From a U.S. perspective, Europe’s migration crisis often looks confusing, contradictory, and self-inflicted. That impression is not wrong. At the heart of the European Union’s failure lies a fundamental mistake that American policymakers, despite their own divisions, have never fully embraced: Europe chose to integrate migrants before deciding who is actually allowed to stay.
This was not an oversight. It was a political choice.
The European Union built an entire system around “integration” while deliberately avoiding the prior and unavoidable question of membership. Who belongs? Who does not? And under what conditions does presence become permanent? Instead of answering these questions, European institutions replaced decision-making with management, sovereignty with procedures, and borders with administrative narratives.
The recent OECD International Migration Outlook 2025, widely used by European institutions as a policy compass, confirms this structural flaw. Integration is framed as an economic tool, a labor-market strategy, a demographic adjustment mechanism.
Migrants are discussed primarily in terms of productivity, skills, and workforce participation. What is missing is not data—but political judgment.
Nowhere in this framework does integration function as a threshold. There is no point at which failed integration leads to a clear consequence. There is no moment when authorities say: this path has not worked, therefore remaining is no longer justified. Integration becomes an endless process, not a condition. A promise without an end.
This is where the paradigm Integrazione o ReImmigrazione directly challenges the European model.
From a U.S. standpoint, the logic is straightforward. Borders exist because political communities exist. Immigration systems are sustainable only if entry, permanence, and removal are clearly linked. In Europe, that link has been severed. Once a migrant enters the integration system—whether through asylum, temporary protection, or regularization mechanisms—presence slowly turns into permanence, regardless of outcomes.
The OECD dossier unintentionally exposes this contradiction. It celebrates increasingly sophisticated integration policies—language courses, employment fast-tracks, digital monitoring, AI-based job matching—while completely disconnecting them from the right to remain. Integration is measured, funded, and expanded, but never enforced as a requirement.
Returns, when mentioned, are treated as a separate technical issue, reserved for rejected asylum seekers or formally irregular migrants. They are never framed as the natural consequence of non-integration. This separation is crucial. It allows European institutions to avoid the uncomfortable truth that not everyone can or will integrate, and that a serious system must acknowledge this.
In the United States, migration debates are often polarizing, but one principle remains central: the state retains the authority to decide who stays. Europe, by contrast, has diluted that authority through endless exceptions, humanitarian shortcuts, and de facto regularizations. The result is a system that integrates without limits and governs without consequences.
The paradigm Integrazione o ReImmigrazione restores a missing element in the European discussion: responsibility. Integration is not rejected; it is taken seriously. It is understood as a real obligation—learning the language, respecting the legal order, contributing economically, accepting the rules of the host society. And crucially, it has an outcome. If integration fails, ReImmigrazione is not a punishment, but a structural component of a credible migration system.
For an American audience, this should sound familiar. No country can sustain open-ended integration without selection, nor can it preserve social cohesion by refusing to draw boundaries. Europe’s mistake was believing it could.
As long as the European Union continues to integrate without deciding who is allowed to stay, it will remain trapped in legal ambiguity, social tension, and political paralysis. The OECD report does not solve this problem—but it reveals it clearly. Management without decision is not governance.
Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Lobbyist registered in the EU Transparency Register – ID 280782895721-36
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