While President Donald Trump and his administration are working hard to implement commonsense safeguards around immigration into the U.S. and restore American safety and sovereignty, European voters are inching closer to implementing their own immigration restriction policies. The only question is whether Europeans will act in time before their continent is overrun by a mass diaspora from the third world.

A recent measure advanced by the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei or SVP) aimed at heavily restricting immigration to Switzerland as the nation’s population nears 10 million. Currently, the population of Switzerland stands at 9.1 million, including more than one-quarter (27% or 2.5 million) who are foreign nationals. Upon the population reaching 9.5 million, the SVP proposal would have required the Swiss government to significantly cut the number of refugee admissions and the number of family members of immigrants permitted into the country, in addition to terminating European Union (EU) free movement, which currently allows EU member state nationals to travel to and from other EU member states without requiring a visa.

“We have lost control. Uncontrolled immigration and its negative consequences define our daily lives almost everywhere. If this continues, Switzerland will lose its identity,” the SVP warned in a communique ahead of the referendum, which took place Sunday. “Many people are worried: They don’t want to suddenly feel like strangers in their own country. Whether it’s creeping Islamization or expats who only speak English: It’s also about protecting our culture and identity — about our coexistence as a whole.”

The proposed immigration controls failed to pass in the referendum, but the contest was closer than many Swiss bureaucrats had anticipated, with 45% of the population voting in favor of the immigration controls and only 55% voting against. Swiss Justice Minister Beat Jans said that the Swiss people “have sent a signal of stability, openness, and reliability” by rejecting the SVP proposal, which he said risked alienating Switzerland from the EU and engineering a Swiss “Brexit,” the process by which the United Kingdom (U.K.) withdrew from EU membership. The Swiss Trade Union Federation also issued a statement, hailing the rejection of the SVP initiative as a repudiation of “isolationism and xenophobia.”

SVP President Marcel Dettling, however, lamented that the measure failed to pass, saying, “It’s a disappointing Sunday for us, but also for all of Switzerland.” Despite the fact that the immigration control measure was not passed, the referendum demonstrated heightened concern among Swiss voters over mass immigration. The average voter turnout for referendums in Switzerland lately has been a little less than half (49%) of registered voters, but Sunday’s referendum saw nearly 60% of voters participate, in addition to thousands who had mailed their ballots prior to the vote. Furthermore, while the SVP generally earns nearly one-third (30%) of the national vote in parliamentary elections, the party’s immigration control proposal was more popular by a full 15 percentage points. Thomas Aeschi, a member of the SVP and of the Swiss National Council, said that the referendum results show that a “very large portion of the Swiss population does not want that this immigration as we’ve seen it today continues.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Lukas Golder, co-director of the Swiss polling and political research firm Gfs.bern, said, “At first sight, this is a clear defeat for the Swiss People’s Party. But it is not a rejection of the underlying problem.” He continued, “The result shows a more nuanced picture: many voters do see population growth, immigration, housing shortages, crowded trains, traffic, and pressure on schools and hospitals as real political issues. What they rejected was the proposed solution.” According to Golder, the SVP proposal would have altered Switzerland’s constitution, thus requiring majority approval both from the voting public and from Switzerland’s cantons, which function similarly to American states, with their own legislatures, executives, and constitutions. “Historically, this is a very high hurdle,” Golder said, noting that some 90% of proposed constitutional changes are rejected via referendum. “They often succeed politically by setting the agenda, even when they fail at the ballot box. This is also what happened here.”

“The SVP succeeded in putting population growth and immigration at the center of the national debate. The idea of a ‘10-million Switzerland’ became a powerful image for density stress: more people, less space, higher rents, more pressure on infrastructure, and a feeling that the country is changing too fast,” Golder observed. “In that sense, the initiative was politically effective,” he added, even though the measure was not approved in Sunday’s referendum. “The reason is that voters separated the problem from the instrument. They accepted the diagnosis more than the remedy. Many wanted better control of growth, but not a hard population ceiling that would put the free movement of persons, the bilateral agreements with the European Union, and economic stability at risk.”

