Vice President J.D. Vance criticized European world leaders Friday for allowing their citizens to suffer from “appalling setbacks” caused by mass migration throughout the continent during his speech at the Munich Security Conference.
The vice president blamed the “conscious decisions” made by political leaders throughout Europe for the surge in mass migration that has spread across the continent since the beginning of the 2020s. He said that a car attack caused by an Afghan national in Munich, Germany, on Thursday could have been prevented if the nation’s leaders had passed more restrictive laws on who is allowed to enter the country.
“I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration,” Vance said. “Today, almost 1 in 5 people living in [Germany] moved here from abroad. That is of course an all-time high. It’s also a similar number in the United States, also an all-time high. The number of immigrants who entered the [European Union] from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone and of course it’s gotten much higher since. And we know the situation, it didn’t materialize in a vacuum. It is a result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent and others across the world over the span of a decade.”
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The 24-year-old assailant injured 36 people, including several children, after he plowed his car into a crowd of union members marching through the streets of the city. The man entered Germany as an accompanied minor in 2016 and did not receive asylum status given that authorities did not believe his testimony. Officials in Munich later gave the individual a temporary residence permit in 2021 which allowed him to attend school and work in the city.
The tragic incident marks at least the fifth major random attack in Germany caused by a Middle Eastern national in the last nine months, according to The New York Times. In December, a Saudi Arabian national rammed his car into a large crowd of people attending a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, killing a total of five people including a 9-year-old.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with them and we remain with them, but why did this happen in the first place?” Vance said. “It’s a terrible story but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his 20’s, already known to police, rams a car into a crowd and shatters a community. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction? No voters on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to unvetted immigrants.”
“But you know what they did vote for, in England, they voted for Brexit,” the vice president continued. “And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more in Europe, they’re voting for political leaders who promised to put an end to out of control migration. Now I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me, I just think the people care about their homes, they care about their dreams, they care about their safety and they care about their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.”
Concerns surrounding Islamic extremist attacks have surged across Europe in recent years and even more so since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel carried out by Hamas.
In August, a Syrian refugee in Germany killed three and injured eight in a stabbing spree in Solingen, while two cars exploded outside of a synagogue in southern France on the same day. An Afghan residing in Germany killed a police officer in May, which authorities believed was a religiously motivated attack.
Featured Image Credit: (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Samantha Cate)
