For a decade, Europe has remained suspended in a perpetual state of migration crisis. While the Greek word krisis refers to an exceptional moment that disrupts the normal order of things, since 2015 it has become an enduring condition in contemporary Europe. That year, 1 million people sought refuge in Europe, fleeing wars and persecution. In the ensuing decade, the issue of migration has been so thoroughly weaponised that one can hardly remember a time when it was not considered a crisis.

The idea of a permanent state of emergency does not reflect a reality whereby Europe genuinely cannot cope with new arrivals. Rather, it reflects the fact that there are simply too many who profit from manufacturing a sense of crisis.

Crisis narratives sustain a political economy of fear, and have driven far-reaching transformations of Europe’s border architecture and migration policy. The European border-industrial complex is booming, with profiteers including the EU border agency Frontex, whose budget has exploded from €90m in 2014 to more than €1bn this year – despite frequent allegations it is involved in human rights violations. (Frontex has denied these allegations.) Across Europe, private defence and security companies have benefited from lucrative deals that have further militarised Europe’s borders.

Promising that 2015 will not be repeated, conservative and far-right political forces are on the rise across Europe, seemingly intent on whipping up anti-migrant sentiments and making racist “great replacement” conspiracies increasingly mainstream. The racist right have seized their opportunity. But the fact that Europe is an increasingly hostile environment for migrants and racialised minority groups is in large part due to the dangerous cynicism of centrist parties that seek to beat the hard right and far right at their own game.

Germany serves as a paradigmatic case. Exploiting the 2015 “refugee crisis”, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) first entered the German parliament in 2017, announcing that it would “hunt” the parties of the government coalition and “reclaim our land and our people”.

As leader of the opposition and as chancellor since May, the CDU’s Friedrich Merz has steered sharply to the right. Pursuing an aggressive anti-migration agenda and callously playing with sentiments that could be viewed as racist, he ominously suggested in October that Germany’s “problem in the cityscape” could only be resolved through “large-scale deportations”. Back in 2018, Merz promised to halve the AfD’s vote share. Several years of pursuing copycat politics has had the opposite effect: the AfD has surged from about 5% to 26%, now matching Merz’s CDU in polls.

In the UK, the Labour government shares a similar fate. Facing abysmal popularity ratings and massive pressure from the hard-right Reform UK, the government announced “the most sweeping asylum reforms in modern times” in November. Its draconian plans will make refugee status temporary, cut benefits, tear families apart and place many people in a decades-long limbo. This approach does not contain forces on the political right: it emboldens them. While Reform welcomed the announced asylum reform, gleefully wrapping the Labour home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, in its own colours on social media, the jubilant far-right activist Tommy Robinson celebrated what he referred to as the obliteration of the Overton window.

For the hard right or far right all over Europe, the “gift” of migration crises and panics keeps giving. Though this should be clear to all by now, it deserves reiteration: when you engage in a politics of cruelty to outbid those whose entire political agenda appears founded on cruelty, defeat is inevitable. Even if governments succeed in implementing “tough” migration policies, or bring the number of asylum seekers down, the far right will find other racial minorities to target, scapegoat and dehumanise.

None of this has quenched the far right’s desire for more anti-migrant cruelty and violence. Turning vast geographies such as the Sahara and the Mediterranean Sea into death zones is not enough for those who see their fight as a civilisational one, steeped in racial mythology and “remigration” fantasies that will ultimately also turn against Europe’s minority citizens.

The ideas of the far right are gathering in strength, creating alliances across the world and leading to migration being used as a vehicle for authoritarian transformation. In its recent national security strategy, Donald Trump’s administration called for an end to the “era of mass migration” and laid out plans of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory” in order to prevent Europe’s “civilizational erasure”. In Germany, the AfD is already celebrating.

What, then, does the next decade hold for fortress Europe? The EU’s chosen path seems clear. With thepact on migration and asylum coming into full force in 2026, yet another milestone in Europe’s fortification will be reached. Instead of countering the narratives around perpetual migration crisis, the pact turns crisis into policy. It will enable EU member states to accelerate border procedures, extend enforced detention and limit asylum rights when faced with “an exceptional situation of mass influx of third-country nationals”. Yet, according to Amnesty International, the “situations” covered “are so broad, vaguely defined, and overlapping that they are likely to apply regularly. Once in place, it may prove challenging to unwind these exceptions, leading to a normalisation of emergency provisions in Europe.”

In a world with many reasons for forced human mobility – wars and genocides, capitalist exploitation and climate breakdown – ramped-up border security, deportations and a generalised politics of cruelty will never “solve” the issue of migration. What they will achieve is the erosion of democratic norms, the deepening of social divides and the amplification of racist hostility.

Since migration has become the cornerstone of the current authoritarian turn, it is precisely around migration that resistance needs to form. How we will look back on the decade 2026-35 is ultimately up to us. Carrying out rescues in the Mediterranean, disrupting immigration raids and deportation flights, reclaiming cities as spaces of plurality and solidarity – all these are urgently needed interventions that defend our fellow human beings, and take the fight to the authoritarian forces that are growing all around us.

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