Blaming Refugees Not Warmongers:  

The Right-wing Press, Fortress Europe and ‘Weaponized Migration’

Paul Cochrane

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

An expected refugee crisis is looming from the US-Israeli wars on Iran and Lebanon. This probability has already been raised by aid agencies, but also, of course, by the right-wing press that thrives on the fear-mongering that Europe is being overrun by foreigners. As a GB News headline blared just days into the conflict: “Europe braces for ANOTHER migrant crisis…’It will wash up on Britain’s shores!’”

While the obvious connection is made between the war and the likelihood of millions fleeing, the implication of such articles and videos is that Iran is responsible, rather than the whole debacle being due to an illegal war of aggression.

This propaganda line – which is also a diversionary tactic – has been extremely effective over the years, that immigrants are coming to Europe for reasons other than conflict, economic exploitation, or Western policies, including regime change and instigated uprisings, like in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Indeed, just weeks before the war on Iran, I mentioned to two middle-class Italian ladies the fact that US wars forced refugees to head for Europe, and opined that European countries should have opposed such aggression from happening in the first place. They were surprised, saying they had not made that connection before. Incredible, the lack of critical thinking to make that link between the US, Israel and Europe’s warmongering in the wider Middle East and beyond, and Europe’s ‘migration crisis’.

Of course, if that connection –the context– is not made in news articles, TV reports or social media videos, it is easy to imply that migrants are coming to Europe for reasons other than those caused primarily by Western imperialism. This is sadly not that surprising, however, as context requires space and time, and media outlets increasingly cut back on such background as people don’t want to read more than a few hundred words or watch lengthy explanations of how we got to where we are at; sound bites are preferable. Reflective of this is that news agency Reuters a few years ago cut the standard length of articles from 800 to 600 words over concerns about reader attention spans. That cut of 200 words is concerning, as it is just enough words – a few paragraphs – to provide some context.

The other talking point that the right-wing media brings up that needs to be watched out for is the trope of ‘weaponized mass migration’ or ‘migrant warfare’. The GB News article quotes Mani Basharzad at the UK’s right-wing think-tank the Institute for Economic Affairs saying: “The Islamic regime mobilises illegal immigration … These people are a real threat to England (and) a real threat to the countries that they are in.”

This concept of ‘weaponized migration’ surfaced in a 2011 book, Weapons of Mass Migration by Kelly Greenhill, which argues that migration can be a ‘geopolitical weapon in asymmetric statecraft’. The concept has been picked up by the European Commission, the UN, NATO, and the US – there was a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe hearing in February on the topic – with ‘migrant warfare’ supposedly a part of ‘hybrid warfare’ being used against Europe ‘to shape national and international policies’, whether by Moscow, Tehran or another usual suspect.

The book argues that in the 64 documented cases of ‘coercive engineered migration’ since 1951, over half have been successful in achieving political goals. I am not sure how the author’s mental gymnastics ended up making such a conclusion based on cases studies on Cuba’s 1980 Mariel Boatlift, Slobodan Milošević’s threats during the Kosovo crisis, Haiti’s 1991 boat people crisis, and North Korea’s potential threats to China. Indeed, if Cuba was, as alleged, using migrant warfare to bring down the US, then Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is of Cuban origin, must be so deep undercover that even he doesn’t know it – or maybe he is a modern day Manchurian Candidate?

In any case, these migrant warfare stories do not hold water. Sure, people could point to, for instance, the case of the three Iranian asylum seekers arrested last year in the UK for allegedly spying, but that hardly constitutes a major threat or that Iranians trying to migrate to the UK are undercover agents or fifth columnists.

This weaponized migration argument is particularly disturbing coming from countries that have caused so much mass migration, and in the cases of the USA and Israel, their colonial-settler origins are based on weaponized mass migration to ethnically cleanse the indigenous population – just ask the original citizens of Turtle Island or Palestinians.

The other anti-immigrant argument being put forward is rooted in Islamophobia, that any refugees from Iran or Lebanon will be, or become, Islamic extremists. As the GB News article quoted Tobias Ellwood, a former Conservative MP and chairman of the Defence Select Committee: “The other one is extremism, because when people do depart from war zones, they could easily then be subject to indoctrination and then you get Islamic extremists coming out from that.”

What is not mentioned here is the link between people being radicalised and their country being bombed, friends and family killed, and their lives smashed. As a study in which nineteen university students role-played the persona of an apprehended suicide bomber showed, the psychological mechanisms to do such an act of self-sacrifice may be universal rather than rooted in religious extremism.

