Is it an exaggeration to talk about a migratory invasion?

A few days ago, João Marques de Almeida wrote, regarding the President of the Portuguese Republic, that regarding the " issue of immigration, numbers don't count; what counts are the 'narratives' in the media ." In a simple sentence, he summarized the entire policy pursued by most European (and also American) elites over the last five decades: what matters is not being , but appearing . What matters is not reason, but rather the pathos I mentioned in the previous text—the first part of my reflection on immigration—that is, feelings. It's the politics of "good feelings," of "popularity polls." But in fact: numbers do matter. Recently, US President Donald Trump stated that Europe needed to wake up and address the " horrible (sic) immigrant invasion that is destroying Europe ." When Trump speaks of a "migratory invasion," he isn't referring, for example, to the immigration of Europeans to the United States or of Americans to Europe. It refers, rather, to extra-European—or, more precisely, extra-Western—immigration, often originating from the so-called Third World. In other words, to the influx of populations from outside Western Civilization, often Muslim, who emigrate to both Europe and the United States.

But is the term "invasion" appropriate? Are the numbers so high that they justify the use of such a strong word? If there's one mantra repeated ad nauseam by some European elites—those who work in Brussels, wear Armani suits, and earn monthly salaries of €30,000—it's that Europe has always been a land of immigration, naturally open to people from all over the world. According to this narrative, the European continent has always been a space of encounters, miscegenation, and multicultural societies. " Islam is a European religion, " say some. " Without the Arabs, Europeans would still be living in the Middle Ages ," say others (who have a great imagination, or mental problems, or both). Thus, anyone who expresses concern about the current high levels of immigration is almost automatically labeled a xenophobe, a racist, or an Islamophobe. But is that really the case? Isn't there some truth when we talk about absurd numbers of immigrant entries?

Answering this question without statistics is impossible. And one of the mistakes many on the right make is not delving deeper into the topic with official statistics. As for the left, mentioning numbers is out of the question—statistics must be silenced, and, apparently, reality is, for some, racist... However, more than ever, it is necessary to have an overview of a phenomenon that—and the election results demonstrate this—has worried Westerners, both in Europe and the United States. While in some countries—and Portugal is a good example of this—statistics are very opaque, in others this is not the case. Furthermore, many official data from state institutions mix intra-EU, intra-European immigration with immigration from so-called Third World countries, which makes the issue even more difficult to analyze. This opens the door to all sorts of delusions: on the right, for example, the idea that 30 or 40% of the European Union is Muslim—a figure I've read many times in commentaries and which is completely false; or on the left, the constant repetition that non-European foreigners represent only 1 or 2% of the EU population—a statistic we've been hearing for 40 years, as if the number of people coming from outside Europe had never grown, as if there were as many births as deaths in these populations and as many entries as exits. Neither position is correct. Therefore, I propose we look at the numbers—the official ones, at least.

Let 's start with the European Union. In 2024, there were 29 million non-EU citizens. Europeans in the EU, representing 6.4% of the 449.3 million EU citizens ( source ). In 2023, EU countries granted 5.1 million residence permits to citizens of third countries, that is, non-EU members ( source ). In the same year, there were 25.1 million valid residence permits in the Union (including renewals from previous years – source ). In 2024, this number exceeded 28 million. The majority of those who benefited from these permits came from Morocco, Turkey, and Ukraine – the latter, a European country that is not part of the EU ( source ). However, other nationalities also have a significant presence, such as Algerians, Tunisians, Congolese, Nigerians, Pakistanis, and Afghans ( source ; source ).

Since 2015, the year of the Syrian refugee crisis, an average of between 2.6 and 4 million people have entered the European Union from outside the EU: 2.6 million in 2015; 3 million in 2019; 3.7 million in 2023; and around 4 million in 2024 ( source ). Illegal immigration has been growing steadily over the last decade, with a slight decline in 2024: that year, around 239,000 people entered the EU illegally, according to Frontex, while the previous year the number had been much higher, reaching 385,000 ( source ). The militarization of borders in Poland and Finland has made access more difficult for illegal economic migrants and may explain this decrease, as well as increasingly harsh policies, such as those in Greece.

