EU internal migration is relatively non-controversial, at least after the UK left the bloc and people realized how much of a trainwreck leaving the EU would be.

EU internal migration is relatively non-controversial, at least after the UK left the bloc and people realized how much of a trainwreck leaving the EU would be. Brexit happened mainly because English speakers are painfully stubborn monolingualists. On the other hand, EU external immigration is extremely controversial. Huge parts of the EU have an extreme far-right that's polling extremely well, and the liberal/centrist parties are all bowing to them by basically copypasting their entire external immigration playbook. The two major fronts in the EU immigration debate boil down to "do we just turn away all asylum seekers or do we start deporting citizens we don't like too?" The reason why this happened is that the EU suuuuucks at integrating external migrants, especially from poorer countries. I think I saw a statistic which was that, like, Turks that move to the US hate the shit out of Erdogan as much as native-born Americans do, but those that move to Germany wind up loving him more than those that didn't emigrate[0]. Or something like that. The US at least has family migration, which means we've spent the last 50 years learning how to integrate basically everyone, which is the kind of institutional experience the EU's member states lack. [0] Like to the point of joining hilariously (and illegally) far-right biker gangs