The ‘real story’ is not the refugees that might make their way to Europe. It is the huge numbers of people that will be displaced in the Middle East. The International Organisation for Migration has estimated that more than 19 million people are already internally displaced due to conflict, violence and disasters across the wider Middle East. The war on Iran has now caused 3.2 million Iranians to be internally displaced, while in Lebanon, close to 1 million are displaced. Such numbers will inevitably increase as the wars continue.

While some refugees will try to get to Europe, most will be forced to stay in the region, as happened with the Syrian refugee crisis from 2011 onwards. Europeans point to the 1.3 million Syrians who came, and the nearly 1.1 million granted some form of asylum between 2015 and 2023, yet Europeans overlook that Lebanon took in around 1 million Syrians – roughly 20% of Lebanon’s population. It caused immense pressure on Lebanon, as well as anti-Syrian sentiment, but it did not cause the same uproar as in Europe, or bolster right-wing populists, as in Europe and the UK, with the anti-immigration sentiment playing a role in Brexit.

This time, unlike with the Syrian crisis, Europe is better prepared to stop the ‘barbarians at the gates’, having spent billions of euros on Fortress Europe and outsourcing prevention. Countries such as Italy and Spain have outsourced migrant processing centres offshore, Germany is considering doing the same, while the EU has essentially paid off Turkiye, Libya and elsewhere in North Africa to prevent migrant outflows. A new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum is also to take effect in June, with mandatory border procedures, faster asylum processing, and a common return system put in place.

Europe is beefing up Frontex, its border patrol force, as part of the Fortress Europe approach, with an additional 10,000 officers to be added to its current ranks of 1,300 by 2027, and a further 30,000 proposed for the near future. Frontex has been accused of using state-organised violence as ‘deterrence’, with the EU agency linked to the deaths of 2,000 migrants. Coast guards, such as Greece’s, have used deadly tactics, in 2023 ramming a migrant boat and killing 15 people.

The idea of ‘re-emigration’ has also taken root in Europe as a means to kick out migrants, which, if there is an uptick in migration due to the wars on Iran and Lebanon, may rise further up the agenda of right-wing political parties, and could result in such populists taking further cues from the Trump playbook by instigating ICE-style arrests and deportations.

Europe’s crackdown on migrant smuggling and other policies has led to a decline in irregular migration, down 38% in 2024 on the previous year, and down 30% in the first quarter of 2025, while 110,385 third-country nationals were returned to their home countries in 2024, up 19.3% from 2023.

Yet despite Fortress Europe’s offensive and defensive posturing on refugees, the push factors for people to leave the Middle East keep piling up, due to both American and European actions. While US wars exacerbate economic instability, and the current war on Iran is driving up the prices of food and energy, the stop-gaps that had been in place, notably humanitarian aid, are drying up. The Trump administration has cut 90% of funding for USAID, as well as for other NGOs and UN programmes. The UK, Germany, the Netherlands and others have also cut humanitarian assistance to bolster defence budgets. In short, the very agencies that mopped up after previous US wars have either ended operations or are underfunded and overstretched. It will add to the push factors for people to leave the region. The drop in aid will also force Europe to shore up authoritarian governments such as Turkiye’s and Egypt’s as part of efforts to stop migrants leaving their shores. This will provide bargaining chips for Turkiye’s Erdogan and Egypt’s Sisi in their negotiations with Europe – pay up, don’t criticize us, or we open the gates.

The glimmer of hope is that Europe wakes up and realizes the cause for a great deal of instability and suffering on its immediate southern border is due to the US and Israel’s actions, and demands a stop to the warmongering while placing full blame on Washington and Tel Aviv for any fallout. But going by recent history, the lack of context in much of the coverage of the wars on Iran and Lebanon, and the spinelessness of the European establishment to stand up to the American hegemon or the Zionists, this is not likely to happen – but if it does, it will already be too late.

Paul Cochrane is an independent journalist covering the Middle East and Africa. He lived in Bilad Al Sham (Cyprus, Palestine and Lebanon) for 24 years, mainly in Beirut. He is also the co-director of a documentary on the political-economy of water in Lebanon, “We Made Every Living Thing from Water”.

Computer simulation improved understanding of refugees

Uppsala University

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image: 

Screen showing some of the countries where the migration persona starts in this computer simulation.