In the end, Golder recounted, the campaign against the SVP proposal succeeded by focusing heavily on Switzerland’s relationship with the EU and the likelihood that the SVP proposal would bar the free entry of other EU nationals. “The countryside was more open to the initiative, but the SVP did not generate the broad protest wave it needed. It mobilized its core electorate and parts of the growth-critical center. But it did not bring enough additional irregular voters to the polls,” the pollster noted. The referendum result “shows again that a majority of Swiss voters wants more credible management of immigration and growth, but not a hard break with the country’s key European agreements.”

The referendum result also serves as “both a relief and a warning” for the centrist political establishment, who “can say that the hard population ceiling was rejected. But they cannot ignore the underlying pressure. Housing, infrastructure, schools, transport, and public services remain politically sensitive. If the center does not offer credible answers, the SVP will continue to own the issue,” Golder said. The SVP’s proposal “showed that immigration and population growth remain among the strongest issues in Swiss politics. The initiative failed as a concrete solution, but the problem frame is now firmly established.”

Continental Wake-Up Call

Switzerland is not alone. Across the whole continent, Europeans are coming to recognize the existential threat posed by mass immigration — and some are moving quickly to act. In Sweden, for example, the government approved legislation on Monday to heavily restrict immigration permissions, including barring foreign nationals from obtaining visas or revoking visas already issued based on the foreign national’s behavior. The Swedish parliament said in a statement Monday that “a foreigner’s conduct, i.e. way of life, should be taken into account to a greater extent when examining the right to residence permits, both when it comes to granting and revoking such permits.” The new law will deny long-term residence permits or revoke those permits for foreign nationals who have criminal records, owe large debts, are likely to become a burden on Sweden’s welfare system, or “make a dishonest living” via crime, fraud, scams, etc. The new law allows for “removing people from the country due to their way of life” and opens the possibility for Sweden to conduct its own mass deportation campaign.

In regions where the government has failed or refused to curtail mass immigration, however, desperate Europeans are taking matters into their own hands. Riots have rocked Belfast in Northern Ireland (part of the U.K.), following an incident in which a Sudanese immigrant, Hadi Alodid attempted to behead British man Stephen Ogilvie in the street last week. While Belfast resident Maitiu Mág Tighearnán, a husband and father who was returning home with his son from sports practice, used his son’s sporting equipment to beat the attacker away and rescue Ogilvie, the latter was hospitalized with severe lacerations to his face and neck. Ogilvie also lost an eye and was left in a coma.

The attack in Belfast came just days after the public release of bodycam footage from the death of Henry Nowak. In December, 18-year-old Nowak, a British national, was accosted and stabbed by 27-year-old Vickram Digwa, a Sikh Muslim who was permitted to carry a ceremonial knife, despite the U.K.’s ban on nearly all weapons. After stabbing Nowak at least five times, Digwa called the police and claimed that he had been “racially assaulted” by the 18-year-old. In the bodycam footage, police officers are seen arresting and handcuffing Nowak, even as he lay bleeding to death on the street. When Nowak, seeping blood, told officers that he had been stabbed, one of them replied curtly, “I don’t think you have, mate.” Nowak was dead seconds later. Following the two brutal attacks, bands of British Unionists in Belfast began setting fire to government-funded housing for immigrants, later skirmishing with police who appeared on the scene.

Both Nowak’s murder and the attempted murder of Ogilvie follow a litany of crimes perpetrated against the British by foreign nationals, especially those from the third world. Recent years have seen the exposure of decades of mass rape of teenage and even prepubescent British girls by Muslims across Britain. Estimates of the number of girls systematically abused and gang-raped by groups of Muslim men range from hundreds of thousands to more than one million over the past three decades. In nearly every instance, police refused to prosecute or even investigate reports of rape for fear of being labeled “racist.”

Numerous other European nations have dealt with similar crimes perpetrated by foreign nationals, from mass murders and terrorist attacks to sexual assaults and rapes. In Ireland, for example, prosecutors just opened a case last week against Algerian national Riad Bocuchaker, who is charged with the attempted murder of three five-year-old children outside a school in Dublin in 2023. It has taken Ireland’s government nearly three years to initiate its prosecution against Bocuchaker. According to prosecutors, the Algerian was “upset” by a letter he received denying him access to certain aspects of social welfare, and decided to let of some steam by stabbing three children multiple times. One of the children, a little girl, was slashed across the chest and needed surgery to save her life; she had no pulse when paramedics arrived on the scene. Another little girl was struck in the head so viciously that police found “bone fragments” in her hair.

