Denmark Is Leading Europe's Anti-Immigration Policies

The problem is in the definition of the word refugee. In greece for example for many years until recently (namely before the whole Evros situation form last year), there was a huuuuuge push in the media and from political organizations, NGOs, and especially, political parties on the left to put economic migrants at the same position as refugees.

For example, pakistani, algerians, moroccons, afghanis, nigerians etc etc should be viewed the same as people from syria who were escaping war, and provided free housing, jobs etc. This, in a country who has lost more than 30% of its economy during the crisis, and unemployment in youths (under 35 yo) is around 40% and in general population just below 20%. When people started saying, this is not right, it makes no sense, they were attacked as racists etc. And then the way immigrants behavde in many cases was really aggressive, like putting fires and destroying property and facilities and equipment.

So when the evros crisis happened, there was no way media and politicians continue to push this, and now they are changing their positions and how they speak about immigration. There was a time when reporters and articles about pakistani would call them refugees. Now almost no media does that. But the situation was poisoned so much by the media and leftist parties (the coalition of the radical left party - SYRIZA - was government from 2015 to 2020 in greece) and the backlash inevitably crosses over to refugees and their status.

For me, refugees are refugees, you do what you must to help them. This does not mean you have to keep them for ever, only until it is safe to return back home. Immigrants are immigrants, if they don't follow the laws, there is no reason to be accepted by any country for whatever reason. And if a country wishes to limit immigration they have every right to do so.

In principle I believe people should be able to move freely anywhere. In practice, this breaks down when massive migration happens.

Immigration per se isn't the problem if well controlled. However, due to various reasons populations may mass migrate. This will happen more and more as climate change will cause massive upheaval. Locals have rights to be afraid as huge population movements inevitably cause changes. Just look at history. As of now we don't have a good example of positive mass migration to the locals. People may point out countries like USA and Brazil, but the local population were changed multiple times there (from Natives to mixed to new wave of migrations). I can't think much of a case the locals benefited from that and I'm mostly sympathetic to multiculturalism.

Another problem is massive brain drain from already economically distressed countries. Today's economic engine is a well trained and educated population (if a country wanna join the developed club).

Syria lost a lot of their best from migration and this would strain even more their attempts at rebuilt their society. Ideally we should face these problems in a global way. Refugees could be harbored temporarily till they can safely and orderly return (don't forget refugee crisis outside Europe, South America and Asia have their own as well). Sadly, not much resources are placed in such solutions.

For economic immigrants, I think developed countries may need to offer better solutions to lift countries out of poverty. Depending on each case, lot of poverty is caused by interference from multinational companies over local affairs and/or unfair tariffs and sanctions.

the ultimate solution is to assist those countries where the refugees come from initially but that is often not a realistic option...