How Europe Can Face Up to Reality on Immigration

There's at least one reason why the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016 may have been good for Europe: It's pushed immigration center stage throughout the continent and forced some long-overdue policy thinking -- if not yet much thoughtful implementation beyond putting out fires.

This week, Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank, published a 188-page volume that summarizes the most recent data available on European Union population movements and attempts to suggest some solutions to migration-related problems. Though I follow European migration keenly, I haven't seen anything like it in terms of depth and breadth. Perhaps the most important takeaway from this work is that the biggest barrier to getting a grip on migration issues is a lack of coherent integration policies. Given Europe's lack of natural population growth, integrating immigrants should be a much higher priority than it has been.