Uncommon Knowledge: What Europe Can Teach Trump about Imm...

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By Newsweek EditorsShareNewsweek is a Trust Project member

In one of President Donald Trump's favorite countries, the most arresting migration number last week wasn’t how many people arrived—it was how many left. The U.K. reported that net migration fell two-thirds in a year to 204,000, after years of public concern. But this overall figure included the inconvenient facts that of the 693,000 people who emigrated in the year to June 2025, 252,000 were British citizens—and about three-quarters of those leaving were under 35. All this in a country of around 69 million people. It is a sobering thought: a relatively rich country celebrating lower net migration even as its own young people head for the exit.

America, by contrast, barely measures emigration at all. The United States does not run "exit immigration" checks the way Europe and Britain do. Instead, DHS reconstructs departures from airlines’ and carriers’ manifests and newer biometric programs—not to count how many Americans leave to live abroad, but to spot visa overstays. That makes the U.S. blind to a statistic British ministers are now forced to confront, but in any case emigration of U.S. citizens isn't something that keeps American policymakers awake at night. Yet there are more pertinent lessons in the British and European experience.

If Trump wants to learn from friendly governments that have driven down irregular flows, the lesson won’t be found in a border wall metaphor. It’s in the administration of time. Europe has spent the last two years re-engineering its migration apparatus to compress decision-making into weeks, not years—building digital exit systems and standardizing fast-track screening—precisely to avoid the immense costs of a backlog, which in the U.S. is now huge. The surprise in the U.K. data is a reminder: when systems work quickly, people don’t linger in limbo—and voters notice.

Common Knowledge

The American right says deterrence starts with certainty. The Heritage Foundation argues that the new approach has ended "catch-and-release" and shifted to a "border-control blitzkrieg," adding that "from here on, the campaign will be a long slog—finding, arresting and removing deportable aliens inside the U.S." U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is on pace for its most removals since the Obama years, a talking point for conservatives arguing enforcement finally has teeth. They say that "non-enforcement" extended by prior policies overwhelmed the courts and encouraged more arrivals.

On November 29, 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services halted all asylum decisions pending expanded vetting after a murder in Washington, D.C. linked to an Afghan asylum beneficiary. To the right, this proved the system’s screening was too lax; to the left, it needlessly froze thousands in limbo and undercut the very premise of quick, credible adjudication.

The left more broadly says that deterrence without due process is a false economy and a legal minefield. Amnesty International warned that Europe’s new Pact on Migration and Asylum—meant to accelerate screening and returns—“will set back EU asylum law for decades," replacing protection with assembly-line rejection. The American Immigration Lawyers Association likewise blasted the administration’s late-November move to revisit refugee vetting and suspend some decisions as sowing "fear, not security."

Uncommon Knowledge

The salutary lesson from these differing approaches is not just about who crosses a border, but how long they sit in the system. Backlogs are policy. They shape who stays, who goes, and how the public judges the results.

In the U.S., as of early November, the immigration court backlog sat above 3.4 million cases; average waits are approaching two years just to reach a merits hearing—and much longer in high-volume courts. A GAO report found that for non-detained cases between 2016 and 2023, 34 percent of initial decisions were issued in absentia. And while the Trump administration has ramped up deportations, its decision to simultaneously freeze asylum decisions at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in late November is highly likely to compound the pressure.

Now look at Europe. The EU Entry/Exit System went live on October 12, 2025, introducing biometric exit/entry records across 29 countries, with full operation due by April 10, 2026. It allows authorities to spot overstays immediately, and sequence asylum screening with maximum time limits (screening in five days, a border procedure capped around 12 weeks). The result is fewer people in administrative limbo and fewer incentives to wait out the state, while still, contentiously, granting millions of legal permits through regular channels.

Britain sits somewhere in between, demonstrating the political rewards of making something move fast—and the risks when something else does. London’s rule changes throttled student dependents and some work routes, while emigration ticked up. The ONS shows long-term immigration fell to 898,000, emigration rose to 693,000, and net migration dropped to 204,000; crucially, net migration of British nationals was minus 109,000. That is a speed story of another kind: young workers and graduates are voting with their feet.

The Trumpian instinct is to see Europe’s recent numbers as vindication for the "enforce first" model. There is something to that: limit ambiguity, move people quickly to a decision, and flows become more manageable. But the data shows the key is not only strictness, it’s speed. When decisions are fast, both protection and removal become credible—and cheaper.

That brings us back to Britain’s disappearing twentysomethings. A government can lower immigration and be alarmed at the results. The real policy frontier, on both sides of the Atlantic, is not how loudly one promises to stop people, but how quickly one can decide their cases and enforce the results. In migration politics, the queue is everything. Europe is learning to shorten it.

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