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Credit: RealLives Foundation

Computer simulations can help people gain a better understanding of the situation faced by migrants. This is shown by a new study in which 148 teenagers were assigned random migration pathways, with different start and end points. Along the way, they encountered unforeseen events that affected their journey. Experiences from the game led to a partial shift in attitudes towards migration.

The researchers set out to investigate whether it is possible to improve the standard methods currently used in teaching about migration. One common teaching method is for teachers to present international migration statistics. The teaching design tested in the study instead makes it possible to create a more student-activating approach, in which students develop an understanding of migration by experiencing the situation for themselves.

An initial sample of 148 students

The study involved 148 students (aged 14–19) from five Swedish schools. The participants undertook individual and randomised digital journeys as migrants from the Middle East and North Africa to countries of their choice around the world. The simulation involves experiencing the life of a randomly generated character from birth to death in another country, where players have to try both to navigate world events that affect their life situation and to improve their living conditions using the resources they have and acquire.

“We demonstrate that students can develop a deeper understanding of migration by experiencing a simulated migration journey for themselves,” says Thomas Nygren, Professor at Uppsala University and one of the authors. “At a time of polarised debate on migration and widespread disinformation, this offers new opportunities to address attitudes in an evidence-based manner. It’s like Hans Rosling’s models for tackling fact resistance meeting computer games.”

Critical thinking and fact-checking

The simulation is based on accurate, research-based data on migration and combines game mechanics with fact-based decision-making scenarios. The gaming experience involves both critical thinking and fact-checking through interactive participation. Before the study, the students’ attitudes towards various social issues related to migration were measured. The assessment was repeated after they had carried out the computer simulation. Around 25 per cent of the participants attempted to migrate, but failed to reach their target countries due to financial constraints, limited travel options to other countries, illness or death.

“It’s not really surprising that many students were unable to migrate their characters. In reality, migration is often difficult to achieve, particularly from certain parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where many people live in great economic deprivation. You need favourable conditions, such as money and good health,” says Markus Al-Afifi, the study’s lead author. 

An eye-opener for many

During the game, the students therefore had to try to create the conditions that would enable their characters to migrate later in life, which was not always easy depending on the country in which they were born and the resources they were born with. 

“This game is likely to be an eye-opener for many students who believe that the opportunity to migrate is wide open to everyone, regardless of their circumstances,” says Al-Afifi.

The analysis showed that:
•    The pupils exhibited significantly increased social understanding following the simulation
•    The outcomes were influenced by the students’ prior knowledge, basic attitudes and perceived learning
•    No statistically significant change in political understanding could be observed

The study sets out from a scientific theory (intergroup contact theory) which shows that contact between groups can reduce prejudice. When direct contact may not be possible – such as in a classroom setting – a simulation can serve as a structured, educational form of indirect experience. The results were analysed using three different scientific methods (the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, hierarchical regression analysis and interaction analysis).

The results of the study show, among other things, that students:
•    Can develop greater empathy and social understanding towards immigrants
•    Develop an understanding of immigrants to varying degrees, depending on their prior knowledge of the causes of migration

The computer simulation can also help students to:
•    Gain insight into the causes of migration
•    Understand how structural conditions influence individual decisions to flee
•    Experience agency, uncertainty, risk and limited options from a first-person perspective in the context of migration

“By using structured and fact-based information, this type of simulation can give students a nuanced and data-driven understanding of global migration patterns. Having said that, the results show that political views on immigrants’ rights are more stable and do not change so easily as a result of a single intervention of this kind,” says Al-Afifi.

 

Screenshot data selected indicator by countries in this computer simulation. The simulation involves experiencing the life of a randomly generated character from birth to death in another country, where players have to try both to navigate world events that affect their life situation and to improve their living conditions using the resources they have and acquire.

 

Screenshot of personal settings for the persona. During the game, the students had to try to create the conditions that would enable their characters to migrate later in life, which was not always easy depending on the country in which they were born and the resources they were born with.

 

Statistics of birth and target countries in the simulator. The birth country was randomised, while they could choose the target country. Around 25 per cent of the participants attempted to migrate, but failed to reach their target countries due to financial constraints, limited travel options to other countries, illness or death.

“It’s not really surprising that many students were unable to migrate their characters. In reality, migration is often difficult to achieve, particularly from certain parts of the Middle East and North Africa, where many people live in great economic deprivation. You need favourable conditions, such as money and good health,” says Markus Al-Afifi, the study’s lead author.

