German Chancellor Angela Merkel has recently admitted that terrorists have managed to infiltrate Europe by passing themselves off as refugees. She said that “in part, the refugee flow was even used to smuggle terrorists.”

This comes as no surprise to those critics of Europe’s massive influx of Muslim immigrants. Indeed, upon hearing the news, many are no doubt jumping out of their seats yelling, “we told you so!”

Just this last May, Neue Osnabrücke Zeitung, a German news source, reported that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) has received 369 tip-offs on possible links between refugees and Muslim extremists. German police announced that at least forty asylum seekers were being investigated for alleged terrorism links. It was reported that Germany’s spy chief, Hans Georg Maassen, said that Germany’s domestic intelligence agency had obtained “strong evidence that… 17 people have arrived under Islamic State instructions.” [Emphasis added.]  Furthermore, last month, German authorities announced that 499 Islamists were under surveillance, ostensibly because there is credible evidence that they pose a threat.  It is not clear if this figure also includes homegrown Islamists.

So we now know for certain that some Islamist terrorists have taken advantage of the massive influx of refugees and have successfully infiltrated Europe — and on ISIS’ orders. Furthermore, there are undoubtedly even more pending investigations, and it is certain that many Islamist terrorist cells with refugee connections are operating within Europe as of this writing.

Consequences of Mass-Muslim Immigration

More than a million immigrants have immigrated to Europe since the beginning of the Syrian civil war. According to the UN Refugee Agency, about 240,000 arrived thus far in 2016. The influx of refugees is not over despite the European Union’s agreement with Turkey. Most refugees are arriving by boat, some by land, and (it seems) hardly any by plane. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that more than a million arrived by sea in 2015, whereas only about 35,000 arrived by land. Most of the European migrants are ending up in either Germany, Sweden, or Hungary.[1] Some European countries like Bulgaria have constructed large fences to keep out the refugees attempting to enter Europe by land.

The largely Muslim migrants have brought no shortage of problems with them: there have been refugee-caused sexual assaults across European cities, increased radicalization of Muslim circles, a lack of assimilation, persecution of Christian migrants, etc. These problems serve to exasperate the assimilation problems that already plague many second-generation Europeans whose parents are from Muslim-majority countries. Given that European birthrates are generally below replacement levels, and that the massive influx of immigrants is, although stemmed in some quarters, still occurring, these problems will unfortunately only become more acute as time goes by. The late Libyan President Mu’amar al-Gaddafi once said, alluding to Muslim immigration to Europe, that the Islamization of Europe would happen without the need for the sword. But he  surely didn’t expect it would happen as fast as we are witnessing now.

Since the vast majority of the refugees are Muslims whose culture clashes with native European ones on several well-known fronts, this influx has naturally resulted in  growing anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe.  It is reported that nationalist and rightist groups are gaining ascendency With the increase in the number of Islamic terrorist acts  happening all around the world, including in the heart of the European Union, Europeans certainly have a right to be worried any encroaching Islamism.

What to Do About the Smuggling-in of Islamists?

So what should be done about the Islamist terrorists who are taking advantage of naive refugee policies to infiltrate Europe? The answer is pretty clear. Here are four common-sense measures that Europeans could take in stemming the number of Islamists that enter their territories.

First, Europeans should severely limit the number of refugees to whom they grant asylum.[2] Abstracting from any deals made (e.g., the recent Euro-Turkey deal on immigration), the European Union, and the few European countries outside the Union, have no obligation to accept more refugees. Immigrating to a sovereign nation is a privilege, not a right.

Second, Europeans should aggressively pressure the refugee populations already residing in their territories to assimilate to their native cultures. Failure to assimilate, e.g., failure to take classes in an official language of the European country in which one is residing, should be penalized (e.g., by paying fines).

Third, Europeans, especially European lawmakers, need to realize that not all cultures are created equal. It must be acknowledged that some cultures are superior to others. German culture, for example, is superior to the backward culture of Saudi Arabia — a place where women cannot drive, where Christian workers cannot build churches or congregate to pray, and where blogging about religion and politics could get you flogged.

Fourth, although it is practically impossible to thoroughly vet every refugee who comes into Europe since there is no way to check for Islamist links that an asylum seeker might have back in his home country, there are some good ideas that could be implemented here.  Non-Muslim refugees from places like Iraq and Syria should be given priority over Muslim refugees from these regions—this is for the simple probabilistic reason that a Muslim is more likely to pose a terrorist threat than a non-Muslim.  The probabilistic disparity is more pronounced if the Muslim comes from a highly radicalized area like Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the three countries with most asylum seekers.  This is the politically incorrect truth.

Now, to be clear, this is not to say that all Muslims are terrorists or that all Muslims are evil—of course not. However, there is clearly a huge problem within the Muslim community today, and most terrorists today are in fact members of the Islamic faith.[3] Ideological tests should  also be implemented as a vetting measure. Anyone who believes in a regressive and totalitarian sharia ideology that sees non-Muslims and women as inferior, or non-Islamic laws as illegitimate, should be barred from entering Europe.

Legislators in the United States should also be learning from this fateful European experiment. Hopefully, they will not make the same well-intentioned mistakes that European lawmakers have made, and grant asylum to too many people to the chagrin of national security.

Of course, the number of refugees  who are pouring in from Syria (the main source of refugees) is a cause for humanitarian concern. It is incredibly melancholic to see the plight of innocent Syrians made refugees by Islamist groups like ISIS, Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Assad government. The amount of refugees that Europeans have taken in does also speak to their very good intentions. However, reality often involves choosing between alternatives that are not very good. And this is one such dilemma. It is not easy taking the above steps knowing that in taking them many war-torn and truly innocent refugees will not be able to find a better life in Europe. But there are not many alternatives when wealthy Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar refuse to welcome their Syrian brothers and sisters. A rich man can only welcome so many poor people into his home without disturbing his family. The same goes for the “European rich man.” Some refugees or asylum seekers will have to be turned away. Europe can only welcome so many without leading to socioeconomic and security concerns. Reality must be looked squarely in the eye.

[1] Although in 2015 Germany saw the highest number of asylum seekers, Hungary has, proportionally, had the highest number of migrants.

[2] European Union policy may make this difficult, but there are ways around this. Britain’s exiting the European Union will probably make it easier for the British to stem the tides of Muslim refugees. Indeed, many British voted in favor of Britian’s leaving the European Union because of what they perceived to be the negative consequences of immigration (the other, and perhaps most important factor, was that they didn’t want to be “ruled” by foreign unelected bureaucrats).

[3] Just about all of the groups that the FBI has designated as foreign terrorist organizations, e.g., are Islamic organizations whose members are virtually all Muslim.