No Political Solution?

In many cases, European voters have either seen their voices silenced at the ballot box or else have had their pleas ignored by Europe’s political class. In Germany, the immigration restrictionist party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland or AFD) has surged to become one of the largest political entities in the country and the second-largest party in the federal parliament, called the Bundestag, as well as the second-largest German party represented in the European Parliament. Nonetheless, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), and German courts have implemented numerous restrictions and sanctions against AfD, alleging that the party represents a threat to the “free democratic basic order” of the country, largely due to AfD’s immigration policies.

Citing AfD’s opposition to mass immigration, and especially immigration from majority-Muslim countries, the BfV last year officially labeled the party a “confirmed right-wing extremist endeavor,” allowing the intelligence agency to monitor the political party’s communications and actions, infiltrate the party via undercover informants, and even intercept and halt internal party communications. American Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have both openly criticized the German state’s restrictions against AfD.

In France, the National Rally (Rassemblement National or RN) advocates stringent immigration controls, similar in many cases to the policies proposed in Switzerland by the SVP. When RN was surging in the polls in the 2024 elections, the moderate establishment party Ensemble hastily formed a coalition with the far-left New Popular Front (Nouveau Front Populaire or NFP) in order to block RN from claiming a majority in the French national legislature and enacting immigration restrictions. Shortly afterwards, French authorities charged longtime RN leader and perennial presidential candidate Marine Le Pen with embezzlement and sentenced her to four years in prison. While half of Le Pen’s sentence was suspended and the other half was agreed to be served on probation, the political leader was further barred from running for the office of president. Le Pen referred to the punishment as a “political death sentence.”

Across Europe, voters have voiced their concerns and, in many cases, voted for politicians who pledge to impose heavy restrictions on immigration. Time after time, however, those politicians have either been halted — sometimes by national establishment political forces, sometimes by EU bureaucrats — or have simply failed to follow through on their commitments. Last year, the foreign-born population of the EU (that is, the share of the population born outside Europe) reached an all-time record high of 64 million, representing at least 14% of Europe’s population. Spain and Germany accounted for nearly half of the continent’s immigrant inflow. Viktor Marsai, director of the Hungary-based Migration Research Institute, warned that studies often underestimate the number of foreigners in the EU and that the real number is likely higher, accounting for more than 20% of the continent’s population. Marsai added that some countries, like Spain or Germany, are likely approaching a point where 30% of their populations hail from the third world.

With Switzerland, Sweden, and Northern Ireland as recent examples, the dam could be at the point of breaking in Europe. Hermann Kelly, founder and president of the Irish Freedom Party, told TWS, “Due to self-loathing Leftie immigration policy, Irish nationalism and a desire for democratic self-determination is definitely on the rise again, not only in Ireland, but all across Europe.” He continued, “The Irish people are sick of the beheaders, rapists, and fraudsters who come to our country, at our expense and without our consent. It is also very wrong of the government to legally fling open our doors to the rest of the world, costing us our taxes, our security and, ultimately, our children’s future.”

Claremont Institute President Ryan P. Williams told TWS that the European immigration crisis should serve as a warning to American politicians and voters. “From Belfast to Stockholm, and so many other major cities in Europe, cold reality is becoming undeniable: the importation of refugees and immigrants with little consideration of their ability to assimilate leads to higher crime, disorder, rising housing costs, resentment, and ultimately a slow-motion national dissolution,” Williams observed. “The nation-state can be a powerful force for prosperity and human flourishing, but those goods rest on a certain baseline of civic friendship, cultural continuity, and stability,” he added. “Rapid immigration from countries with significantly different cultural and religious traditions and habits will inevitably undermine national cohesion. Responsible leaders and citizens ought to be very wary of such experiments in demographic transformation.”

“The American people and their leaders should treat the turmoil around the immigration question in Europe as a cautionary tale,” Williams urged. “It is perfectly legitimate, indeed it was a core American Founding principle, for a people to decide, through their elected representatives, whom they allow to join their nation as new citizens,” he continued. “Immigration policy is the most important domestic issue facing the West, with implications for many other policies close to the people’s homes, hearths, and pocketbooks. Europe shows the dangers of not treating immigration policy as deadly serious business.”