According to Eurostat (data from January 1, 2024), 44.7 million people living in the EU were born outside the EU ( source ). This number encompasses different profiles: people who retained the citizenship of their country of origin without acquiring that of an EU country (e.g., Syrians, Moroccans, Turks, Congolese); people born outside the EU but who later acquired the nationality of a member state (e.g., an Indian citizen who becomes Portuguese); and even people born in European countries that only later joined the European Union, such as a Romanian born in 1990. This total of 44.7 million represents an increase of 2.3 million compared to 2023.

However, these data don't tell us, for example, how many non-Europeans—people whose origins are not European—immigrate to Europe (in its broadest sense), nor how many people of non-European origin (second, third, or fourth generation) live in Europe. Only then can we gain a more general understanding of the true scale of non-European immigration to the continent. I believe that a brief " tour " of the main European countries will allow us to better understand the scope of this phenomenon.

Let's start with France, one of the countries that has received the most non-European immigrants. INSEE (the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) estimated that by 2023 there would be 7.3 million immigrants (10.7% of the population), of which 2.5 million acquired French nationality, and 5.6 million were foreigners ( source ). But the real numbers could be much higher. Four years ago, André Posokhow, an expert on the cost of immigration in France, published a book that caused some controversy: "Immigration, l'Épreuve des Chiffres" (Immigration, l'Épreuve des Chiffres), in which he estimated that there were some 16 million foreign citizens or citizens of foreign origin (second generations included). Of this total, 5.5 million would be of European origin, and 11.3 million would be non-European. This means that 25% of the population in France is foreign or has direct foreign origins, and that 16.6% of the French population is not native to Europe. This does not include the third, fourth and fifth generations.

To give you an idea, in 1950, non-Europeans represented less than 1% of the French population. In 1975, the largest foreign minority in France was European: the Portuguese, with 759,000 people, representing 22% of the foreign population, far exceeding the non-European population at the time ( source ). In fact, while France became a land of immigration in the 19th century, it was primarily Poles, Spaniards, and Italians who initially arrived. Only from the 1980s onwards did a clear shift in immigration occur.

And what about other European countries? The situation is similar, with an increase in the number of immigrants, especially since the 1980s. The Netherlands had 9.2% of its population of foreign origin in 1972; 46 years later, in 2018, the foreign population or those of foreign origin represented 23.1% of the total ( source ). Of these, at least two-thirds will be from outside Europe, according to demography expert Michèle Tribalat ( source ). This means that around 15% of the Dutch population is from outside Europe. At this rate, native Dutch people will be a minority in the Netherlands by 2100.

Austria experienced several waves of immigration in the post-World War II period. Initially, the arrivals were mainly Europeans fleeing the communist regime: 180,000 Hungarians in 1956; 162,000 Czechs in 1968; and 33,000 Poles in 1981. In 2019, approximately 16.2% of the Austrian population was foreign-born ( source ), and 22.8% of the population had foreign origins ( source ). Of the 16.2% foreign-born, 61% were non-European, coming primarily from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa ( source ). The Muslim population was 700,000 in 2019, having doubled between 2001 and 2016 ( source ), and according to Austrian demographers, Muslims could represent up to 30% of the Austrian population by 2046 ( source ). If projections are correct, native Austrians will be a minority before 2100.

Denmark was never a country of immigration until the early 2000s. Before that, it was primarily a country of emigration. Since the 2000s, immigration to Denmark began to increase. In 2019, there were 612,000 foreign-born people residing in the Nordic country ( source ), of whom 353,000 were born outside Europe and about 156,000 were born in Denmark but to parents born outside Europe ( source ). In a total population of 5.8 million, this represents 8.8%. The Muslim population represented 5.4% in 2019 and is estimated to reach between 8% and 16% by 2050, according to statistics from the Pew Research Center—if the current strong border control policy is maintained ( source ).

