Europe Won’t Live By Deporting
written on July 17, 2026
I have a great deal of respect for DHH, and I agree with the premise behind his recent list: Europe is in trouble and it needs to become much more capable of building. We are aging, we are economically fragmented, and we are losing too many of the people who are willing to take risks. The question is not whether there is a problem. Beyond that do, I squarely disagree with his diagnosis of the challenges.
His priorities and pain points are migration, climate, and then ends with a call to stop fighting success. The only real point where I think we’re in agreement is the last one: we need to adopt a spirit of believing in oneself, and that we can build our way out of problems. But Europe has not lost its edge because it has too many people, or because it cares about the climate but it is losing it because it has become very good at preserving the present and very bad at making room for the future.
An Aging Europe
DHH is right about one limited point: immigration cannot, by itself, make an aging society young forever. People grow older wherever they live. No country can recruit its way out of an unsustainable pension system, a low birth rate, or decades of underinvestment. But that is not an argument for ending immigration, much less for “remigration.” It is an argument for building a country that works.
Europe needs people to care for an older population, start companies, teach in schools, build homes, work in hospitals, and pay into the systems all of us rely on. More importantly, it needs to retain people already here. An ambitious young European who leaves for the United States, and an ambitious person abroad who decides not to come in the first place, are both losses we seem strangely unwilling to take seriously. From what I have observed, those people are not leaving because of a Syrian immigrant on the street (though maybe Twitter might make you believe otherwise) but because they find better starting conditions elsewhere. In fact, the same fundamental forces that make a Syrian leave to Europe, makes a European move to the US or Dubai.
I too have issues with migration. Large and rapid arrivals can strain housing, schools, public services, and social trust and we see that. Integration requires real work from newcomers and from the country receiving them and there should always be a discussion about balance and approach. It requires language, employment, schools that work, housing that is available, clear expectations. But we’re so focused on what is largely really not Europe’s issue. If Europe’s GDP was growing, we were proud of our accomplishments, I doubt we would have nearly as much of a discussion about immigration. In particular because Europe is hyper focused on mostly refugee immigration which in itself are the results of a highly unstable world, and Europe’s realtive closeness to it. And yes, I agree it’s entirely reasonable to discuss limits and capacity and it is also reasonable to expect people who settle somewhere to participate in the society around them.
But none of that leads to the conclusion that (even culturally incompatible) people must be removed. It turns a hard, but manageable problem of state capacity into a problem with human beings which often glosses over all the problems for the people the people who were born here, grew up here, have families here, or have spent years trying to become part of a country that insists on keeping them provisional. The modern world through internet, social media and just our ever connectedness increasingly struggles with clear divisions. Outside the US you will rarely find families who are not split across different countries and immigration regimes. It’s not uncommon for people with different passports to live within one married family.
Europe’s migration systems are particularly absurd. We make legal paths for skilled workers unnecessarily difficult, funnel people fleeing wars into asylum systems that take years to decide, prevent them from working while they wait, and then express surprise when integration fails. People who could be colleagues, neighbors, and taxpayers are instead left in limbo. A system like that is not compassionate, orderly, or economically rational.
The answer is neither open borders as an abstraction nor mass removal as a political fantasy. It is a migration system that can make decisions, enforce them fairly, and give people who are here a real path to belonging. Such a system would reduce chaos rather than create it. But it’s also fundamentally a system that is almost impossible to erect in a society which has increasingly taking a binary view on the topic. And yet, it does not take much for an individual to recognize the absurdity of that binary view, as many of their friends are on shakly legal grounds when it comes to residency. It just has become too common.
Abundance Includes a Stable Climate
I agree that air conditioning should not be treated as a moral failure. I happen to be a true believer in air condition! During heat waves, it is basic public-health infrastructure, especially for old people and those in poor housing. Europe should make homes cooler in summer, warmer in winter, and energy cheaper and more reliable.
But this is an argument for energy abundance, not for climate indifference and most importantly it’s an argument for generally adjusting to a changing environment. The choice is not between a degrowth cult and burning every available fossil fuel. Europe can build clean generation, grids, storage, insulation, heat pumps, and nuclear power where it makes sense. It can make permitting faster without pretending that the climate problem is optional. When I see a data center powered by jet engines burning Jet A I do not see progress, I see a complete failure in policy making.
The claim that Europe emits too little to matter is a particular odd view for me. Every country can make the same claim and Europe is still a large, rich industrial bloc whose consumption, technology, standards, and investments matter far beyond its direct emissions. For many countries, climate change is not a moral hobby imposed on Europe from outside but by nature. Heat, drought, expensive insurance, unstable food production, and displacement are all costs that put pressure all across the world. Maybe not all those countries have political systems that are in a position to work with these challenges, but they are real issues regardless.
