Immigration: How in 10 years Europe passed from the policy of reception to talk of an “invasion” of foreigne
Several European governments are proposing restrictive measures against immigrants in response to public concern
The day they appeared, I could hardly believe my eyes. One after another, one small boat arrived from the Turkish side. “I have so many memories coming back to me now,” says Paris Louamis, 50, a hotelier on the Greek island of Lesbos. “There were people from Syria, Afghanistan, from many countries.”
It was August 2015, and Europe was witnessing the largest population movement since the end of World War II. More than a million people would arrive in the EU in the following months, driven by violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
I witnessed the arrivals on Lesbos and met Paris Laoumis as he helped exhausted asylum seekers near his hotel.
“I’m proud of what we did then,” he tells me. Together with international volunteers, he provided food and clothing to those arriving.
Today the beach is quiet. There are no asylum seekers. But Paris is worried. He believes another crisis is possible. With arrivals surging during the summer months, his country's migration minister has warned of the risk of an “invasion,” with thousands arriving from countries including Sudan, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Yemen.
“Of course I'm worried. I see people's suffering. They don't come here, but we see it in Crete (Greece's largest island), where people have arrived. So it's possible that with the wars, more people will come.”
In 2015, I followed asylum seekers as they boarded ferries, trudged in the heat along train tracks, crossed cornfields, down country lanes and over highways, making their way through the Balkans, and onward to Germany and Scandinavia.
The number of people entering Germany soared from 76,000 in July to 170,000 the following month.
On the last day of August, the Chancellor Angela Merkel declared: “Wir schaffen das” (We can do it), which many interpreted as a sign of opening her arms to asylum seekers.
“Germany is a strong country,” he said. “The motivation with which we approach these issues should be: we have achieved so much, we can do it! We can do it, and when something stands in our way, you have to overcome it, you have to work at it.”
But the intense emotions of that summer, when crowds greeted asylum seekers on the northern roads, seem to belong to a very different era.
That optimistic proclamation soon became a political liability for Merkel.
Her political opponents and some European leaders felt that her words acted as a magnet for asylum seekers to the EU.
Within 15 days, the chancellor was forced to impose controls on German borders due to the influx of asylum seekers.
And a decade later, concerns about migration have become a major political issue in many European countries.
The causes are complex and vary from country to country, but concerns around Security, economic hardship, and disillusionment with ruling parties have all played a pivotal role in shaping attitudes toward those fleeing war, hunger, and economic despair.
This has fueled the rise of far-right parties and seen centrist—and even left-wing—parties struggle to impose controls on migration, fearing electoral defeat at the hands of the populist right.
Data from the Atlas Institute of International Affairs shows how support for far-right parties in Europe almost doubled over two election cycles, reaching 27.6%.
Since 2015, when the UNHCR said more than one million people entered Europe via asylum routes, there has been a dramatic decline in arrivals.
However, since 2016, the average number of people entering Europe has remained at around 200,000 per year. So far in 2025, a total of 96,200 asylum seekers have been recorded arriving.
So can strict new controls further reduce the number of people trying to reach Europe? Or do global conflicts and economic desperation make their continued flow, with fluctuating numbers, inevitable?
Hungary's tough stance
In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban's far-right government has adopted one of the toughest approaches to migration.
In September 2015, I witnessed the construction of Hungary's first fence on the border with Serbia and watched as hundreds of people rushed to cross into the EU before being prevented from passing.
This week in Budapest,I met with Hungary’s EU minister, Janos Boka, who said Hungary’s position has been vindicated by the restrictive measures being implemented in the UK – where the government plans to make it harder for refugees to bring their relatives to the country – as well as in countries such as Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden.
“We feel vindicated not only by what’s happening in other European countries. This, of course, is also a sign that we took the right path 10 years ago, and that we now see that most countries are doing what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years,” he says.
Hungary immediately returns people who arrive at the border without entry permission. They can only apply for asylum in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, or in Kyiv, in war-torn Ukraine.
Human rights lawyer Timea Kovacs says this effectively makes it impossible to enter the EU via Hungary. “There is basically no legal way to enter Hungarian territory as a refugee,” she says.
As a result, Hungary is being fined €1 million a day for failing to meet its responsibilities to asylum seekers under EU law.
EU Minister Boka says the country is unwilling to change its policy. “If this is the price we pay for protecting our borders and maintaining peace and stability in Hungary, it’s a price worth paying.”
But even these restrictive measures have failed to completely stop the influx of asylum seekers.
Austrian police told the BBC that between 20 and 50 people were being caught each day trying to enter their country illegally from Hungary. This is only the number of those caught.
On a trip to the Serbian border, I heard the frustration of a group of Hungarian guards.
We left the paved road and followed a patrol along a dirt track that led into the forest. The trees closed in, forming a natural tunnel. The bright sunlight gave way to shadows.
The men in the vehicle in front of us were carrying shotguns.
“A big circus”
Dressed in military camouflage, Sandor Nagy and Eric Molner are citizen volunteers, paid by the state to patrol the Hungarian side of the border with Serbia.
“I feel sad and angry, and most of all, worried about what’s coming next,” says Sandor. He believes Europe is failing to stop people from crossing its borders.
“To be honest, what we experience here is basically a big circus. What we see is that border defense here is mainly a spectacle, a political issue.”
We came out into an open space where a 3.6-meter-high border fence appeared, topped with barbed wire and equipped with sensors and cameras to detect illegal crossings.
