Most Europeans want their governments to have more control over their borders to tackle migration, polling across 23 EU countries shows.

Seventy-one percent of respondents agreed that “the European Union needs to allow member states much greater control of their own borders, so that countries can better manage immigration,” according to a survey of 11,714 people across Europe that was carried out by strategic communications firm FGS Global and shared exclusively with POLITICO.

The findings highlight countries’ skepticism of the EU’s migration coordination, an area long defined by bickering and finger-pointing, at a time when Brussels is working on major reforms to bolster protection of the bloc’s external borders and increase support for countries that receive the bulk of arrivals. 

Yet a move away from EU-level coordination and toward national border control could undermine Europe’s flagship passport-free travel zone, the Schengen area.

Countries in the Schengen area — 25 of which are in the EU, while four aren’t — have committed to remove checks on internal borders. While it is possible to temporarily reintroduce controls as a last-resort response to a serious threat, that’s supposed to be limited to six-month periods, which can only be extended to up to two years.

Since 2025, 12 EU governments have notified the European Commission they are imposing temporary border controls, eight of which listed migration as a motive for doing so. Some countries have in practice had border checks in place for years.

EU ministers met in Cyprus last week to hash out how to halt migration across the EU’s internal borders to protect Schengen.

The continued existence of the check-free travel zone “relies on trust and shared responsibility,” Cypriot Justice Minister Costas Fytiris said.

That question of shared responsibility has long haunted EU migration debates, which weigh the pressure on countries that receive the bulk of arriving migrants, such as Italy and Greece, against the impact on countries elsewhere in the bloc as a result of secondary movements, i.e. onward travel from the EU country where migrants first arrive.

“It’s all about responsibility on the one hand, from those countries that are at the external border. But also solidarity on the other side; from the member states which are affected by secondary movements,” Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner told POLITICO.

Yet the challenge of finding an EU-level answer to immigration management remains. Throughout preparations for the first so-called solidarity pool, a framework that seeks to better share the migration burden among EU countries, governments have disagreed about who owes whom what.

Support for “frontline” states such as Italy and Greece can come in the form of financial contributions or relocations — with several countries, including Belgium and Sweden, already ruling out relocations.

Belgium’s Migration Minister Anneleen Van Bossuyt told POLITICO that Belgium’s initial solidarity contribution had already been lowered to €12.9 million and that the country is in talks with Italy and Greece to figure out “how we can account for historical [secondary] movements and see whether we can further lower that amount,” she said.

With many countries now focused on the migratory implications of the EU’s signature borderless travel area, Luxembourg has become something of a lone Schengen crusader.

The country “regrets” that the debates about Europe’s free-travel area and migration have become so intertwined, Home Affairs Minister Léon Gloden told POLITICO. “Schengen is much more than just migration.”

Secondary movements aren’t a Schengen problem, he argued — they only mean that the bloc needs to cooperate better and strengthen controls on its external borders.

“The illegal migration does not take place between Luxembourg and Germany,” Gloden said.

The small country has lodged a complaint against migration-linked checks on Germany’s borders, which have landed the thousands of commuters that enter Luxembourg on a daily basis in major traffic jams.

When the Schengen zone was built, it was “not linked to migration … [It] should facilitate the free movement of people, not hinder [it],” he said.

FGS interviewed 11,714 adults from 23 European Union countries between Nov. 10 and Nov. 23, 2025. A minimum of 500 interviews were conducted in each of the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Interviews were conducted online and the data was weighted to be nationally representative of each country by gender, age, income, region and socio-economic group. Data from a nationally representative poll of 500 adults is accurate to a margin of error of +/- 4.4 percent at 95 percent confidence.