Europe Won’t Live By Deporting | Dark Thoughts
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Europe Won’t Live By Deporting
written on July 17, 2026
I have a great deal of respect for DHH, and I agree with the premise behind his<br>recent<br>list:<br>Europe is in trouble and it needs to become much more capable of building. We<br>are aging, we are economically fragmented, and we are losing too many of the<br>people who are willing to take risks. The question is not whether there is a<br>problem. Beyond that do, I squarely disagree with his diagnosis of the<br>challenges.
His priorities and pain points are migration, climate, and then ends with a call<br>to stop fighting success. The only real point where I think we’re in agreement<br>is the last one: we need to adopt a spirit of believing in oneself, and that we<br>can build our way out of problems. But Europe has not lost its edge because it<br>has too many people, or because it cares about the climate but it is losing it<br>because it has become very good at preserving the present and very bad at making<br>room for the future.
An Aging Europe
DHH is right about one limited point: immigration cannot, by itself, make an<br>aging society young forever. People grow older wherever they live. No country<br>can recruit its way out of an unsustainable pension system, a low birth rate, or<br>decades of underinvestment. But that is not an argument for ending immigration,<br>much less for "remigration." It is an argument for building a country that<br>works.
Europe needs people to care for an older population, start companies, teach in<br>schools, build homes, work in hospitals, and pay into the systems all of us rely<br>on. More importantly, it needs to retain people already here. An ambitious<br>young European who leaves for the United States, and an ambitious person abroad<br>who decides not to come in the first place, are both losses we seem strangely<br>unwilling to take seriously. From what I have observed, those people are not<br>leaving because of a Syrian immigrant on the street (though maybe Twitter might<br>make you believe otherwise) but because they find better starting conditions<br>elsewhere. In fact, the same fundamental forces that make a Syrian leave to<br>Europe, makes a European move to the US or Dubai.
I too have issues with migration. Large and rapid arrivals can strain housing,<br>schools, public services, and social trust and we see that. Integration<br>requires real work from newcomers and from the country receiving them and there<br>should always be a discussion about balance and approach. It requires language,<br>employment, schools that work, housing that is available, clear expectations.<br>But we’re so focused on what is largely really not Europe’s issue. If Europe’s<br>GDP was growing, we were proud of our accomplishments, I doubt we would have<br>nearly as much of a discussion about immigration. In particular because Europe<br>is hyper focused on mostly refugee immigration which in itself are the results<br>of a highly unstable world, and Europe’s realtive closeness to it. And yes, I<br>agree it’s entirely reasonable to discuss limits and capacity and it is also<br>reasonable to expect people who settle somewhere to participate in the society<br>around them.
But none of that leads to the conclusion that (even culturally incompatible)<br>people must be removed. It turns a hard, but manageable problem of state<br>capacity into a problem with human beings which often glosses over all the<br>problems for the people the people who were born here, grew up here, have<br>families here, or have spent years trying to become part of a country that<br>insists on keeping them provisional. The modern world through internet, social<br>media and just our ever connectedness increasingly struggles with clear<br>divisions. Outside the US you will rarely find families who are not split<br>across different countries and immigration regimes. It’s not uncommon for<br>people with different passports to live within one married family.
Europe’s migration systems are particularly absurd. We make legal paths for<br>skilled workers unnecessarily difficult, funnel people fleeing wars into<br>asylum systems that take years to decide, prevent them from working while they<br>wait, and then express surprise when integration fails. People who could be<br>colleagues, neighbors, and taxpayers are instead left in limbo. A system like<br>that is not compassionate, orderly, or economically rational.
The answer is neither open borders as an abstraction nor mass removal as a<br>political fantasy. It is a migration system that can make decisions, enforce<br>them fairly, and give people who are here a real path to belonging. Such a<br>system would reduce chaos rather than create it. But it’s also fundamentally a<br>system that is almost impossible to erect in a society which has increasingly<br>taking a binary view on the topic. And yet, it does not take much for an<br>individual to recognize the absurdity of that binary view, as many of their<br>friends are on shakly legal grounds when it comes to residency. It just has<br>become too...