As of yesterday the Migration Pact is in force across the entire Union, and the continent greeted the date in two poses at once — Belfast in flames and Dublin marching against the Pact. Some are shouting that a Europe is being born in which we will stop recognizing our own cities. Others, that nothing is happening and the only ones in hysterics are racists. Both sides argue over the numbers. Except that Europe's problem doesn't begin with the number of people it has let in — it begins with the question it has stubbornly refused to ask for decades. Just who did it let in.
First, the numbers neither side wants to hear.
Let's start with the thing least convenient for those who shout the loudest. Migration into the Union isn't rising — it's falling. Last year saw fewer than 670,000 asylum applications, more than a quarter down on the year before, and Frontex recorded the fewest illegal border crossings since 2021. And the demographics? Pew Research — the very center the prophets of "the end of Europe" so eagerly cite — estimates that Muslims today make up about five percent of the continent's population and, in the darkest scenario, will reach fourteen by 2050 — exceeding one third in no single country. There is no caliphate anywhere in that data. And that is precisely why the quarrel over numbers is a dead end, because if the numbers aren't the problem, it means that for years we have been looking in the wrong direction.
Which Sudan, I ask.
Let's return to Belfast. The spark was a knifeman — according to police, a Sudanese citizen seeking asylum, charged with the attempted murder of a disabled man. And here comes my first question, the one Europe never asks. Which Sudan? Because since 2011 Sudan has been two separate states. The north — Arab, very nearly one hundred percent Muslim. The south — black Africa, mostly Christian and animist, tribal to the bone. These are two different planets, not two sides of the same border. Darfur itself, the source of one of the greatest tragedies of our time, means in Arabic "the land of the Fur" — a people who are black and Muslim at once, murdered by Arab militias who share their religion. Anyone who doesn't know this will not understand a single one of these people. The same goes for Syria. An Alawite thinks one way, a Sunni another, a fighter in a Shiite militia another still, and a Kurd different again — and last spring on the Syrian coast armed men asked in doorways "Alawite or Sunni?" before pulling the trigger. To the European bureaucrat all of it is simply "a Syrian." Nobody here has done their homework.
A border that was never sacred to them.
There is something deeper still that Europe refuses to acknowledge. Many of these people come from a world in which the state and the border mean something entirely different than they do for us. There it is the clan, the family, the religion that come first, while the border is sometimes a line drawn with a ruler across the desert — by European cartographers, in Berlin, in 1885. The Tuareg people today live cut up between five states, the Fulani between more than a dozen. Last year Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso simply walked out of the ECOWAS economic community, because those borders were never sacred to them. I spent years travelling those routes myself, and I know how fluid those frontiers can be — it is not a matter of regulations, it is a matter of the state, in many places, simply not being there. For us the border is sacred; for them it is sometimes a deal. This is no accusation against anyone — it is knowledge one must have before taking in a person from there. Europe did not want that knowledge.
First you made racists of us.
And now the thing I resent most. For years, whenever anyone spoke about all this out loud, they heard a single word. Racist. Not an answer, not a conversation — a slur. Let me put it plainly: for decades, European and national elites worked toward this explosion of discontent we are now watching in the streets. That is my opinion and I will not take it back. Because in the meantime the state stopped doing its first job — it stopped giving the citizen security. And when the state fails to do its part, people take matters into their own hands. It is the worse method, but they are not the ones who chose it. You see this most clearly in a story that still makes my blood boil. In Southampton an eighteen-year-old boy of Polish descent, Henry Nowak, was stabbed to death. The officers, instead of saving a bleeding man, first handcuffed him, and he was told he had probably made the wounds up. British police later apologized, and the oversight commission is investigating. And the murderer tried to make a racist of his victim — the court threw the accusation out. There you have this state's reflex in a nutshell: first it reaches for the "racism" template, and only then for reason. And I'm afraid that this is not a matter of two bad policemen. I'm afraid that it is the standard.
It's not a loss of roots. It's a loss of hope.
One often hears the claim that the third generation of immigrants radicalizes because it loses its roots. I disagree. It does not lose its roots — it loses hope. This generation looks at the lives of its grandparents and parents and already knows that exactly the same place has been set aside for it. The lowest. And here Europe lies most of all, because it tells itself it is open and equal while, beneath all that eloquence, it keeps whole communities under its boot. This is not my guess — it is hard research. You need only send employers two identical resumes, one signed with a European surname, the other with an Arab one, to see that the second gets half as many interview invitations. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights reported that nearly half of Europe's Muslims have experienced discrimination in recent years — and that the figure is rising, not falling. The better educated someone is, the more sharply they feel that glass wall. So let's call the thing by its name. This is a hidden caste system. And from stolen hope comes anger — and only into that ready-made anger, as into dry kindling, does radical ideology enter. Not the other way around.
Even the Emirates fear it.
Finally, an image that ought to set off every warning light in Europe. The United Arab Emirates — an Arab and Muslim country — according to reports in The Times and the Financial Times struck every British university off its scholarship list, because they fear their own young people will be steeped in radicalism on those campuses. Let that sink in. A wealthy monarchy on the Persian Gulf fears the Islam that grew up in Europe more than Europe does itself. I remember, a quarter of a century ago, hearing from Arab clerics that radical Islam would truly gain strength not among them, but precisely in the West. Back then I took it for an exaggeration. I no longer do. Because Islam did not sail over to conquer Europe — it was Europe that, with its own hands, bred a problem it cannot today even name.
Before we repeat the same mistake.
I am not writing this to close the borders. I am writing so that someone might finally learn the lesson the West has failed to learn for half a century. Integration is not a one-sided act. The guest has a duty to learn the house he has come into — the language, the history, the rules; but the host has a duty to actually demand those rules, not to pretend they don't exist. That is what every serious state does: you want citizenship, pass an exam on its constitution and its history. We Poles have one advantage in this matter that we must not squander — we carry less of that Western arrogance and more of an ordinary, joyful curiosity about the other person. Except that this advantage vanishes the second we begin copying the Western model: first take in anyone, any way, then have no idea who they are, and in the end call a racist anyone who asks. The Migration Pact has just come into force. The question is not how many people will reach us. The question is whether this time we will know whom we are letting in — and whether we will give them a reason to want to be at home here. Because until now Europe was not losing to Islam. It was losing to itself.
So that none of this is mere assertion — here is the foundation of facts. The date the Migration Pact came into force (12 June 2026) and its mechanism were announced by the European Commission; the drop in asylum applications is confirmed by Eurostat, and the lowest number of illegal border crossings since 2021 by Frontex (figures for 2025); the demographic projections come from a 2017 Pew Research study. The course of the riots in Belfast and the march in Dublin was reported by Reuters, RTÉ, the Irish Times and Al Jazeera (June 2026); the Henry Nowak case was covered by AP and NPR among others, and the proceedings are being handled by the British police oversight body, the IOPC; the withdrawal of Emirati scholarships from British universities was reported by The Times and the Financial Times (January 2026). For knowledge of the two Sudans, Darfur and the Syrian mosaic I draw on Britannica, UN News and Human Rights Watch reports, and for data on discrimination and radicalization on meta-analyses in Sociological Science and a report by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights. For all the conclusions I alone am responsible.
