Shada Islam: Orbán’s migration politics spreads across EU mainstream

On 27 April, the Guardian published an essay arguing that Viktor Orbán’s migration rhetoric has outlived his political peak by migrating into EU mainstream language. The author, Shada Islam, writes that Orbán’s “white Christian nationalist” framing was once treated as a far-right tell, but now echoes in policy debates about deportations, deterrence and “returns” across the bloc.

Islam’s case is built less on speeches than on administrative practice. She points to EU border fortification and outsourcing deals—cash-for-migration-control arrangements with Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania—as the working machinery behind the slogans. She also contrasts the reception of Ukrainian refugees with the treatment of black and brown asylum seekers, arguing that the difference is not merely capacity but hierarchy: who is presumed to belong, and who is presumed to be a problem to be managed. In Brussels, the vocabulary is managerial—“risk management”, “burden sharing”, “returns”, she notes of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen—while the outcomes remain coercive.

National leaders supply the sharper edges. Islam cites German chancellor Friedrich Merz calling for “very large-scale” deportations of “irregular” migrants, and Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen pushing limits on “non-western” migration while warning that sharia “must never, ever become Danish”. The effect, the piece argues, is to launder once-explicit identity politics into phrases like “social cohesion”, “European values” and “integration”, shifting the burden of proof onto minorities already navigating housing, jobs, education and policing systems.

The essay links this to a broader European record: colonial-era categories that still shape who gets screened, stopped, or suspected. It includes a domestic example of automated governance in the Netherlands, where an algorithm used in childcare benefits enforcement wrongly flagged thousands of parents as fraudsters, disproportionately hitting families with migrant heritage and leaving debts, evictions and, in some cases, wrongful imprisonment. Islam’s point is not that software is uniquely malicious, but that it scales whatever assumptions a bureaucracy already carries.

Orbán’s advantage was always that he said the quiet part out loud. Islam argues that the EU’s advantage is that it can do much of the same work through procurement, databases and bilateral deals far from voters’ line of sight.

In her telling, the border is no longer a fence at the edge of Europe so much as a supply chain of contracts, screening tools and removal targets that keeps moving outward.