Credit

RealLives Foundation

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Journal

Computers & Education

DOI

10.1016/j.compedu.2026.105603 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Gaining tolerance of immigrants through simulating migratory experiences: Quasi-experimental evidence from secondary school classrooms

Article Publication Date

19-Mar-2026

What Mearsheimer Gets Right — and Wrong — About 38 Million Sanctions Deaths

A friendly quarrel while we agree that the US sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction and kill more people than wars do. And that we must talk much more about sanctions than we have so far.

by Jan Oberg / March 19th, 2026

Image: The News Statesman

John Mearsheimer recently stated that U.S. sanctions murdered around 38 million people between 1971 and 2021 – see the video below. It is a dramatic figure, and it has spread quickly because it captures, in one sentence, the enormous human cost of modern sanctions.

I share his concern about the destructive effects of economic coercion. But the specific number he cites — and the way he attributes it — deserves a friendly academic clarification.

The figure comes from a 2023 Lancet Global Health article estimating the mortality effects of unilateral U.S. and EU sanctions over the past half‑century. This is the first point where Mearsheimer’s shorthand diverges from the text: the study is explicitly about U.S. and European Union sanctions, not U.S. sanctions alone. Given the EU’s increasingly active sanctions policy, this distinction matters.

The second issue concerns how the Lancet researchers actually measure mortality. They do not count deaths directly caused by sanctions. They do not claim to know how many people died because a medicine could not be imported or a hospital lacked spare parts. Instead, they use a statistical causal‑inference model to estimate excess mortality associated with sanctions.

This term has a precise meaning. “Excess mortality” does not mean “deaths caused by sanctions” in the everyday sense. It means the number of deaths above what would be expected if the sanctioned country had followed the mortality trajectory of comparable, non‑sanctioned countries. To do this, the researchers assemble a large dataset covering many countries and many years, including variables such as GDP, conflict intensity, demographics, and health‑system indicators. They then compare: a) a country’s mortality before sanctions, b) its mortality after sanctions, and c) the mortality of similar countries not under sanctions during the same period.

This is a standard econometric approach — a difference‑in‑differences design — that estimates the average effect of sanctions while controlling for other factors such as war, economic collapse, or natural disasters. But it cannot identify which individual deaths were “caused” by sanctions, nor can it perfectly isolate sanctions from all other forces at work in a society.

The authors therefore speak carefully of “excess mortality associated with sanctions.”

The study provides an annualised estimate: roughly 564,000 excess deaths per year in countries under unilateral U.S. and EU sanctions. It does not give a 50‑year total. If one multiplies the annual figure by 50, one obtains about 28.2 million. The authors then compare this to an estimated 5.5 million war‑related deaths over the same period. Adding the two yields a 33‑million figure , but no the 38 million Mearsheimer mentions.

In paranthesis – but an important one – please note that the human costs of sanctions over time seem to be much higher than those of warfare – about 5 times higher!

The arithmetic is fine. But the Lancet authors themselves do not present this as a single combined death toll, nor do they frame it as “deaths caused by sanctions,” let alone “killed by the United States.” Their purpose is to show scale and association, not to produce a definitive historical body count.

My intention here is not to diminish the suffering caused by sanctions. On the contrary, I have long argued that the United States suffers from a kind of “sanctionitis” — a chronic overreliance on coercive economic measures, with more than 100,000 sanctions designations issued over the decades.

This is a serious disease of contemporary statecraft. Mearsheimer is right to draw attention to the human costs – particularly since sanctions get no media attention compared with warfare and since they are often called a “soft” weapon. Reality tells us that sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction, even though you will never get the exact numbers.

But precision matters. The Lancet study gives us powerful evidence that sanctions are associated with large increases in mortality. It does not tell us that 33 million people “died from U.S. sanctions.”

Keeping that distinction clear strengthens, rather than weakens, the critique of sanctions, particularly those that last over a long time – as in Iran. And the sanctions on Iran since 1979 is the topic of my next analysis.

*****

See also: Does John Mearsheimer get China right?

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Jan Oberg is a peace researcher, art photographer, and Director of The Transnational (TFF) where this article first appeared. Reach him at: oberg@transnational.org. Read other articles by Jan.

Silent Attacks on Personal Freedom

by Andrew P. Napolitano | Mar 19, 2026 |

During the first Trump administration, the FBI quietly spent $5 million on Pegasus, an Israeli-developed software product known generically as zero click. Zero click permits the user to download the contents of another mobile or desktop device without tricking the user of that device into clicking on a viral link.

