The list falsely blaming Jews for immigration into Europe

The supposed list of Jews who support immigration into Europe

Said like that, it sounds delusional, but the list exists and circulates with full names attached. In certain corners of the internet, a catalogue of public figures has resurfaced, attributed Jewish origins and a supposed responsibility for European migration policies. The roster runs from former Catalan president Jordi Pujol to former chancellor Angela Merkel, taking in Olof Palme, Juan Carlos Monedero and an American activist named Barbara Lerner Specter.

From Pujol to Merkel: who appears on the list

The list mixes Catalan oligarchs, Swedish social democrats, former German chancellors and Spanish political scientists. One common trait: almost none of them has verified Jewish ancestry. Pujol is presented as "the Jew Jordi Pujol" because of his trips to Israel and his sons' stays on kibbutzim, but even those who spread the list cannot agree on that claim. Olof Palme is included for a quote in which he defended taking in the persecuted; no reliable source documents his Jewishness. And Merkel, raised in the GDR, is dismissed with an equally flimsy label.

The hidden-network thesis

Beneath the roster lies a theory: an elite of Jewish origin, or the State of Israel itself, would use its influence in the media, NGOs and finance to favour mass migration towards Europe. Its advocates cite organisations such as the ADL or the SPLC, academics of the Frankfurt School and the financier George Soros. Some qualify that "international Jewry" is not the same as Israelis; that distinction, on which even they cannot agree, is a clue to how shaky the argument is.

What the data debunk

Against the theory there are objective facts. The Barbara Lerner Specter video was recorded in the mid-1990s, circulated on supremacist digital platforms in the early 2000s and contains no revelation whatsoever about a conspiracy. The "three trips to Israel" figure about Pujol proves nothing: regional presidents travel, and the Pujol clan's fondness for Israel is well known but does not amount to Jewish ancestry. Moreover, there is an argument hard to rebut: the list of people without Jewish origins who support immigration is just as long. If European migration policy answered to an ethnic network, it would be the only EU policy executed with any efficiency.

The sensible thing is to treat these lists as what they are: recycled political myth. They circulate because they are easy to share and hard to fact-check. Real immigration has material causes —demographics, war, economics— that need no conspirators. But in the digital ecosystem, the conspiracists always win: a list never retracts.