Sweden is a prime example of the problems caused by uncontrolled extra-European immigration, and is now trying to react (is it too late?) to the scale of immigration in the country. In 1950, Sweden had approximately 7 million inhabitants, of which 197,000 were foreign-born, primarily European ( source ). By 2017, out of a population of 10 million, the foreign-born population reached 1.8 million, almost 20% of the country's population ( source ). In the same year, if we include people born outside Europe and their children, approximately 17.3% of the population had non-European origins ( source ). To give you an idea, in 2015, 34.3% of children between the ages of 0 and 17 were born outside Europe or were born in Sweden to parents (or at least one parent) born outside Europe. Of these, a significant portion come from the Middle East, Africa, and also the Far East ( source ). According to some demographers, Sweden—which had less than 1% non-European ancestry in 1980—could see its native population become a minority by 2070 ( source ).

In the United Kingdom, the debate over immigration has become increasingly fierce, and not a month goes by without native English people taking to the streets to protest what they call an "open door policy." A country of emigration for centuries, it began receiving immigrants from the rest of Europe in the second half of the 19th century and, from the 1950s onward, immigrants from the Commonwealth countries. Between 1997 and 2010, the United Kingdom received 2.2 million immigrants, more than half of whom came from Commonwealth countries such as India and Pakistan ( source ). Since 1996, extra-European immigration has been increasing: around 129,000 in 1998, rising to 232,000 in 2018, primarily from Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and the Middle East.

In a country with approximately 66 million inhabitants, 9.4 million were born abroad. Of these, 3.7 million were born in Europe, and 5.7 million outside of it ( source ). Of these 5.7 million, the overwhelming majority come from countries outside the Western civilizational space. There are "racial" statistics in the United Kingdom, which allow us to understand the importance of extra-European immigration in the country, and which also tell us a lot about the rest of Western Europe. Today, white people represent 73.3% of the island's population—compared to 99% in the late 1940s—but in the future, the situation will change. These statistics were published in a study that has generated much discussion in the British Isles, conducted by dozens of academics and demography researchers, who point to the year 2063 as the moment when white people (as the term used in the study)—who have inhabited the British Isles for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years—will become a minority. According to the same study, in 2100, white people will only make up 33.7% of the population ( source ).

And the same is true in other countries… In Belgium, in 2018, 16.7% of the population was born abroad, and in 2016, half of all applications for Belgian nationality were made by people of Turkish and Moroccan origin ( source ). It is predicted that, long before 2100, native Belgians will become a minority compared to non-Europeans in their own country, leading a journalist from the newspaper Jeune Afrique to state—quoting a Moroccan taxi driver—that " Belgium will end up Arab " ( source ), referring to the Islamist mentality of Belgian youth of Maghrebi and Arab origin. As for Germany, a country that until the 1980s received mainly European immigrants, the situation has changed profoundly. The 2015 refugee crisis markedly changed the country's demographic composition. In 2018, of the 82 million inhabitants, 13 million were born abroad, of which 7.7 million were from outside the EU, mainly from the Middle East, Far East Asia, and Africa ( source ). This phenomenon is growing and is occurring in all European countries.

And it's not just the influx of immigrants that increases the number of populations of non-European origin, but also the birth rate, which is well above that of native European populations. Thus, according to official data from the French Demographic Institute, women of non-European origin have a much higher birth rate than women of French origin (or of European origin, if you prefer): 3.3 for sub-Saharan African women, around 2.4 for Maghrebi women, compared to 1.8 for European women living in France ( source ).

Country-by-country statistics show us that, contrary to what some intellectual elites and the media claim, the phenomenon of extra-European immigration to Europe is relatively recent, and that it has gained such importance that it has become one of the issues that most concern native Europeans. We are left to ask ourselves: if even in the 1970s, European countries were extremely homogeneous, does that mean that Europe was not a continent open to migration of populations from all over the world in the past?

Europe was, indeed, a land of migration. Neanderthals arrived in Europe at least 400,000 years ago, and Homo sapiens at least 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. Since the arrival of the first sapiens, Europe has welcomed populations from Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. But what about the last 10,000 years? Then, the scenario changes completely.

