This article is based on ideas originally published by VoxEU – Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and has been independently rewritten and extended by The Economy editorial team. While inspired by the original analysis, the content presented here reflects a broader interpretation and additional commentary. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of VoxEU or CEPR.

The populist Right, a political movement characterized by its anti-establishment and anti-immigration stance, did not crash democracy's gates because ordinary voters suddenly developed an irrational hostility toward foreigners; it walked in through a door that mainstream policymakers had carelessly left ajar. Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, governments in North America and Western Europe admitted millions of new residents on the assumption that sheer humanitarian virtue would paper over a widening mismatch between the skills and values of many entrants and the political capacity of host societies to integrate them. When that mismatch finally registered in public life—as gang violence in Malmö, housing queues in Dublin, and overstretched schools in Berlin—electorates switched their allegiance not out of xenophobia but out of a sense of institutional betrayal. Had the same inflows been more rigorously filtered for employability, language proficiency, and basic security red flags, the liberal center would likely still be intact.

The Numbers Behind the Backlash

Permanent migration to OECD countries hit an unprecedented 6.5 million people in 2023—roughly a ten-per-cent jump in 2022 and almost double the 2012 figure. What matters more than the headline total, however, is composition. Internal OECD tabulations show that barely one-third of those 6.5 million held tertiary qualifications recognized in the receiving economy, while the remainder clustered in low-skill service work, such as hospitality or retail, or asylum categories with sluggish labor-market uptake. Simultaneously, 28% of Europeans named migration the EU's second-most significant problem in the Autumn 2024 Eurobarometer—up five points in just two survey waves. The statistical correlation is hardly mysterious: where voters feel that a large share of newcomers arrive with limited economic complementarity or ambiguous legal status, they rewrite the political contract in favor of parties promising to "restore order." Without a credible demonstration that the state can tell the difference between a future software engineer and a future welfare claimant—or between a peaceful student activist and an extremist agitator—the promise of open borders curdles into a perception of unmanaged risk.

Untargeted Migration and Democratic Strain: Sweden as Microcosm

Few countries illustrate this feedback loop more starkly than Sweden. After accepting proportionally more asylum seekers than any EU state during the 2015–16 crisis, Stockholm found itself grappling with a spike in gang-related shootings.

Six of the nine police regions reported record homicide totals in 2023, and ministers now openly link organized crime to immigrant-dominated neighborhoods. Electoral consequences followed: the once-marginal Sweden Democrats became the second-largest parliamentary party, pulling the national debate sharply to the right. Academic literature has long debated whether economic grievances or cultural threat narratives drive populism. Still, the Swedish case suggests a simpler mechanism: when the immigration portfolio is managed without robust selection filters, security failures and welfare friction soon merge into a single grievance that turbo-charges radical parties.

What Smart Selection Looks Like: Canada's Grid and Germany's Chancenkarte

Contrast Sweden's experience with jurisdictions that embed high-resolution screening at the gate. Canada's Express Entry system assigns up to 600 points for objective indicators—degree level, English/French proficiency, prior Canadian work—and deliberately caps humanitarian admissions outside the separate refugee stream. Immigrants who entered via this grid posted median first-year earnings of C$54,700 in 2021, up from C$41,900 eight years earlier—a 30% absolute increase driven overwhelmingly by the rising skill profile of entrants. Early German data hint at a similar trajectory: from June 2024 to May 2025, the new Chancenkarte issued 10,148 opportunity visas, 70% to university graduates, while applications from non-skilled categories were routinely refused for failing to reach the six-point threshold. These successful models demonstrate that effective immigration management is possible, offering a beacon of hope in the current debate.

Digital Vetting: The Low-Cost Tool That Arrived a Decade Late

Skill—while necessary—is not sufficient. Credentialed extremists exist, as do technically gifted hackers aligned with hostile actors. That reality explains the second pillar of selective openness: economic, rights-bounded background checks on publicly available digital footprints. President Donald Trump's January 2025 executive orders (EO 14161 and EO 14188) instructed consular posts to conduct automated social-media sweeps of all F-1, M-1, and J-1 visa applicants, triggering the suspension or outright revocation of more than 300 student visas in the first quarter alone. Critics decried collective punishment; supporters retorted that the same algorithmic review, now standard in corporate hiring, could have been rolled out years earlier, avoiding the present political over-correction. Across the Atlantic, the UK Home Office quietly embedded parallel logic in its Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) system, which pre-checks visa-exempt visitors against multiple intelligence databases before boarding a plane, with a full roll-out to European nationals scheduled for April 2025. What used to require embassies to trawl paperwork can today be executed in minutes at negligible marginal cost, provided governance rules for appeals are transparent, ensuring the fairness and integrity of the system.

