Thousands of people rallied in Rome on Friday for rival pro- and anti-migration demonstrations, with hundreds of police deployed to keep the two crowds apart as a far-right “remigration” initiative gained traction across Italian cities. In Northern Ireland, thousands attended anti-racism rallies in Belfast following two nights of anti-immigrant violence provoked by a stabbing attack — while far-right activist Tommy Robinson was detained at Heathrow Airport under counter-terrorism laws after returning to the UK. The same week, the EU’s new migration policy came into force, representing the most significant tightening of the European Union’s approach to irregular arrivals in a generation. The scenes on the streets of Rome and Belfast are occurring simultaneously with the formal policy architecture catching up to a political reality that has been building for years.
The received wisdom
The mainstream framing of Europe’s migration politics is, broadly, this: a continent that prides itself on liberal democratic values is being challenged by a surge of nativist sentiment — stooked by opportunistic politicians, inflamed by social media algorithms, and disproportionate to the actual scale of the challenge. The anti-immigration crowds in Rome and the violence in Belfast represent the ugly face of a politics of fear, not a legitimate response to genuine policy failure. Tommy Robinson is a far-right provocateur whose detention is, on this reading, an appropriate application of existing counter-terrorism law to a man who has consistently used inflammatory rhetoric to incite disorder. The EU’s new migration rules, meanwhile, are welcomed as a pragmatic evolution that moves the centre to where public opinion actually is — without endorsing the underlying nativism.
This account is not without merit. Robinson is a convicted criminal whose relationship with the truth is adversarial. The violence in Belfast is not a policy debate; it is criminal disorder that harms innocent people. The anti-racism rallies that drew thousands to Belfast streets are a legitimate democratic response.
But the mainstream framing has a significant blind spot.
A different read
The EU’s new migration rules — coming into force this week after years of institutional paralysis — are themselves a tacit admission that the critics had a point. The open-borders enthusiasm that characterised European elite opinion for much of the 2010s produced political outcomes that elites found alarming: the rise of Alternative für Deutschland, the normalisation of the Swedish Democrats, Giorgia Meloni in the Palazzo Chigi, Marine Le Pen as perennial near-miss. Institutions do not fundamentally revise their policies unless reality forces the revision. The new European migration architecture is reality having forced the revision.
The question is whether the revision is too late and too calibrated to manage the backlash or actually address the underlying concerns that produced it.
The Belfast violence is instructive here. Northern Ireland’s political settlement is built on exceptionally delicate foundations — the Good Friday Agreement depends on both communities believing that the institutions of the state protect their interests equally. The anti-immigration unrest following a stabbing, which may or may not have had anything to do with immigration at all, is the kind of event that can metastasise quickly in societies with deep pre-existing divisions. The British and Northern Irish governments need to be careful not to allow legitimate concerns about community cohesion to be exploited by people whose actual agenda is the reignition of sectarian politics under new ethnic clothes.
The Rome rallies are a different phenomenon. Italy has been at the coalface of Mediterranean migration flows for fifteen years. Successive Italian governments — of the left and the right — have pleaded with Brussels for burden-sharing arrangements that the more geographically insulated northern member states were reluctant to provide. When Meloni’s government pursues offshore processing agreements with Tunisia and Libya, it is doing so partly because Italy tried softer approaches and found them politically untenable. The “remigration” language of the far right in Rome is genuinely alarming — it implies forced returns of legally settled residents, which is both practically difficult and morally objectionable. But conflating it with the much larger and more moderate constituency that simply wants controlled borders and honest numbers conflates the fringe with the mainstream.
Tommy Robinson’s detention will be cited by his supporters as proof that dissent is being criminalised. That claim is overwrought: Robinson has been convicted of multiple offences, and the application of counter-terrorism powers to a man with his record and his pattern of incitement is defensible. But a democratic polity should be uncomfortable with the counter-terrorism powers being used to manage domestic political disorder, even when the individual involved is as unpleasant as Robinson. The principle matters independent of its present application.
The broader pattern — rival marches, street violence, an EU scrambling to adjust — reflects a political class that spent a decade and a half treating mass migration as an event to be managed rather than a policy choice with distributive consequences. The distributional costs of rapid demographic change fall most heavily on working-class communities with the least capacity to choose their neighbours, their schools, their employers. Those communities were consistently told that their concerns were racist. The bill for that dismissal is arriving.
What to watch
- Implementation of the EU’s new migration rules: The rules are only as meaningful as their enforcement. Watch for early test cases — particularly how frontline states like Italy and Greece apply the new framework.
- UK domestic politics: Keir Starmer is expected to announce measures on under-16 social media use; whether his government also tightens asylum and migration enforcement will be a clearer indicator of its response to the Belfast violence.
- Tommy Robinson’s legal status: His detention will generate a court hearing; the legal basis and outcome will clarify what powers the state is using and whether they are proportionate.
- The Italian domestic coalition: Meloni’s continued grip on power depends partly on being seen to manage migration effectively; if the new EU rules provide political cover, expect her to use it.
— J