“They just cut it, and groups forced their way in from several points at once; this has been going on for years.” The problem, he argues, lies with organized crime, which is always one step ahead of the authorities.
“This fence doesn’t stop anyone in the long run… It slows the flow, but it can’t stop it.”
A Flood of Abuses
As people smuggling has grown, there has been an avalanche of human rights abuses, according to the United Nations.
People traffickers abandon people in the Sahara Desert, others are crammed into dangerous boats.
Some of those who make it across are forced back into the desert by local security forces.
More than 32,000 people have died trying to reach Europe in the past 10 years, including 1,300 dead or missing this year.
According to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, “much of this is happening in a situation of near total impunity.”
The summer of 2015 was not just a summer of welcome. It prompted immediate changes in the strategies of several European states.
Not only with the construction of the fence in Hungary, but also, among other examples, with the deployment of riot police in Croatia and the detention of migrants in Slovenia.
By March 2016, six months after Merkel's statement, the EU had reached an agreement with Turkey to prevent migrants from crossing into Greece and Bulgaria.
Since then, the EU has reached agreements with countries such as Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt to prevent their countries from being used as launching points into Europe.
Currently, there are numerous well-documented cases of asylum seekers being returned across EU borders by police and coast guards.
Last January, the European Court of Human Rights found Greece guilty of unlawful and systematic returns of asylum seekers to Turkiye.
Gerasimos Tsourapa, a professor of international relations at the University of Birmingham, describes the outsourcing of asylum policy as a dramatic shift for Europe.
“The idea that migration can be leveraged to extract money, aid, or other concessions—something quite unusual in Europe in 2016—has become a pattern,” he says.
“Migration diplomacy is contagious. Once a deal is struck, the logic spreads.”
There is a paradox here too, he says. “We are restricting asylum, keeping the borders closed, but we also need to find migrant workers to fill the shortages and support our national economy.”
A Sweden in Transformation
Persistent public concern has led to a surge in support for far-right parties across the EU, including in places like Sweden, which has historically prided itself on being a welcoming nation for those fleeing persecution.
The far-right Sweden Democrats party won 20.5% of the vote in the 2022 general election, making them the second-largest party in the country.
In return for supporting a minority coalition government, they have seen much of their anti-immigrant platform shape government policy.
Family reunification for migrants has been made more difficult, as have the conditions for permanent residency, and asylum quotas have been substantially reduced.
For the final leg of my journey, I went to the western Swedish city of Karlstad, a picturesque spot on the banks of the Klaralven River, Scandinavia’s longest waterway.
Syrian refugee Abdulmenem Alsatouf, 44, recalled the welcome he received here in 2015.
That has changed, he says. “At first, they treated us very well. But after a few years, and after the change of government, things changed. They became more racist.”
He cites incidents of racist abuse, such as a neighbor who left a toy pig outside the home of this devoutly Muslim family.
I first met Abdulmenem and his family ten years ago, when they were trying to reach Europe from Turkey. I remember their hope for a new life. Now his wife, Nour, says she would rather be in Syria.
“They look at us as if we only came here to take their money or live off their aid. But that’s not true. When I arrived, I studied Swedish for two years, learned the language, and finished school. Then I went to work: cleaning, cooking, taking care of children. I pay taxes here, like everyone else. I’m part of this society.”
Why has Swedish public opinion shifted to the right on immigration?
One of the reasons most cited in local media and by politicians is crime, specifically the rise of organized crime, where young perpetrators are used to commit acts of extreme violence.
Since 2013, the rate of gun crime in the country has more than doubled.
People born abroad and their Swedish-born children are overrepresented in the statistics crime.
However, the Swedish Foreign Ministry warns against a simplistic analysis of the figures.
It says low education levels, unemployment, social segregation, and war trauma among refugees are among the causes, not being a migrant.
Outside the local cultural museum, where he and his apprentice were painting the walls, I met Daniel Hessarp, 46, who is among the 60 percent of Swedes who, according to opinion polls, are worried about crime.
“We see the crime statistics, who commits them, and so on. So there you have the answer. We didn’t have this in Sweden before.”
The apprentice, Theo Bergsten, 20, said he wasn’t opposed to immigration because “you learn from, they learn from you… so it’s also very nice.” However, she noted that rising crime was a “sad part” of the story.
Maria Moberg Stephenson, a senior lecturer in social work at Karlstad University, says social media has allowed the far-right’s message to thrive and find new support among those who feel excluded from society.
“The Sweden Democrats are very clear with us: they don’t want asylum seekers. In fact, they want people to leave Sweden. And the whole government is, in a way, setting the tone for being a hostile country. It’s now more acceptable not to be hospitable.”
Graves marked “Unknown”
Back on Lesbos, I visited a place I’ve come to know from many years of reporting on migration issues there.
About a 30-minute drive from Mytilene Airport, amid olive groves, are the graves of asylum seekers who died trying arrive here or in the refugee camps established after 2015.
Numerous graves are marked simply “Unknown” – the final resting place of those who believed Europe would offer them a better life.
When I visited, there were three fresh graves and a fourth open one awaiting burial. It is a sobering reminder that desperate people will continue to try to reach Europe, despite the enormous risks.
So far this year, the number of asylum seekers detected trying to reach Europe has fallen by 20%.
The numbers may rise and fall, but the global crises driving migration are not going away. That is the fundamental challenge for politicians, regardless of which party is in power.
Additional reporting by Bruno Boelpaep, Nick Thorpe, Daphne Tolis and David McIlveen.