Can Europe summon the empathy needed to solve its refugee challenge in 2026?

Migrants brought to Malta after their boat capsized close to the island, on December 12, 2025. Reuters

One of the most compelling dramas I watched this year was Thomas Vinterberg’s Families Like Ours. The film follows several privileged Danish families forced to become refugees when their country shuts down due to climate catastrophe. Vinterberg described the premise as “a situation where we, as citizens of a civilised and wealthy part of the world, are forced to leave our country, our friends, relatives and everything we hold dear”.

In the story, families are herded onto unsafe boats bound for countries they never imagined living in — places like Romania or Russia. They cannot sell their homes; their savings are frozen. Watching their panic and despair, we begin to understand the agony of fleeing a land you love with no choice and no power.

The film embraces empathy and compassion. Set in a beautiful Copenhagen slowly sinking beneath the sea, Families Like Ours imagines a wealthy European country suddenly vanishing, its citizens scattered to whichever states will accept them.

The irony is hard to ignore. Denmark has some of Europe’s most restrictive asylum and immigration policies. Over the past decade, it has tightened family reunification rules, imposed strict age, income and residency requirements, and openly pursued a political goal of reducing asylum arrivals to near zero. These measures have drawn sustained criticism from human rights organisations for disproportionately affecting refugees from outside Europe.

Across the North Sea, the UK is moving in a similar direction. Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces mounting political pressure on immigration, particularly from voters drawn to Nigel Farage, the right-wing populist leader of Reform UK. Mr Farage has repeatedly attacked courts, human rights institutions and multiculturalism, and has proposed large-scale deportations of people without legal status. The Reform party has spoken publicly of removing hundreds of thousands of migrants over a five-year period if they are elected – which increasingly looks possible.

In European political terms, Mr Farage aligns most closely with populist figures such as Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella in France, as well as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands. During a recent visit to London, I was struck by how many colleagues — journalists, professionals and people who once would have dismissed such politics — told me they now intend to vote for him. “Our country cannot sustain this,” one said. “We are an island. Our culture is under threat.”

During a recent visit to London, I was struck by how many colleagues told me they now intend to vote for Farage

Yet the migration “crisis” is marked by stark contradictions. Data from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, show that irregular arrivals along key Mediterranean routes fell by roughly 20 per cent in the first three quarters of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024, with significant declines on the western and Eastern Balkan routes. This means that, statistically, fewer people are reaching Europe.

But these figures conceal a darker reality. Terrible deaths at sea remain tragically high. Hundreds of desperate migrants continue to die each year attempting crossings, driven by deterrence policies that push people towards ever more dangerous routes rather than addressing the causes of displacement: climate change, poverty and political instability. I have worked with refugees my entire career and one thing I know is that people don’t flee their homes and their roots unless they are forced to.

In 2024, the EU agreed on a new framework to manage migration and asylum: the New Pact on Migration and Asylum. It is due to be implemented next year. Its stated aim is supposedly to “harmonise” asylum procedures, accelerate decision-making and enforce a system of shared responsibility among member states.

In theory, this sounds constructive. But in practice, parts of the pact raise serious concerns.

One is the designation of certain states as “safe countries of origin”, meaning applicants from those countries face accelerated procedures and very high rejection rates. Countries such as Colombia, India, Kosovo and Tunisia are included on this list. The assumption is that people from these states can safely remain at home.

But this doesn’t take into account political dissidents, journalists, women fleeing domestic violence, LGBTQ individuals and others, whose persecution is often highly specific. For instance, religious minorities fleeing discriminatory practices or vulnerable women fleeing gender-based violence in India.

This month, former Iraqi president Barham Salih was elected as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. A former Kurdish activist who once lived as a refugee, Mr Salih brings personal experience of displacement to the role. At a moment when global displacement has reached record levels, his leadership will be tested by a world increasingly committed to deterrence – not protection.

Europe’s migration debate is no longer simply about managing borders or crunching numbers. It is about morality: whether societies that once demanded protection for their own citizens can still recognise that need in others. As climate change, war and political repression drive displacement far beyond Europe’s borders — from the Sahel to Gaza, from Sudan to Afghanistan — the question is no longer who can be kept out. It is whether Europe chooses humanity over exclusion.