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Once heralded for its open asylum policies that protected millions of people fleeing violent conflicts between 2014 and 2016, Germany—the keystone of Europe's free movement zone—has now installed checkpoints at all of the country's land borders.
The center-left government led by Prime Minister Olaf Scholz justified the extraordinary measures last month as a way to mitigate irregular migration and protect the public from violent extremists. But make no mistake, like so much of immigration policy today, the clampdown was symbolic.
Scholz and the Social Democratic Party's true goal is to upstage their far-right and conservative opponents who are building power as they tap into voter anxiety about immigrants' integration and Germany's stretched public services.
This political pressure is not unique to Germany; it is the same story in just about every Western democracy today. But Scholz's capitulation, so much that he would jeopardize the future of the European Union's precious Schengen Area, completes a transatlantic pivot by liberal political leaders who have determined that their traditional aversion to tighter border control is costing them elections.
For the last three decades, liberals in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States have protected the right of asylum seekers to make claims for humanitarian protection from violence and persecution, rejecting inflammatory depictions of "chaos at the border" from the right.
But during France's recent national election campaign, liberal President Emmanuel Macron called his socialist opponents "immigrationists," a label the French far-right has long used to describe his own humanitarian policies. Macron's new prime minister, Michel Barnier—who once called for an immigration moratorium—has pledged a far tougher stance on irregular migrants and asylum seekers.
Across the English Channel, British Labour Party leaders—long concerned with migrants' humanitarian protection—made border enforcement a cornerstone of their summer election campaign. New Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to invest millions of pounds in a "Border Security Command" to be staffed by hundreds of investigators, officers, and prosecutors using counter-terrorism powers to disrupt smugglers.
Finally, in a June executive order, President Joe Biden limited the extent to which U.S. border officers will consider asylum claims. The move came three months after congressional Democrats voted universally in favor of a Biden-backed bill to similarly tighten border control—a measure ultimately blocked by Republicans who did not want to give the White House an immigration policy win ahead of the November election, even though the bill achieved a number of conservative goals.
Previously loath to discuss immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris visited the Mexican border last month to blunt former President Donald Trump's advantage on the issue. She accused Trump of being focused on "scapegoating instead of solutions" and "rhetoric instead of results."
One might be tempted to dismiss liberals' shift as pure rhetoric, too. But after three decades when immigration policy has evolved from a minor administrative issue into the litmus test of partisan differences, it is also possible that liberals have come to a Hobbesian conclusion:
There cannot be liberty without order.
Americans' support for immigration reached historic peaks when Trump was president between 2017 and 2020. And while this might be understood as backlash against his draconian border policies, incendiary rhetoric, and prohibitions on Muslims and refugees, many people who might have otherwise opposed immigration also felt that there was a greater amount of border security.
Of course, Trump's wall on the U.S. southern border did far less to curb flows than the 2020 pandemic. And all his administration's policies were similarly reactive, not proactive; they addressed the symptoms of a global challenge, as opposed to its causes.
The same dynamic was true in Britain after the country voted to leave the European Union. Once the country planned to restrict its otherwise open borders to the European continent, support for immigration jumped in the months thereafter.
Ironically, immigration admissions would then reach record heights under Prime Minister Boris Johnson, one of the lead Brexit agitators, and the issue would become a major reason for his Conservative Party's 2024 losses.
This is because, for liberals and conservatives alike, the tough rhetoric and symbolism ultimately only offer short-term political relief. It does not address lower-income nations' intensifying environmental risks, gang violence, and persistent poverty—circumstances that force people to migrate northward but do not usually qualify them for refugee status under international law.
It will not be enough for Scholz, Macron, Starmer and—should she win the 2024 election—Kamala Harris to apply political band-aids to a policy challenge as phenomenal as human mobility. They need legislation and a long-term plan.
Former President Barack Obama tried something similar. During his first term, to show his concern with order, he directed immigration enforcement agents to deport thousands of undocumented people with violent criminal records. Immigration advocates came to call him the "deporter-in-chief." But the tough stance did not assuage his conservative critics, and he was unable to pass comprehensive immigration reforms through Congress in 2012 or 2013.
At their core, most liberals do not perceive migration to be "a problem" in the first place. If not for the public backlash—restrictive attitudes in the U.S., for example, are at a 23-year high right now—they would be unlikely to take any major action at all. This is because liberals correctly perceive immigration as a critical reason for their countries' success and sustainability.
Immigrants represent an investment of high-skilled talent and low skilled labor into economies that need new ideas and human capital to meet their growth targets. Immigrants are the principal source of population growth in an era of severely declining fertility. And immigrants are, in some cases, in real humanitarian need. Helping people in desperate circumstances reinforces the moral authority of our countries in international affairs.
However, liberals are coming to recognize that these arguments will be dismissed if voters think the government is admitting foreigners indiscriminately, if voters do not feel that the border is under control.
This realization may be what brings them to the negotiation tables with their conservative counterparts to craft policy that ensures a more selective immigration system that excludes unqualified applicants, welcomes those who advance the national interest, and helps address push factors in migrants' countries of origin—the elusive compromise that aging Western societies desperately need.
Justin Gest (@_JustinGest) is a Newsweek columnist. He is a professor and director of the Public Policy program at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of six books on the politics of immigration and demographic change, including his newest, Majority Minority.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
