Europe grasps for ways to stop the migrant surge

The biggest swing in sentiment has been in Germany, long a proponent of generous policies toward refugees. Pressure has been building in recent years as the nation absorbed millions of immigrants, weighing on the welfare system and municipal services. Migration was a key theme in Sunday’s closely watched regional election in Brandenburg, where the governing Social Democrats narrowly beat the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD.

Last week, the coalition government in Berlin reintroduced limited border checks to all neighboring countries, after a knife attack in late August by a failed asylum seeker killed three people in the city of Solingen during a festival to celebrate its 650th anniversary. The attacker was a 26-year-old Syrian with links to Islamic State who had evaded deportation for more than a year after losing his asylum case.

Days after that attack, the AfD won its first ever state election in Thuringia and placed second in Saxony.

Since the pandemic ended, governments across the continent have struggled to cope with rising numbers of asylum seekers and are grasping for ways to stem the flow, from curbing taxpayer-funded benefits to asylum seekers to striking deals with non-EU countries to temporarily or permanently house would-be refugees.

Europe’s shift echoes recent moves by the Biden administration to contain a record surge in arrivals at the U.S. southern border, fueled mostly by people claiming asylum. In both cases, incumbent governments face criticism that they are reacting late and lagging behind the rise in public anxieties. Polls show immigration is a top voter issue ahead of November’s U.S. presidential election.

Last year, a near-record 1.14 million people filed asylum claims in Europe, the highest number since the height of the 2015 migration crisis in Europe, when more than a million Syrians fleeing that country’s civil war entered the bloc. Claims are expected to again top one million this year, with 513,000 claims made in the first half of 2024, according to the European Union Agency for Asylum. Those figures don’t include more than four million Ukrainian refugees who have received temporary protection in the EU since the war began.

The border checks by countries such as Germany—which gives border officials authority to carry out random checks on vehicles, trains or buses—raise questions over the future of one of the most unique features of the EU since the 1980s: the freedom to travel freely across the passport-free Schengen zone.

Anti-immigration parties already govern in Italy and Hungary, support the government in Sweden and are part of governing coalitions in the Netherlands and Finland. Some polls indicate Austria’s Freedom Party could come first in the country’s September election. Last week, the right-wing Dutch government formally asked Brussels for an exemption from the bloc’s asylum rules.

Fifteen European governments signed a letter earlier this year to the EU’s governing body demanding the union impose stricter conditions on migration and “think outside the box" on the issue.

In Sweden, the government this month pledged to pay tens of thousands of dollars to asylum seekers who voluntarily return home. The government has tightened its migration rules and welfare payments in recent years. In August, the government said that in the first few months of 2024 asylum claims were at a 27-year low and Sweden had net emigration for the first time in five decades.

Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s new leader, traveled to Italy this past week to discuss migration with the country’s right-wing prime minister, Giorgia Meloni. She came to power promising to curb immigration but has struggled to stem new arrivals.

Starmer’s Labour government scrapped its conservative predecessor’s plan to deport people who arrived illegally in Britain to Rwanda. But anti-migrant riots in some British towns over the summer have pushed the government to show it can control arrivals.

Meloni’s government passed a law last year that allows authorities to detain migrants for up to 18 months, and plans to build camps in Albania to house thousands of migrants picked up at sea. But to comply with EU law, Italy will still have to assess the asylum claims and take in those who are deemed to be genuine refugees.

“Italy has a government that until two or three years ago was an outlier, with origins in fascism. Now it’s right in the mainstream" on this issue, said Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

In Belgium, the government has cut benefits and stopped guaranteeing shelter for single male asylum seekers. Denmark has contemplated its own Rwanda-like scheme.

Rights groups have criticized some of the measures. Amnesty International estimated that 2,600 mostly male asylum seekers ended up sleeping on the streets or makeshift tents in Belgium last winter. Groups also say the EU’s migration pact with Tunisia, intended to curb the number of migrants arriving in Italy by sea, has led to abuses by Tunisian authorities seeking to expel asylum seekers to neighboring countries. Officials have denied the claims.

The stream of new arrivals in the region adds to worries about safety and security in Europe amid weak economic growth, chronic housing shortages and Russia’s war in Ukraine, said Bernd Parusel, a senior researcher with the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies in Stockholm.

“Many people are afraid of what the future might bring," he said. “If there are terrorist attacks or violence, these are additional triggers for being afraid of societal changes."

Germany also announced plans to detain asylum seekers while authorities determine whether it is responsible for processing their case or whether it should be done by another EU government. The government rejected a proposal by the opposition conservatives to automatically turn away asylum seekers at Germany’s borders, which it deemed to violate EU law.

The German government claims that a narrower set of border checks introduced last year have helped push down asylum claims by over 20% in 2024. But border checks have consistently failed to have a lasting impact in other EU countries, according to Gerald Knaus, chairman of the asylum policy-focused European Stability Initiative.

European politicians are also struggling to balance demand for younger workers in an aging continent against concerns that some asylum seekers struggle to integrate into Europe’s highly skilled labor market and end up weighing on its generous welfare states.

As new arrivals climb, a debate is deepening about the economic impact of migration. Economists say that immigrants can fill gaps in the labor market and boost economic growth. Italy, for example, plans to accept around 450,000 migrant workers over three years even as it maneuvers to slow refugee arrivals across the Mediterranean.

“Europe has a challenging demographic outlook and immigration can help," said Gita Gopinath, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund. The immigration-fueled increase in the eurozone labor force between 2020 and 2023 could raise the bloc’s potential output by 0.5% by 2030, Gopinath said.

However, some recent research has amplified concerns about the costs of lower-skilled migrants, saying they tend to weigh on the welfare state and could hurt productivity growth by slowing the adoption of machines and robots.

Asylum seekers tend to be less educated and lower skilled than other immigrant groups, said Jan van de Beek, an independent Dutch researcher. Between half and two-thirds of all asylum seekers who arrived in the Netherlands since 1999 and have left school are unemployed and on benefits, even though the country suffers from extreme labor shortages, he said.

The EU last December agreed new rules designed to make it easier to quickly reject asylum claims and keep migrants in closed centers, but they don’t take effect until 2026. That has left national governments scrambling to take their own actions.

There are divisions among mainstream parties, especially on the center-right, over how to respond to the migration concerns.

Ruud Koopmans, professor of sociology and migration research at the Humboldt University of Berlin, said that establishment parties risk doing the worst of both worlds—ratcheting up the rhetoric on migration without resolving the issue.

“That is of course something that only helps the extreme right," he said.

Write to Tom Fairless at tom.fairless@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com