When FBI Director Christopher Wray was confronted with evidence of this purchase in 2021, he stated under oath at a congressional hearing that his agents did not and would not use it; but they bought it because they wanted to understand how it worked. He claimed that it was in storage under lock and key in a warehouse in New Jersey.

Not trusting his own FBI director, President Joe Biden signed an executive order in 2023 prohibiting the use of this software by any employee of the federal government except for true national security emergencies. Last week, we learned that President Donald Trump quietly rescinded Biden’s executive order.

We also learned last week that the infamous section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which expires next month and which Trump once condemned when he believed it was being used against him personally when he was out of office as well as during his first term, now has the president’s full endorsement for a legislative extension.

Here is the backstory.

After the presidential employment of the CIA and FBI to violate Americans’ privacy during the Nixon administration, Congress enacted FISA, which proclaims itself to be the sole lawful way for the intelligence community to spy on Americans. Hogwash. The sole lawful way for any government person to use the power of government to spy on anyone in the United States, American or not, is to obtain a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment.

That requires the presentation of probable cause of crime to a federal judge and the issuance by the judge of a warrant permitting the surveillance. The warrant must specifically describe the places to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

FISA purports to change that by changing the nature of the evidence presented to and the warrants issued by any federal judge who sits on the FISA Court. Instead of probable cause of crime — mandated by the Fourth Amendment — FISA Court judges may issue search warrants based on probable cause of communicating with a foreign person. And instead of the Fourth Amendment’s mandated specificity requirements, FISA Court judges may authorize federal agents to search where they wish in a given database and seize what they find.

One FISA Court judge signed a search warrant permitting federal agents to rummage through the telephone records of all Verizon’s American customers, which at the time was 115 million households.

This search-where-you-wish-and-seize-what-you-find mantra has the earmarks of general warrants that were used by British soldiers and government agents on colonists in pre-revolutionary America. General warrants were outlawed by the Fourth Amendment, but Congress — notorious for shirking its constitutional duties — doesn’t think twice about enacting statues that directly contravene the Constitution.

It gets worse. Section 702 of FISA permits warrantless surveillance on foreign persons in the U.S. and elsewhere. This, too, violates the Fourth Amendment, whose protections are for all “people” and have never been limited to Americans.

It gets worse still. Section 702 permits warrantless surveillance on all persons who communicated with foreign persons; and the FISA Court has extended those permissions out to the sixth degree. Thus, if you call your cousin in Dublin or email an art dealer in Florence, the feds can surveil all your communications without a warrant, even those having nothing to do with your cousin or your art dealer.

And then they can surveil without a warrant all persons to whom you communicate and all persons with whom your communicants communicate, out to the sixth degree. In 2023, the feds surveilled a database of 3 million Americans who spoke with foreign persons. This surveillance, taken out to the sixth degree, can exponentially swell to all 340 million Americans. Presto, the feds found a way to spy on all of us and claim it is legal.

It is not legal. Congress had no authority to enact FISA including Section 702, and the FISA Court had no authority to expand the scope of Section 702 out to the sixth degree. When someone from the Trump campaign in 2015 spoke with a Russian friend, the feds used Section 702 and its sixth-degree extensions to spy on Trump’s folks, including the then-presidential candidate himself.

When Trump learned of this, he publicly proclaimed that FISA should be scrapped. Now that he is back in the White House and has a more pliant FBI and CIA, he wants Section 702 extended.

But the entire FISA architecture is itself a fig leaf because of zero click. As horrific to personal freedom as FISA is, as inexplicable as Trump’s belated turnabout support for it is, as patently unconstitutional are warrants based on anything but probable cause of crime, all this is a subterfuge since they feds took zero click out of that New Jersey warehouse.

Zero click is profoundly unconstitutional as it is an AI version of computer hacking. Computer hacking — the unauthorized entry into another person’s electronic device, whether data is downloaded or not — is a felony, and many of the same FBI agents who use zero click on unsuspecting Americans actually investigate and help prosecute persons for computer hacking. But don’t expect the feds to prosecute their own.

What’s going on here?

What’s going on is silent violence against the quintessential American right to be left alone. What’s going on is a reckless Congress faithless to the Constitution it has sworn to uphold. What’s going on is the silent destruction of personal freedom.

Of what value is the Constitution if the people in whose hands we repose it for safekeeping can ignore it

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM