It's no secret that I am a skeptic, to say the least, regarding immigration and refugee policies in Western countries.
That may even be an understatement, since I have pretty much concluded that most Western countries have had disastrous immigration policies, and much of the disaster centers around opening the floodgates to refugees and non-Western immigrants.
My conclusion isn't based on racism, although I will be accused of that no matter what I say. So be it. It's 2026, and accusations of racism are now so common that they have almost become noise — the equivalent of inarticulate grunts from people unhappy with what you say.
The problem with arguments for generous refugee policies that seem to classify everybody who wants to move to Europe or America as an asylum seeker is that the "asylees" are turning Western countries into third-world countries.
One of the most shocking statistics I've ever seen. pic.twitter.com/Qf8Nop1Q0u
— Nate Friedman (@NateFriedman97) September 2, 2026
Of course, not all refugees are created equal. For instance, the influx of Ukrainians into Western Europe and some Eastern European countries hasn't been a huge problem. What has been is asylum seekers from the "MENA" countries. MENA stands for Middle East and North Africa, and you can toss pretty much every Muslim country into that category.
When I saw Nate's X post, I wasn't surprised by anything but the scale of the increase in sexual violence, not the direction it went. And when I did a bit of digging, I found that the comparison between Poland and France is not an outlier, but representative of the split between countries that have imported MENA "asylum seekers" and those in Europe that haven't. Countries like Poland and Hungary have accepted financial penalties from the EU rather than take in those MENA refugees, and it's obvious that it was worth every penny.
According to Eurostat, the differences between countries that allowed large numbers of MENA asylees in and those that didn't are really stark, even when you account for changes in how sexual violence crimes are counted.
A 100 percent to 300 percent increase in sexual crimes is hardly a statistical artifact or an easy thing to explain away, especially given that we know that in some of these countries there is a growing underreporting problem due to a sense that the police will do nothing about it.
You can't argue that any of this is a surprise or that policymakers couldn't have guessed that this would happen. Of course they could have, because they were warned before it happened and people have been screaming at the top of their lungs about it for years. Even calling it an open secret is wrong: there really wasn't any secret about it. Policymakers simply denied it was happening and swept it under the rug because reality didn't match their hopes and dreams.
The transnational elite didn't like what reality was dishing out, so they put an Instagram filter over reality and called what was on the plate gourmet instead of a big pile of poison.
It's racist to point out reality; don't you know?
Except...it's not racism. It's reality, and countries of origin, ideology, and religious values aren't race. Nobody would say that it is racist to say that importing Nazis or communists is a bad idea, despite the fact that a huge chunk of them are white. I wish we were better about excluding people with horrible ideas and behaviors, whatever their race.
UK residents are worried about reporting child marriages for fear of being accused of "racism," as children under 5 are reportedly being forced into marriage.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 31, 2026
Some UK leaders are concerned that five-year-olds will return from school break married or engaged.
According to Home… pic.twitter.com/AZsSnuUZ5n
UK residents are worried about reporting child marriages for fear of being accused of "racism," as children under 5 are reportedly being forced into marriage.
Some UK leaders are concerned that five-year-olds will return from school break married or engaged.
According to Home Office data, forced marriages in the UK are on the rise.
Some children have been promised to older men from birth, according to charity founder Dame Jasvinder Sanghera.
Reform UK home affairs spokesman Zia Yusuf says the rise of forced marriages tracks "almost perfectly" with the import of four million new immigrants to the UK.
Nor does noticing real trends tell you what any particular person is like; it's perfectly possible that individuals from MENA countries would be great additions to a country, but we don't individually vet asylum seekers, and really don't even vet legal aliens to any extent. Nobody would buy a box of apples with only 10 percent being poisoned and no way to sort them out. You reject the entire box as too dangerous.
Approximate recent immigrant or foreign-born shares:
- Sweden, Germany, Austria, Belgium: high teens to about 20 percent, with large Middle East / North Africa / Afghanistan / Horn of Africa components after 2015.
- France: immigrants roughly 12–17 percent depending on definition; Maghreb plus rising sub-Saharan Africa; plus a large second generation.
- Poland: under 1 percent in 2008, now about 5–7 percent, overwhelmingly Ukrainian and Belarusian after 2022.
- Hungary: still a low non-European share; asylum grants near zero after 2015.
- Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria: very low non-European stocks.
The 2015–16 asylum wave is the inflection most people remember. Recorded sexual offences in Germany, Sweden, and Austria rose in the years around that wave and stayed elevated. Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia refused the EU relocation scheme and kept Mediterranean and Balkan irregular arrivals low. Their recorded-rape series did not explode.
Ukraine 2022 is the control that undercuts a simple “any immigration raises rape” claim. Poland and Czechia absorbed enormous numbers of Ukrainians—mostly women and children, culturally closer—and did not see a Western-style spike in recorded rape.
It took me 30 minutes of sorting out research with the aid of Grok to put this all together, so you can bet that EU politicians and bureaucrats have been tracking all this for years.
They just didn't care what they were doing to their citizens. They sacrificed them — and especially women and girls — on the altar of transnationalist ideology. They don't want to admit they made a mistake, and I'm not even sure many of them think they did.
This is a classic case of the elites vs the hoi polloi. And the hoi polloi have figured that out, which is why populist movements that the elites call the "far right" are coming to dominate European politics. And rather than looking at the trend and concluding that the best way to save their own butts is to change policies, the transnational elites are turning on their own citizens to suppress a growing movement to stop the madness.
The rise of nationalist and populist movements is an inevitable consequence of elites' failure to serve the best interests of the people they claim to represent. It has little to do with nativism, as you can see from the rather diverse racial mix of the populists themselves.
I visited Piddington, a village of 350 people into which 1,250 illegal migrant men are being dumped by Burnham.
— Zia Yusuf (@ZiaYusufUK) August 30, 2026
What I saw was heartbreaking. pic.twitter.com/MFyrs0Vh4h
I mean, c'mon, man, the chief spokesman for Reform UK is named Zia Yusuf. What holds these coalitions together is anti-Islamism, including the few Muslims who have joined these parties. There most certainly are nativists among the populists, but what holds these coalitions together is a rejection of importing more people, especially from MENA countries.
For obvious reasons. They are a box of apples that includes the poisoned ones.
It's not an overstatement to say that many Western leaders — the transnational elites, broadly understood — have betrayed their populations. It's right there in the statistics. Asylum seekers cost society more, contribute less, and commit crimes at a much higher rate than native-born or European migrants.
It's just that simple. That's why all these leaders have to go, and why the economic, academic, and cultural elites must be stigmatized.
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