There is a real criticism of European climate policy: it can be bureaucratic, expensive, slow, and too focused on making ordinary people feel guilty. When you give me a paper straw that dissolves in the matter of minutes, I just get reminded of the absurdity every day. We should make that criticism. But the alternative should be a credible program of cheap clean power and resilience, not a politics that calls the future someone else’s problem.
Europe Lacks Agency
On the final point, DHH and I are close. Europe should stop treating success as suspicious. The Draghi report was not news to anyone who has tried to start, fund, hire for, or scale a company here (we incorporated Earendil in Delaware after all). Us Europeans have fragmented capital markets, twenty-seven versions of too many basic processes, weak employee ownership, national protectionism disguised as regulation, and an almost comic inability to complete large common projects. EU countries can’t even make cross inter-EU M&A work without it turning into some bizarre political proxy fight.
But I do not think this is simply a philosophical dislike of capitalism. Even the social state at least in principle has been recognized universally over the last century, even in the US. The deeper problem is a culture of resignation that our institutions have learned to reward. A process that has ten steps causes every person involved can name the other nine as the reason nothing is possible. Rules that were created to guard against a specific harm become a reason not to exercise judgment and no one owns the outcome.
This is not only a Brussels problem. European governments blame Brussels for rules they helped create, while national systems protect their own professions, incumbents, and small advantages against one another. We call ourselves a single market while making it unnecessarily hard to form a company, offer employee equity, raise capital, hire across borders, or sell a service across them.
The result is a self-reinforcing loss. The founder who incorporates in Delaware, the researcher who joins an American lab, and the engineer who moves to a place with better capital, more upside, and a faster ecosystem are each making an understandable individual decision. But every departure leaves fewer people with the experience, impatience, and influence to change things here. Then the system looks even more inevitable to those who remain.
If I were to put my finger on where to start, I would start there. We need a real market for services and capital, normalize employee ownership, institutions that can act quickly when the stakes are real, and an energy system built for the next century. We need more housing and childcare so people who want children can actually imagine supporting them. We need pension systems that do not consume every political choice in defense of the past. And we need to choose a few common projects (infrastructure, energy, technology, defense) and actually finish them and not let politicians get away with focusing on their local country over the success of the Union in those aspects. Most importantly we need to change the way we look at work. Away from something that is seen negative, to something that can be a fulfilling part of your life. To celebrate the ones that achieve and create workplaces that others want to work at, the ones that set ridiculous goals that yet inspire others to follow them and try to make them real. And also to extend a level of positivity and optimism towards people that try, instead of wishing them to fail or to take a default position of suspicion towards changes.
None of this requires Europe to imitate the United States in every respect. I do not want American inequality, its increasingly arbitrary politics, or its newfound ability and willingness to abandon people when they become inconvenient. But it has things we lack: a large integrated market, deep pools of risk capital, a more ordinary relationship to ownership, and an instinct that asks how to make something work before explaining why it cannot.
A Future People Want to Join
The migration-first diagnosis gives Europe an external explanation for its own failures. It tells us that our stagnation is caused or aided by the people who arrived, rather than by our failure to make a society that can work in the modern and globalized world of relative freedoms. Blaming people is easier than reforming a pension system, building homes, fixing a school, connecting an energy grid, or taking on an entrenched industry. More importantly blaming people is much easier than taking an honest reflection that maybe ones individual action or country of birth or residence might itself be a blocker in fixing the overall system.
It is also a profoundly unambitious way to think about a continent with Europe’s resources, education, history, and human capital. A country that cannot make room for the people it has, or for people who want to contribute to it, is not protecting its future.
Europe needs a greater sense of urgency, focus, and drive and for sure it needs less self-sabotage and less comfort with mediocrity. Yet the goal should be to make this a place people do not want to leave, and a place people can join without being held at arm’s length forever. We will not deport our way to that future and we sure as hell should not.
[…] How much opportunity there was in this young country for anyone willing to work—and that impressed me. Through wandering from agency to agency, through introducing myself in businesses, I had also gained an insight into the [Americas]’s godlike freedom. No one asked me about my nationality, my religion, or my origins, and — fantastical in today’s world of fingerprints, visas, and police certificates — I had traveled without a passport. But there was the work, waiting for the person; that alone decided. Within a minute, in a freedom that has become almost legendary in these times, the contract was concluded […]
— Stefan Zweig, 1919, about his travels to New York.
