As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, Europe finds itself questioning its relationship with one of its oldest allies. Europe and America have long had intertwined destinies, but many of their current challenges are different. Examining the United States today, Europeans are quick to take note of the many problems present in the pompously self-proclaimed “land of the free,” economic inequality and ever more antagonistic political division being just the two most pressing ones.
And yet the United States remains strong in ways Europe can only dream of. For all the talk of media polarisation, the United States still has some of the strongest free-speech protections in the world. While complaints about income inequality abound, the poorest American state is still richer than nearly all European countries on a GDP-per-capita basis. And crucially, for all the talk about the newest immigration policies put in place by the Trump administration, America remains uniquely tolerant of its multi-ethnic and multi-religious population. This is a level of cosmopolitanism that the European Union can only dream of.
On the Old Continent, life is different. Anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise, and populist parties are gaining ground. Multiple polls show France’s far-right Rassemblement National is on track to win the 2027 Presidential election, Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland has resurrected the far-right back to life in a country where it had died long ago, and the European Union itself recently approved the so-called “Returns Regulation”, giving union states sweeping powers to deport asylum seekers and immigrants to third-country detention centers, where they often face inhumane living conditions. This specific decision has been critiqued by Human Rights Watch and the UN as limiting migrants’ human rights. All throughout Europe, governments are enacting laws that make it more difficult for immigrants to assimilate into European societies.
These European anti-immigration policies worsen the problems they claim to be solving. To make the assimilation of foreigners into European societies more difficult and to threaten immigrants who fail to do so with deportation to unspecified detention camps for unknown periods of time is to create a culture of mistrust towards foreigners.
How could anyone feel secure trying to build a life for themselves in a society that warns them that losing their job could mean near-immediate deportation to a country they have never even heard of? How can an immigrant plan his future in a country where political parties gain ever more support by vilifying them and blaming them for the nation’s problems?
And what is more, in some European countries, such as France, the process of renewing visas or asylum permits is so slow and ineffective that many previously legal immigrants lose their status and find themselves on the fringes of society. The increasing marginalisation of entire ethnic groups is a direct result of European policies that treat immigrants as either an economic resource or a safety hazard, and not as human beings.
Many immigration sceptics will point out that European states are fundamentally different to the U.S. Founded upon a common ethnic and linguistic heritage, they indeed have a different basis for national identity. Yet the past doesn’t change that nationalism, like multiculturalism, is but a collectively imagined basis for a national identity. Nor were European states always built around a singular linguistic or ethnic identity. Long before the anti-immigrant nationalist policies of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, the Roman Empire was one of the most diverse states in antiquity, ruled at times by emperors born outside of the Italian peninsula.
And before the far-right populism of the AfD and the Freedom Party of Austria, Central Europe found itself controlled by the Holy Roman Empire and the notoriously multicultural Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the context of such rich European history, nationalism, a 19th-century invention, is merely an anomaly. Not heritage but deviation, that need not inform the shape of states to come. There is no reason why Europe cannot reinvent itself today in line with the past.
Europe cannot escape multiculturalism in a globalised world. European economies cannot thrive without immigration and the salvation it brings from ageing populations. The continent cannot turn its back on those escaping territories to be ravaged by climate change.
Just as the US, Europe, too, has long been a bastion of liberty, a place that immigrants dream of building better lives in. In the decades following the crumbling of the Iron Curtain, millions of Eastern Europeans fled west in search of better economic opportunities, and more recently, millions of Ukrainians were forced to leave their homes. European countries have found ways to assimilate them into European societies. And yet the Iron Wall is erected once again on the beaches of the Greek Islands, the mountains of the Balkans, and across the Mediterranean Sea.
America’s success story has been written by immigrants. When I lived in the United States as a young boy, I played football on a team consisting of Latino immigrants from various Central American countries. I did not speak Spanish, but I fit into the team as a blonde Finn because I could play football. No doubt I stuck out like a sore thumb; My parents were relatively wealthy journalists, with work visas and stable jobs. Meanwhile, some of my teammates had parents who had illegally immigrated to the United States. Our training sessions would often drag on for hours under hastily constructed floodlights. I wanted to go home, but my teammates were playing to survive. For many of them, a football scholarship was the best shot they had at obtaining a college education. My team was called Dreamers Football Club.
These boys were able to dream because they lived in a society that tolerated the dreams of immigrants. They could be confident that by working hard enough, they too could succeed in America. It was the power of that dream that pushed my teammates to practice for three hours four times a week. But is that dream alive in Europe? Do immigrants see a path for themselves to become welcomed and appreciated members of European societies? Can they dream of one day calling Europe their own home?
There is no future for an isolationist Europe. Europe must become what the United States has always been: a place welcoming to everyone based not on their religion or ethnicity, but on the content of their character and their ability to build a life for themselves. Every European country that directs the blame for its economic challenges onto immigrants compromises its own values. And for every immigrant who realises that Europe can never truly be their home, one more European Dream is killed.
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