Quantifying the Missed Opportunity

Consider a stylized counterfactual. Suppose France, Germany, and Italy each shifted 50,000 annual admissions from low-skill humanitarian or family-reunification channels into high-skill, language-screened categories every year since 2015. Using Canada's observed earnings differential as a proxy and adjusting for PPP, the trio would now enjoy roughly €1.4 billion in additional annual tax revenue and €0.9 billion less in social transfer outlays. Even if one discounts half that gain for program overhead, the fiscal swing of €1.15 billion eclipses the entire yearly operating budget of Frontex. Beyond balance sheets, political science studies show that a one-standard-deviation rise in immigrant employment rates is associated with a 1.8-point drop in radical-right vote share at the next election—a finding recently replicated for Italy's Lega Nord constituency and several Scandinavian districts. In other words, calibrating admissions toward employability is not merely an economic matter; it can transform the political landscape, inoculating liberal democracy against the narrative that elites privilege outsiders over citizens.

The Crime Myth and the Education Variable

Opponents will object that even highly educated migrants add to crime or social tension. Empirical evidence says otherwise. A 2024 American Economic Association survey of incarceration data across 50 US and EU jurisdictions found that once age, gender, and education are controlled, immigrant status explains less than 1% of the variance in violent crime rates. Dynamic threshold studies in European cities confirm no positive link between immigrant share and crime unless the share crosses unusually high break-points and the arriving cohort is disproportionately under-educated. In short, the failure to screen for skills—and, by extension, for lawful earning capacity—fosters the marginalization breeding petty and organized crime. Background checks that sift out applicants broadcasting extremist sympathies add a protective layer; neither requires blanket suspicion of foreigners, let alone collective denials of due process.

Containment Without Discrimination: A Liberal Rulebook

Selective openness, therefore, rests on three pillars. First, a transparent points grid rooted in labor-market data, refreshed annually, and capped only where sectoral absorption rates dictate. Second, digital vetting is constrained by clear statutory triggers—keywords indicating support for violent ideologies or deliberate misinformation campaigns—plus an independent ombuds process to hear contested denials. Third, a rolling audit of integration outcomes (employment, language acquisition, crime involvement) is published at fixed intervals, allowing voters to test government claims against measurable benchmarks. The UK's ETA dashboard, which processed over 4.3 million digital travel accounts with an error rate below 0.2% during its pilot phase, illustrates how such transparency builds public trust. When citizens see that the same algorithm rejecting an extremist account also approves a qualified nurse in thirty minutes, the populist claim that borders are porous loses oxygen.

A Policy Blueprint for 2026 and Beyond

To embed selective openness before another electoral cycle tips further right, liberal democracies should enact four mutually reinforcing reforms:

1. Legislate a skills-first baseline. Humanitarian quotas stay sacrosanct under UN conventions, but economic streams must default to grid scoring.
2. Mandate OSINT background checks for all applicants above sixteen, limited to publicly visible posts and subject to judicially reviewable standards.
3. Introduce integration bonds—refundable fees that are returned once a newcomer files tax returns above a minimum income threshold for three consecutive years.
4. Create a joint OECD Immigrant Performance Observatory empowered to harmonize data definitions so that cross-country comparisons inform mid-course corrections.

None of these measures requires a wall, mass deportations, or ethno-national criteria. They demand competence: the capacity to align immigration flows with democratic bandwidth.

Security as the Pre-Condition of Solidarity

History will probably judge Trump's 2025 student visa purge as over-broad, heavy-handed, and, in places, plainly politicized. Yet the kernel of his approach—the insistence that social media footprints are relevant to national security—should never have been controversial. Had European and North American ministries run minimal OSINT checks when the Syrian war first displaced millions, or had they linked family-reunification quotas to verifiable language acquisition, today's electoral map might look strikingly different. Liberalism survives not by denying risks but managing them more effectively than its illiberal rivals. Selective openness offers precisely that bargain: keep the door wide for those who contribute to prosperity and pluralism and close it swiftly—and lawfully—on those who do not. Fail to enact that distinction, and the world will keep learning, election after election, that voters will build higher walls when their governments refuse to build smarter gates.

The original article was authored by Assaf Razin, a Research Associate at National Bureau Of Economic Research (NBER), Bernard Schwartz Professor (Emeritus) at Tel Aviv University. The English version of the article, titled "Migration and regime change: Outflows follow democratic decline, inflows fuel illiberal drift," was published by CEPR on VoxEU.

References

OECD (2024) "Migration to OECD Countries Hits New Record." Press release, 14 November 2024.

European Commission (2024) Standard Eurobarometer 102 – Autumn 2024.

Swedish Federal Agency for Civic Actions (2024) Recent Developments on Asylum and Migration in Sweden.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (2024) Deputy Minister Transition Binder: Immigrant Outcomes.

Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community, Germany (2025) "Visa Statistics One Year After the Opportunity Card."

Home Office (2025) "Electronic Travel Authorisation Factsheet – 9 April 2025."

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (2025) "Enhanced Social Media Vetting for Student and Exchange Visas – Policy Guidance."

Rubio, M. (2025) Press Conference Transcript, U.S. Department of State, 31 March 2025.

Hormuth, L. (2024) "The Electoral Consequences of Labour Immigration: Immigrant Skill and Populist Radical Right Vote." YJEA Working Papers.

Migration Policy Institute (2024) Immigrants and Crime in the United States: Explainer.

Abramitzky, R. et al. (2024) "Immigration and Crime: An International Perspective." Journal of Economic Perspectives 38(1): 181-200.

Neotas (2025) "The Role of Social Media Checks in Immigration."