The initiative – fronted by well-known activists Martin Sellner and Eva Vlaardingerbroek – proposed radical and sweeping changes to Europe’s migration laws. It sought four things.

First, a moratorium on all “non-Western” immigration into Europe, encompassing all forms of immigration from asylum to work and study visas.

Second, it sought widespread mass deportation of very loosely defined groups of migrants, including those it defined simply as “imposing a burden on member states”.

Third, it proposed the universality within Europe of deportation orders – that is to say, that a deportation order in one member state would mean ejection from Europe as a whole, rather than simply that member state.

Finally, it sought vast reductions in the welfare and benefits available to migrants.

Underpinning all of this is a fifth plank – a justification. That fifth plank in the document claims that all of these measures are necessary to preserve Europe’s “ethnic and cultural continuity”, which explicitly marks the document out as a kind of ethnic manifesto.

It was this final element that the European Commission could not stomach: the Commission noted, entirely correctly, that the Save Europe Act explicitly proposes discrimination on ethnic and racial grounds. Therefore, the Commission said, it could not proceed.

A Predictable and Legally Justified Rejection

There are some things to note here. The language of the Save Europe Act is objectively and deliberately racial and discriminatory, given that it explicitly targets “non-Western” immigration and has the specific and open aim of “preserving European ethnic continuity”. This is racial language, and the organizers of the petition had to know that it was. The EU Commission, legally, was entirely justified in rejecting the whole thing.

Further, the organizers were perfectly capable, had they so wished, of evading that obstacle to most of their agenda simply by using different language, which suggests that instead a positive choice was made to confront Brussels on a battlefield of their own choosing.

On the other hand, one might make the fair observation that EU rules around discrimination are quite flexible: nobody has ever had an idea rejected by Brussels if that idea proposes so-called “positive discrimination”, whether it be gender quotas for parliamentary seats or racial quotas for universities.

However, annoying as progressive hypocrisy around “positive discrimination” might be, it is not quite the same as a proposal to deport tens of millions of people based on their ethnic heritage.

The EU’s Misstep

The irony here is that by rejecting the petition, Brussels has played right into the petitioners’ hands. Instead of public hearings on their proposal, Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek have been granted a narrative of suppression: that the EU feared their proposal so much that it could not even permit it to be heard.

Had it been heard, they might have faced a tougher challenge. For example, while serious reforms to the EU’s immigration policies are undoubtedly merited, the economic and societal challenges and costs raised by a proposal to uproot millions of people and send them to countries that, in many cases, have no obligation to take them are another matter entirely. Were these issues actually thrashed out in public, the attractiveness of the mass remigration position might be somewhat tarnished.

Instead, the Commission has walked right into the trap laid for it. It can now be presented as being so frightened of the certainty that millions of Europeans would have signed the petition that it refused even to permit it. Exactly, one suspects, what Sellner, Vlaardingerbroek et al anticipated.

Remigration: At Odds with Every Conservative Principle

At issue in all of this is the political position around remigration now being adopted by much of the European populist right. Straight journalism – even that of a conservative bent – must name this for what it is. It is a proposal for the mass removal of millions of people from the European Union, including a great many who, due to the choices of their parents and grandparents, have known no other home.

Before addressing the moral and ethical component, the costs and impracticability must be confronted. Remigration would require, in the first instance, hundreds of nations around the world suddenly to agree to accept thousands – in some cases millions – of people who they have no obligation to house or admit. It would further require an administrative and policing effort unprecedented in modern European history, and would certainly unleash enormous political and social unrest – not unlike that seen during Donald Trump’s now-abandoned ICE raids in Minnesota and other US cities.

To even think about doing something like this, governments must have overwhelming justification. The justification offered by the petition’s authors is chilling, in that it simply states a preference for ethnic continuity. What is proposed, then, is an explicitly ethnic and racial program for the continent. Or, in other words, a peaceful act of ethnic cleansing.

That Europe has problems with immigration is undeniable. That political change in Brussels is required to address this is also an objective fact. Yet what Vlaardingerbroek and Sellner seek to sell is not an immigration system that works but instead a police-led campaign of ethnic purification across the continent.

Brussels is right to reject that. It is wrong, however, to lack the courage to debate it openly and expose it for what it is.