Europe’s future won’t belong to those who throw open the gates, but to those who build them wisely.
Damir Omerbegović
Oct 28, 2025 - 11:07 AM
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The Immigrant Who Followed the Rules
I came to Prague as an immigrant, a legal one. From Bosnia: a small, complicated country whose history taught me to prize order, law, and stability. My papers were in order, my visa approved, my residence permit granted after the usual labyrinth of bureaucracy that anyone who has ever moved countries knows too well.
In this beautiful, disciplined city, I live in a Vietnamese neighbourhood, among families who have quietly built their lives here for decades. Around me are others like myself: Indians, Ukrainians, Turks, Arabs, Africans - people who came to live and work here the right way. We all speak at least some Czech, we work, we pay taxes. And in every meaningful sense, we are Westerners, not by passport but by attitude. What unites nearly every immigrant I’ve met here is the same emotion: not contempt, but deep frustration toward those who break the rules, arrive illegally, and expect to be rewarded for it.
Among Prague’s expats, this is a familiar conversation. Many of us came from outside the EU, endured the labyrinth of Czech bureaucracy, and worked hard just to stay. We are living proof that immigration works, when it’s done right, but we are weary of lawlessness dressed up as compassion.
Czechs, to their credit, understand this instinctively. The Czech Republic may not make as many headlines as the UK, Sweden, Germany, or France, but its measured discipline has paid off. This is a country that expects responsibility from its citizens, and from those who wish to join them. Immigration here is slow, bureaucratic, sometimes maddening yet that is precisely why it works. It filters for people who truly want to belong. You can see the results in the streets of Prague, Brno, or Plzeň: immigrants who integrate, learn the language, and contribute. No ghettos erupting into riots, no sprawling migrant camps demanding subsidies. Czech pragmatism, often mistaken for indifference, has instead become a kind of civic wisdom, a recognition that compassion without structure is not virtue, but vanity.
The Myth of Moral Generosity
Across the border in Poland, you hear the same frustrations echoed. Their immigration system remains one of the most orderly and disciplined in Europe, and it shows in the results. The Polish economy is booming; its GDP per capita has nearly doubled since 2010. Foreign investment continues to pour in, and its labour participation rate outperforms that of many Western European economies that once mocked it. Their cities are safer, more coherent, and visibly less fractured by imported chaos. In Prague and Warsaw, immigration is something to be earned and respected.
But while Central Europe quietly perfected a model of disciplined immigration, Western Europe turned migration into a moral experiment. In some countries, immigration has become a bureaucratic afterthought, an emergency policy patched together to justify what has already happened. The European Union spent the last decade promising that large-scale immigration would solve demographic decline, labour shortages, and sluggish growth. The idea was seductive: open the borders, bring in hundreds of thousands of new workers, rejuvenate the economy, and fill empty jobs.
Germany, the supposed model of rational governance, was the loudest in this chorus. Chancellor Merkel’s famous “Wir schaffen das” - “We can do it” - in 2015 became the motto of a Europe that quickly confused moral impulse with practical policy. But ten years later, the numbers tell a story very different from the idealism of that summer. That same “we-can-do-it” Germany has not experienced the rejuvenation it was promised. Its welfare expenditures have ballooned, productivity has stagnated, and its social fabric is fraying. Between 2015 and 2025, Germany is estimated to have spent between 230 and 250 billion euros on migration, asylum, and integration efforts, a sum equivalent to the GDP of Greece.
Yet despite this colossal outlay, all across Europe, unemployment among many migrant communities remains several times higher than among the native population. The official statistics are dry, but what they describe is simple: tens of billions spent not on growth, but on maintenance; not on renewal, but on repair. These costs are not merely fiscal. Social services are overrun, housing markets are strained, education systems stretched by the linguistic and cultural integration of hundreds of thousands of children whose parents were told Europe would provide for them. What began as an act of moral generosity became a structural liability.
By 2025, even Germany’s new chancellor acknowledged that the welfare state is “no longer sustainable in its current form.” Yet still, much of Europe’s political class persists in the myth that more immigration, even unregulated immigration, is the solution to problems created by the very same policies.
The Return of Discipline
Modern Europe faces a stark paradox. The countries that opened themselves most widely to mass, unfiltered migration are now struggling with stagnation, fiscal strain, and social disunity. Those that maintained control, refusing to mistake borders for cruelty or regulation for xenophobia, are the ones thriving.
Western Europe still clings to a dangerous assumption: every migrant is a future engineer, every asylum seeker a potential taxpayer, every illegal arrival a misunderstood asset waiting to be “integrated.” But integration is not magic. It requires shared language, shared values, and the desire to belong. Without those conditions, integration becomes a euphemism for permanent subsidy.
When societies reward law-breaking, they corrode the trust that underpins democracy. Turning a blind eye to illegality in the name of progress breeds cynicism, not solidarity. The Višegrád countries recognized this early. Once mocked as “illiberal” for controlling their borders, they now appear prescient. Poland and the Czech Republic continue to grow, their societies remain cohesive, and their public finances strong. Germany and others, by contrast, confront demographic decline, an overstretched welfare system, and political paralysis, reluctant to admit the experiment has failed.
The lesson is simple, though uncomfortable. Unchecked migration fractures economies and burdens societies. Legalizing illegality does not create fairness; it undermines it. A functioning nation cannot be built on constant exceptions. Compassion without order invites chaos. Generosity without rules invites ruin. The continent’s future belongs not to those who fling gates open, but to those who build them wisely, high enough to protect, yet open enough to welcome those who arrive with respect.
