Europe and the wider West have long believed that their laws, customs and moral grammar would act as an unbreachable sieve: charity for the oppressed would be offered, but incompatible social practices would not be absorbed. That confidence is now being tested. What began as an exercise in compassion toward refugees has become, in certain cases, a legal and moral minefield – one that Islamist networks and opportunistic litigants are learning to exploit with surgical precision.

At the root of this confrontation lies an apparently arcane legal dispute that may have seismic consequences. For the first time the European Court of Human Rights has been asked to rule on a polygamy-related family-reunification case brought by a Yemeni national, Khaled Al-Anesi, who was granted asylum in the Netherlands after the Arab Spring. The case challenges the Dutch refusal to admit five children fathered by wives the asylum-seeker did not initially seek to bring to the Netherlands – a refusal rooted in the Netherlands’ ban on polygamy. The litigant’s strategy, as defenders of Dutch policy have warned, is simple and cunning: use a claim for the children’s reunification as the legal channel that will later, in practice, enable the mothers to join them and thereby circumvent the prohibition on multiple spouses.

If Strasbourg’s judges, tasked with balancing Article 8 (respect for family life) against Member States’ public-order and equality principles, side with the applicant in a way that privileges reunification despite an express national ban on polygamy, the ruling could become a precedent replicated across Europe – and beyond. That prospect has not gone unnoticed by those who view such changes as the thin edge of a cultural wedge. Former UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman captured the mood when she warned bluntly on social media that Europe “doesn’t have to commit this cultural suicide”.

Braverman is not alone. Dutch politician Geert Wilders, long criticized for his warnings about uncontrolled migration, once posted the cover of National Geographic’s 2018 issue titled “The New Europeans”, lamenting: “I want my country back”.

But the question now is graver than ever: Can Western nations truly reclaim their cultural identity while they continue to import social structures that reject Western laws, gender equality, and monogamy?

This controversy is not merely legalistic hair-splitting. It illuminates a broader pattern: how Islamist movements, conservative religious networks and self-interested individuals have adapted to, and now exploit, liberal legal frameworks, refugee protections and welfare states. To understand the challenge, one must follow the incentives.

The strategic logic: Law, welfare and immigration as instruments of demographic influence

First, migration and family-reunification rules are a........

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