Europe Will Not Be Muslim, but It Will Change
In late July 2026, tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, nearly as many as the city’s entire population.
This was no natural phenomenon. It was a geopolitical lever.
A recent Spanish court ruling held that illegal migrants cannot be deported without due process. Combined with Morocco’s deliberate blind eye and lax enforcement, it produced a crisis like the one in 2021, only more extreme.
Lately, Muslim immigration to Europe seems to appear on every media channel and social network. It almost feels as though Islam has become the majority in the Europe we all once knew.
Since the Arab Spring and the refugee crisis of 2015, the face of immigration to Europe has changed. Anyone who has walked through a major European city in recent years has noticed it without looking at a single statistic.
Still, the question everyone keeps asking, whether Europe will become Muslim, is the wrong question.
And the answer is no.
Even under the Pew Research Center’s medium migration scenario, Muslims will make up 11.2% of Europe’s population by 2050.
Beyond that, most people consistently overestimate the size of minorities. In a 2016 Ipsos survey, the average French respondent estimated that 31% of the country’s residents were Muslim. The actual figure was 7.5%.
Europe will not be Muslim. It will be a different Europe, and a more Muslim one.
The problem is concentration, not the average
What creates the opposite impression is not the national average but concentration. Immigrants settle in closed communities in major cities.
There are already entire neighborhoods and districts where Muslims are the local majority, and where a national minority is experienced as an everyday majority.
The reasons are no mystery. New immigrants go where family, a mosque, or a path to work is already waiting for them.
The result is a neighborhood where a child can grow up without ever needing the national language.
Social integration rarely fails because of a single decision. It fails because nothing requires it.
This is where the policy failure is exposed. Immigration law was built on the assumption that migration is an individual phenomenon. In practice, it is collective and concentrated.
The West also has no real alternative. The fertility rate in the European Union fell to 1.34 in 2024, the lowest level since 2001. In Spain it stood at just 1.10, while replacement level requires 2.1.
The EU’s old-age dependency ratio reached a record 34.5% in 2025, roughly three working-age people for every retiree.
Europe must absorb. And that absorption forces it to change.
Europe needs a new integration policy
Europe needs an immigration policy that allows newcomers to integrate into the local culture. The current system leaves them in a neighborhood that is, in effect, a miniature version of the country they left.
Denmark offers one model. Refugees do not choose where to live. The authorities assign them to a municipality, and under the 1999 Integration Act they must stay there for three years to keep receiving welfare assistance.
In 2018, Copenhagen added a national plan, “One Denmark without Parallel Societies,” which aims to break up immigrant concentrations in disadvantaged neighborhoods by 2030.
Language is the entry ticket. Under the same plan, schools where more than 30% of pupils come from those neighborhoods must test their students’ Danish. Denmark’s results speak for themselves.
For Europe’s Jews, this change is not theoretical.
Antisemitism in Europe has several sources: the far right, the far left, and radical Islamist networks. None of them absolves the others.
But in isolated, crowded neighborhoods where radicalization meets no resistance, the hatred that erupted after October 7 found fertile ground. Jewish communities felt it first.
Tel Aviv University’s annual report found that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks since 1994.
This is a sign that Europe is changing. For Europe’s Jews, it is also a sign that the time has come to make aliyah.
Many already read it that way. Europe is becoming a different Europe.
Israel remains home.
