Refugees on a boat crossing the Mediterranean sea, heading from Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos, 29 January 2016.
American mainstream media and Europe’s left manipulate statistics to support claims that illegal aliens and migrants do not increase crime and that they benefit the economy. The data tell a different story. Immigrants are disproportionately represented in arrests, convictions, prison populations, and on welfare rolls across EU countries.
In Germany, foreigners represent roughly 17% of the population but accounted for 41.8% of all criminal suspects in 2024 and approximately 39% of all convictions in 2023, a new high. In France, foreigners make up about 7.8% of the population by citizenship, yet account for 17% of all criminal suspects, more than twice their population share, rising to 40% of suspects for vehicle theft, 38% for burglary, and 31% for unarmed robbery.
In Italy, foreigners are approximately 8.9% of the population but are implicated in 28% of murders and attempted murders, 33% of assaults, and 41% of rapes, and make up 31% of the prison population as of mid-2022. In Spain, foreigners represent 13% to 14% of the population, account for 28% of criminal convictions, and make up 31% of the national prison population, rising to 49% in Catalonia. Belgium presents the most extreme disparity: foreigners are 13% of the population but constitute 43% of the prison population, with roughly 30% of those foreign inmates holding no valid residence permit.
The welfare data are equally stark. Of the 5.6 million people on welfare in Germany as of May 2024, 2.7 million — nearly half — were not German citizens. The unemployment rate among foreigners in Germany stood at over 16% in 2023 to 2024, roughly double the national average. EU-wide research identifies France, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Nordic states as places where social benefits are higher for immigrants than for natives, with dependency persisting even after controlling for age, education, and work experience.
In France, 57% of Afghan signatories to integration contracts were unemployed 18 months after signing, with only half reaching an elementary level of French. In Italy, absolute poverty among foreign families is almost six times higher than among Italian-only families. According to official Italian government statistics for the 2022 to 2023 school year, 26.4% of students with foreign citizenship experienced school delays, compared with 7.9% of Italian students, and the dropout rate for students with foreign citizenship was 40.3%, nearly three times the 13.7% rate for Italian students.
Many in Europe are growing weary of open borders and unbridled migration, and a number of right-wing parties have made gains in recent elections. However, the battle for control remains contested, and the left has also notched recent victories. In France’s municipal elections that ended last Sunday, centrist and left-leaning forces held Paris, Lyon, and Marseille, where the National Rally had hoped to make inroads. In Slovenia’s parliamentary election, liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob’s Freedom Movement edged out the right-wing Slovenian Democratic Party led by former Prime Minister Janez Janša.
Italian voters rejected Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s flagship judicial reform in a constitutional referendum. The reform would have separated judges and prosecutors into distinct career tracks, a change Meloni’s party argued was crucial to reducing corruption and creating greater judicial independence. The loss weakens her ahead of the elections she must face by 2027.
The broader European picture nonetheless favors the right. Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party has been in power since 2022. France’s National Rally, led by Marine Le Pen, holds the largest share of seats in France’s parliament and advocates for strict immigration controls, French nationalism, and opposition to EU integration. Right-wing populists are now in government or supporting ruling coalitions in Belgium, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and Sweden. Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), which governed from 2015 to 2023, maintained close ties with conservative Catholic groups, sought to restrict abortion, and opposed special rights for LGBTQ people.
PiS lost power in 2023, and the current government under Donald Tusk is centrist and pro-EU, though Poland’s 2025–2030 migration strategy, introduced in 2024, is still framed around security, control, and selectivity, launched under the banner “Regain control. Ensure security.”
Though PiS lost power in 2023 to Donald Tusk’s centrist government, Poland’s 2025 to 2030 migration strategy is still framed around security, control, and selectivity. Slovakia, under Prime Minister Robert Fico, governs from a nationalist, socially conservative position aligned with Hungary’s Viktor Orbán; in 2025, the Slovak government amended its constitution to recognize only two genders and has resisted EU migrant relocation quotas.
“Another key example is Austria, where the Freedom Party, led by Herbert Kickl, secured 29.2% of the vote in September 2024 parliamentary elections, the first far-right election victory in Austria since World War II. Three centrist parties then formed a coalition government that excluded the FPÖ, following the longest government formation process in Austrian postwar history. Despite being blocked from power, the FPÖ now polls at around 36.4%, far ahead of the People’s Party at 20.8% and the Social Democrats at 18.1%.
Hungary under Viktor Orbán remains the most explicit example of a government fusing Christianity with a closed-border immigration policy. Orbán has declared that “Christianity is Europe’s last hope” and warned that Western European politicians “opened the way to the decline of Christian culture and the advance of Islam.” His government recognizes immigration as a threat to Hungary’s ethnic, cultural, and Christian identity, grants asylum to fewer than ten non-Europeans annually, has rewritten the constitution to define marriage exclusively as a union between a man and a woman, banned materials related to LGBTQ issues in schools, and built a razor-wire fence along Hungary’s southern border.
In June 2024, the European Court of Justice fined Hungary 200 million euros and imposed a daily penalty of one million euros for failing to implement EU asylum laws, describing Hungary’s conduct as “an unprecedented and exceptionally serious breach of EU law.” Hungary refused to pay, and the European Commission deducted the fine from Hungary’s EU budget allocation.
As of July 2025, €18 billion in cohesion and recovery funds remain withheld from Hungary.
Orbán’s response has been defiant. He posted publicly that the ECJ’s decision was “outrageous and unacceptable” and that “illegal migrants are more important to Brussels bureaucrats than their own European citizens.” He had previously promised in 2021 to “maintain the existing regime even if the European court ordered us to change it.” In 2023, Hungary recorded the lowest positive asylum decision ratio among all 27 EU countries, approving just 1.44% of claims.
In Germany’s most recent federal election, the center-right CDU/CSU won with 28.5% of the vote, while the anti-immigration AfD doubled its 2021 result to finish second at 20.8%, gaining 10.4 percentage points. The left-wing SPD collapsed to 16.4%, their worst federal result ever, the Greens secured 11.6%, and the FDP fell out of parliament entirely with just 4.3%. Voter turnout hit 82.5%, the highest since reunification. The AfD’s gains were strongest in the former East German states, where it won between 32.5% in Brandenburg and 38.5% in Thuringia. Despite finishing second nationally, the AfD remains locked out of government, as CDU leader Friedrich Merz and all mainstream parties have refused to govern with them.
Lorenzo Caccialupi, a right-leaning nationalist and outspoken Christian who became a popular content creator documenting migrant crime after appearing in a Charlie Kirk video, recently interviewed Alexander Sell, an AfD Member of the European Parliament from Germany. Sell called the result a historic shift. “This was a very important, historic day,” he said. “We have realized a right-wing majority with all of the right-wing parties from all over Europe and the Christian Democrats in the center, and this makes it possible to better return illegal migrants from Europe. That’s our mission.”
Sell added that the upcoming elections in Germany could further strengthen this movement, saying it was approaching 40 percent support. The two closed out the interview by pledging to “Make Italy Great Again” and “Make Germany great Again.”
Unfortunately, in Europe’s multi-party parliamentary systems, winning votes and holding power are two different things. The AfD finished second in Germany with 20.8% of the vote, but remains completely locked out of government because all mainstream parties have agreed never to form a coalition with it. The likely outcome is a CDU-SPD grand coalition that excludes the AfD entirely, meaning roughly one in five German voters elected a party with zero cabinet seats and zero ability to pass legislation.
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