Transfers

In recent days, we’ve learned that after a long flirtation between Real Madrid and Kylian Mbappé, France’s wonderkid will finally move to the Spanish capital at the end of the season. Although Mbappé already earns well over a million euros per week at PSG, he’s sure to earn even more in Madrid. Mbappé is an economic migrant, someone who has chosen to relocate abroad in search of a better life.

Just before the winter transfer window opened for footballers, the member states of the European Union and the European Parliament reached an agreement on the terms for the transfers of migrants who don’t play football. If the EU Council formally confirms December’s political agreement on the Migration and Asylum Pact, Slovenia will, according to a so-called distribution key, take in 126 asylum seekers annually. For each, it will receive €10,000 from the EU budget. If Slovenia wishes to avoid this, it can block the transfer by paying €22,000 per person—a total of about €2.8 million annually. Or in football terms, what Mbappé earns in two weeks at PSG.

To be clear, the comparison is not meant to trivialize the significance of the upcoming pact, which aims to better distribute the burden of caring for refugees among EU countries—a burden that currently falls primarily on the countries along the Union’s external borders. This is necessary and fair and could lead to a better, more humane treatment of people seeking refuge in Europe from fates they would likely suffer in their home countries.

Still, the pact contains compromises designed to appease the increasingly dominant political and public stance on migration: that migration is a threat, and everything must be done to minimize it. Those who make it through ever-stricter filters will be redistributed—except where governments decide that even a few are too many and opt to pay to be rid of them.

The fact is that, driven by short-sighted political interests and public opinion shaped by the populist far right—with more or less open support from other political factions—we are desperately trying to saw off the branch we’re sitting on.

Shocking as it may sound, Europe’s biggest migration problem isn’t that there are too many migrants—but too few. According to EU Commissioner Ylva Johansson, Europe would need about a million additional legal migrants annually to offset its growing demographic deficit.

Of course, this claim must be qualified. None of the issues caused by Europe’s rapidly aging population will be solved by throwing open the gates in a haphazard way. Sudden and massive influxes of migrants into just a few countries cause real problems—both for the host country and, even more so, for the migrants themselves. They solve no problems and create new ones. That’s why efforts to distribute migrants more evenly across EU member states are important and necessary. They create the foundation for a more humane and above all rational migration policy—one that doesn’t ignore the fact that Europe needs migrants almost as much as migrants need Europe.

Reaching that point will be long and difficult. Most of the obstacles on this path are ones we’ve built ourselves. Overcoming them will require politics with courage, compassion, and reason. Politics that doesn’t just echo anti-migrant sentiment but has the courage and ability to implement the solutions necessary for managing migration flows effectively, humanely, and rationally. A policy that doesn’t “fight” migration, but manages it—by increasing legal pathways to enter Europe and investing in high-quality integration through education, employment policies, and social programs.

We must do this for our own good. Our inability to understand this, let alone act in our own interest, starkly reveals how far we’ve fallen by surrendering to a chauvinistic politics that builds power on fear and hatred of the other. The sad reality is that in most European countries, migration policy is held hostage by increasingly inflammatory, irrational, and regressive discourses. These not only cause tremendous suffering and loss of life among those trying to reach Europe but also create consequences that, unless reason prevails, will bring social and economic damage to all of us in the not-too-distant future.

None of this means that the arrival and integration of people with different cultural practices is easy. It can cause friction, tension, and even real threats that require action. The concerns of people affected by rapid changes in their environment cannot be simply ignored. But the fact remains: we are often the cause of those tensions. Incidents involving migrants are frequently exaggerated in the media and weaponized politically. People are afraid because we’ve made them afraid.

We’ve backed ourselves into a situation where making decisions that support orderly, legal migration and integration is political suicide. Instead, politicians across the spectrum choose to mimic and flirt with anti-migrant rhetoric and policies—even though, as shown recently in the Netherlands, this strategy fails. Concessions to hatred only legitimize it and make it more socially acceptable. In such an environment, voters will always prefer the original to the copy.

The current approach to migration has economic consequences.

Most advanced economies face labor shortages in many sectors. These problems can’t be solved long-term by importing temporary workers from the Philippines or Thailand to pick potatoes or serve coffee.

The current approach to migration is a moral issue.

It’s marked by hypocrisy: the wealthiest countries are the loudest critics, even though only a tiny fraction of displaced people seek refuge in the West. The vast majority remain in their own countries or nearby—typically in less developed nations where the burden is significantly heavier. Often, the people fleeing are escaping situations that the West itself helped create.

The current approach is a humanitarian crisis.

People are dying.

It’s a social issue.

Hatred that overwhelms empathy and solidarity will sooner or later come back to harm us and our own. A society that hermetically seals itself in hatred of outsiders will eventually be poisoned by internal hatred as well. Solidarity, empathy, and respect for human dignity aren’t sausages to be sliced only for “our own.”

It’s a threat to democracy.

Short-sighted political opportunism that tries to compete with chauvinist anti-migrant narratives helps destroy the values and safeguards of democracy. For far-right populists, inciting fear of migrants is their main weapon—alongside other cultural battlefronts—in a liberticidal march to power. They stoke fear to justify “strong leaders,” not messy things like human rights and civil liberties that benefit migrants, homosexuals, and emancipated women—at the supposed expense of hard-working, white, native-born (especially male) citizens.

Migrants are a resource—one that not just Europe, but most of the developed world needs as much as rare metals for semiconductors and EV batteries. And yet we do everything we can to avoid tapping into it. I don’t mean to take the comparison between people and raw materials too far, but just like semiconductors don’t grow on trees, turning migrants into citizens who contribute to society requires investment. And we simply won’t make it. As soon as anyone suggests investing in integration, someone yells, “All that money for migrants—what about our own people?” The result is that people still come, but they arrive in societies hostile to them, that don’t invest in their integration. This creates ghettos and social hardship—problems we could avoid, but don’t.

For Slovenia, the upcoming Migration and Asylum Pact offers a chance to do things differently. Instead of deporting people who’ve already settled and found jobs here, we could use the €1 million from Brussels—plus the nearly €3 million we’d save by not paying to reject our quota—to successfully integrate our share of migrants, and perhaps even more. Not just because we want to be a humane, compassionate society—but because we need them. Not just a hundred-some—but maybe more.

Who knows—among them or their children, along with drivers, caregivers, waiters, doctors, mechanics, and engineers, there might even be a future Mbappé.