Even as immigration is a major issue in the U.S. presidential campaign, a mass influx of Muslims under the rubric of “war refugees” is reshaping the face of Europe. Each news cycle uncovers a new, unsettling facet of this continent-wide crisis.

The European Union has been alarming defenders of national sovereignty in Europe by trying to impose a unitary policy across the federation of countries, forcing many reluctant governments to share the burden which Angela Merkel unilaterally imposed on the Europe by accepting hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants in Germany. Currently, the EU is threatening nations that will not accept their “fair share” of migrants with crippling fines, according to CNBC:

European Union (EU) countries who refuse to take in their allocation of migrants may face fines of up to 250,000 Euros ($287,304) per refugee.

The new legislation, reported by the Financial Times, is likely to be the most disputed out of several proposals to be announced Wednesday in Brussels at the European Commission.

It is part of a revision to the so-called Dublin asylum regulation, and is the EU’s biggest push to rescue a process struggling to cope with the million-plus migrants to have arrived in Europe in the last year, according to the FT.

In 2015, 1.3 million people sought asylum in Europe, said Eurostat. The majority come from Syria, with Afghanistan and Iraq following closely behind.

The threat of such fines has already moved Great Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron to reverse himself and agree to accept thousands of children from Syria, reports the BBC:

David Cameron says the UK will take in more unaccompanied Syrian refugee children from Europe, although it has not committed to a specific figure.

Ministers will talk to councils before deciding how many can be resettled.

The UK currently takes children from refugee camps in Syria and its neighbours but there has been pressure to take some who are already in the EU….

The government agreed in January to take some lone child refugees directly from North Africa and Middle East – but rejected calls to accept 3,000 children who had made it to Europe because it did not want to encourage others to make the “lethal” journey.

Now, in a change of heart, children registered in Greece, Italy or France before 20 March – when the EU struck its refugee deal with Turkey – will be eligible for resettlement in the UK.

On March 20, the EU struck a controversial deal with Turkey, which would offer Turkish citizens visa-free travel anywhere in the EU, in return for Turkey acting to stem the flood of Muslim migrants across its borders into Greece and Macedonia — a deal which many concerned Europeans denounced as blackmail. Now other migrant-sending countries are looking for payoffs from the EU as the price of restraining the tsunami of immigrants. The Financial Times has reported:

Niger is asking Europe for €1bn to stem the flow of people from other African countries through its vast desert territory en route to Europe. …

Niger has become a hub for thousands of migrants travelling north to the Mediterranean shores of neighbouring Libya and departing by boat for Europe.

The American Interest commented on that report, noting:

If anyone needed proof that the Turkey deal created massive moral hazard, here it is. Libya recently hinted rather strongly that if it didn’t see some money, it would “open the floodgates” to Europe—but the explicit naming of a price tag here is new, and marks the next step. We doubt it will be the last, particularly if Europe makes it clear that it’s willing to pony up to non-coastal countries. Africa is full of small states producing an outsized number of refugees and migrants; why should The Gambia, for instance, go hungry when Niger gets fed? And what is due to a true behemoth like Nigeria?

Given the demographic pressure from Africa, and given that we are now in the age of the hybrid refugee-migrant (where people are fleeing from conditions that most Westerners would consider unacceptable, but also toward better economic prospects rather than just safety), the pressure north is going to be continuous.

Meanwhile, Europe continues to duck the need for enforcement and deterrence; it would rather have the police and military of Niger and Turkey carry out whatever measures they need to to keep refugees away from Europe’s shores out of sight and out of mind than make the changes in law and policy that would allow the Italian coast guard to arrest and repatriate crossers swiftly enough to lead to deterrence. There are many words for this kind of attitude; “moral” and “humane” are not among them. One of the reasons Europeans prefer to duck this question, furthermore, is that it immediately raises the need to have serious policies for Syria and Libya beyond “avert your eyes and pray it all magically gets better.”

Meanwhile, pitifully few of the Muslim “refugees” are being resettled in Muslim countries, where they presumably would prefer to live and could assimilate far more readily. Real Facts Media reports that not a single “refugee” has been resettled in wealthy Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, or the United Arab Emirates, and only 133,000 in Egypt. At the same time, RFM notes:

Saudi Arabia offered to spend millions on the construction of 200 mosques in Germany to “spiritually support” all the military-aged men (and a few women) arriving in Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

Furthermore, the mosques would be “operated and supervised” by Saudi Arabia. As shocking as this may be, it’s actually quite common in Europe. In Germany alone there are 970 Muslim clerics from Turkey who operate over 900 mosques. They work directly for the Turkish government and spread their ideology throughout Germany. …

Refusing to accept “refugees” will force them into other countries, which further helps to spread Islam and bring about the Islamization of Europe and the West. Building and financing mosques in Europe is just another strategy to facilitate that end goal.

RFM points out that Western governments are spending billions to support Muslim migrants who could have been resettled safely and much more cheaply in Islamic countries:

It’s a clear and established fact, backed up by United Nations data, that the most cost-effective way to help the largest number of refugees is to resettle them in neighboring safe countries in the Middle East. The cost breakdown is shocking. Here are the facts:

• The average cost per refugee in the United States is $64,370 in the first five years, or $257,481 per household.

• The average cost to settle a refugee in a neighboring safe country (in the Middle East) is $5,285 over a five year period, or $1,057 per year.

• Using these numbers, it is 79 times more expensive to settle a refugee in the United States than it is in a safe Middle Eastern country.

• This means that for every one refugee resettled in the United States, 12.79 could have been resettled in safe Middle Eastern countries.

In related developments here in the U.S., presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has reiterated his pledge to put a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S., according to The Hill:

Donald Trump stood by his call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. Wednesday, saying he doesn’t care if it hurts him in the general election.

“I don’t care if it hurts me,” the presumptive GOP presidential nominee said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday. “I’m doing the right thing when I do this. And whether it’s Muslim or whether it’s something else, I mean, I have to do the right thing, and that’s the way I’ve been guided.”

“And I’ve been guided by common sense, by what’s right,” he continued. “And you see what’s happening. We have to be careful. I mean, we’re allowing thousands of people to come into our country, thousands and thousands of people being placed all over the country that frankly nobody knows who they are. They don’t have documentation in many cases — in most cases.  And we don’t know what we’re doing.”