The last major migrations from outside Europe date back to around 7000 BC, with the arrival of populations from the Fertile Crescent—Left Bloc activists, rest assured: they weren't Palestinians, or even Arabs—bringing agriculture with them. At the time, and according to the most recent studies, there were three major genetic groups in Europe: the WHG (Western Hunter-Gatherers), native peoples of the continent, present in Europe for at least 45,000 years—hunter-gatherers with dark skin and light eyes (blue and green); the farmers from Anatolia, who arrived around 7000 BC—light-skinned but with dark hair and eyes—who were responsible for introducing agriculture; and the Yamnaya, or Indo-Europeans, a people of nomadic horsemen from the Ukrainian steppes, tall, fair-skinned, with light hair and eyes.

The latter began, from 3500 BC onwards, to spread throughout Europe and also to some regions of Asia (as far as India—hence the name we give them). This hypothetical people brought with them a language: Proto-Indo-European ( PIE ), which, over the centuries, fragmented into several branches: Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic, Proto-Albanian, Proto-Latin, Proto-Hellenic, Proto-Slavic, among others. Today, almost all languages spoken in Europe descend from this common tongue. In addition to their language, the Indo-Europeans spread their customs, their worldview, their gods, their laws, their warlike way of life, and their military classes—what Georges Dumézil called a "tripartite society": oratores (those who pray), bellatores (those who fight), laboratores (those who produce). Millennia later, this social structure would remain visible in the three orders of medieval society.

Later, Greek colonies and Roman conquests spread Hellenic and Latin populations across Europe, bringing with them Greek reason, Roman law, Greco-Roman architecture, and other elements. The great Germanic invasions of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries had a similar effect: peoples of Germanic origin spread throughout the continent and brought with them the concept of the FreiMann , the free man bearing arms, which would be the genesis of medieval knights—figures that so often filled our childhood dreams. Greeks, Latins, Celts, and Germans were all European peoples and, without exception, shared Indo-European origins. This is a key point for what follows.

The masterful study "Histoire des Populations Européennes " by demographer Jacques Dupâquier (prepared in collaboration with more than 35 demographers and historians) demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of migratory movements in Europe were essentially intra-European in nature. What about the Huns, Arabs, Turks, and Persians?

Indeed, in the fourth and fifth centuries, military invasions took place led by Indo-Iranian peoples (a late branch of the Indo-European tribes), such as the Alemanni and Scythians, as well as by Asian Turkic-Mongol peoples, such as the Huns. Later, Arab and Turkish military invasions followed. However, what historical, linguistic, and ethnological research has shown is that, from both a linguistic and religious and cultural perspective, these peoples' influence on Europe was scant. The explanation is simple: Huns, Alemanni, Scythians, and other groups did not seek to colonize—they came to pillage and departed, taking with them the civilian populations that accompanied them. The same pattern would be repeated with the Mongols centuries later. As for the Arabs and Turks, there was no large-scale civilian migration to Europe. What occurred was, above all, a process of Islamization of European populations through the dhimmi status, which led Christians and Jews to convert to avoid oppression under Muslim rule. Islam gradually disappeared from most of Europe with the Reconquest of previously Islamized territories—with the exception of present-day Bosnia, Albania, and Kosovo. The Maghrebi and Arab populations of the Iberian Peninsula—Muslims or converts, the so-called Moriscos—were expelled between 1503 and 1609. In other words, Europeans always resisted attempts at occupation by non-European peoples. This is a constant throughout our long history.

If we want to go further, we can refer to the work "Histoire de la population française" (PUF editions, 4 volumes, 1988), also by Jacques Dupâquier, which demonstrates that, over 5,000 years, the French population—composed of hunter-gatherers and Indo-Europeans—varied very little: only a few percentages over the centuries. All demographic transformations during this period were overwhelmingly of intra-European origin. This version is corroborated by a recent genetic study, which generated widespread debate in France, revealing that the ancestors of the native French already inhabited the territory that is now France thousands of years ago, having remained unchanged for at least 5,000 years ( source )! And according to paleogeneticists, the same is true for other European nations, always based on genetic studies.

In short: the Indo-European/Yamnaya migrations were the last major population movements to significantly alter European demographics. From then on, elements such as Christianity, monogamous marriage imposed by the Catholic Church, the aforementioned Greek reason (and Greek science), Roman law, and the ideal of reconstituting the Roman Empire formed a true civilizational cement, which ultimately generated a strong cultural homogeneity in Europe—unlike other regions of the world, where neighboring peoples differ profoundly in almost every aspect. Europeans—both those on the continent and those in the United States—share a single, solid, and structuring civilization that profoundly shaped the mindset of modern Europeans. This civilizational homogeneity , for the first time in many centuries (or perhaps millennia), is being challenged by the mass arrival of populations from other civilizations, whose cultures, ways of life, traditions, customs, and religion (one in particular) may profoundly transform the face of our civilization. A true anthropological and civilizational revolution — with consequences that could be very serious.

So , is there a migratory tsunami coming, as some claim, especially on the right-wing political spectrum? Over the phone, André Posokhow's answer was categorical: not yet, but it will come if nothing is done. In fact, according to André Posokhow, if between 2 and 3 million non-European immigrants enter the EU annually, we can't really speak of an invasion yet. On the contrary, former MEP Jean-Yves Le Gallou speaks openly of a " migratory tsunami " coming from the Third World. What might happen in the near future? In his book "The Scramble for Europe ," American journalist Stephen Smith argues that, given Africa's persistent underdevelopment, Europe could receive more than 100 million Africans by 2050, stating that " Europe will Africanize " ( source ).

Isn't Stephen Smith a bit alarmist? Probably. However, year after year, immigration and the high birth rate of populations from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia cause the percentage of non-Europeans to grow exponentially each decade, and with this increase comes the emergence of small nations increasingly antagonistic to the values of Western Civilization. What will Europe look like in 2050, and in 2100? Knowing that second, third, and even fourth generations tend to assimilate even less than their parents and grandparents, and that many of the younger generations of Maghrebis, sub-Saharan Africans, and Arabs show increasing signs of religious radicalization, as well as a growing hatred of the West—if not specifically anti-white hatred—what will the future hold for native Europeans? What will be the medium- and long-term consequences of this immigration, which has altered millennia-old European stability? How can we envision a prosperous, democratic, and tolerant Europe in a future where native Europeans are a minority on their own continent? How can we imagine a Europe composed of democratic nations when the radicalization of a portion of the Muslim population has become a source of growing concern—with warnings coming from intelligence services and military leaders across the continent? While, throughout the West, native Europeans (and Euro-Americans) are beginning to show signs of dissatisfaction, our elites not only remain inactive but also seek to silence any feelings of revolt.

Worse still, in some cases, they exacerbate the situation, as was the case with the judges of the French National Court of Asylum , who authorized approximately two million Gazans to seek refuge in France. According to the director of the French Immigration Observatory , Nicolas Pouvreau-Monti, laws issued by certain French judges could legally compel France to accept approximately 580 million refugees—a number eight times greater than the country's current population ( source ). What consequences would arise if 580 million people actually decided to settle in France? Definitely collapse… And what could then happen to the rest of Europe?

Western political elites have failed. They failed to act while there was still time, and now they are uneasy about the violent reactions that have begun to emerge across Europe. European leaders would have done better to listen to and read Enoch Powell, who warned us sixty years ago about the future impact of immigration. Instead, they chose to attack him, stigmatize him, and ruin his career. Even more seriously, they neglected what he considered to be the essence of true statesmanship:

It is the statesman's highest mission to protect society from the evils that lie ahead. In this endeavor, he faces obstacles deeply ingrained in the human condition. Chief among them, of course, is the fact that it is impossible to prove the existence of a danger before it materializes. (In Rivers of Blood Speech , Enoch Powell, 1968).