I have dedicated 15 years to reporting on people's fears. On Wednesday, 17 June 2026, in Brussels, that fear became personal.

When the European Parliament approved its new Return Regulation by 418 votes to 218, the outcome itself did not disturb me. As a journalist I had studied the drafts, tracked the talks, and anticipated the measure.

What caught me off guard was the noise that followed: lines of elected representatives standing to shout in chorus, Send them back. It sounded like a celebration, a loud roar.

I am a Middle Eastern and North African journalist, Egyptian, Muslim, and through part of my family of Semitic descent. I work in Berlin. By every standard I count as one of them.

The Aryan ideal returns in force

And for the first time in three years, watching that recording loop, I felt a fear I thought I had left behind: a sudden physical caution toward any man whose features matched what an older, darker Europe once labeled the Aryan ideal.

To describe that fear exactly: it is shared memory. It stems from years of studying German history and standing at sites where the notion that one people stands above another began as a chant and turned into law. I had examined those records as a researcher, keeping professional distance.

On Wednesday that distance vanished. The triggers I thought were stored away in my mind, in my chest, in the way I now watch strangers on the U-Bahn rose all at once.

I come from Egypt, a country that shelters millions of displaced people yet holds its own resentment toward African migrants, blamed for problems that are not theirs.

I understand how economic worry turns into scapegoating and the political show that follows: the search for a target who cannot vote you out. I expected attacks on rival parties and opposing plans. That is the usual, bearable harshness of politics.

Yet them and back are different words. They label a group of human beings. They point at me, at my neighbors, at the woman who cleans the office, the doctor who treated my friend, and the child in my German class. A slogan against a policy can be debated. A slogan against a people can only be followed or rejected.

Migration and racism form the core of my reporting, so I cannot let the chant pass without stating two facts.

The first: them do not only weigh on Germany; they support it. With an aging population and labor gaps it cannot fill internally, the country needs, by its own figures, hundreds of thousands of foreign workers each year over the next decade; much of its workforce growth in the past 15 years has come from people without German passports.

Only recently Chancellor Friedrich Merz made a clear call for wide, globally sourced labor migration: We need qualified immigration, he said, stressing that Germany wants to appear as an open, free, liberal, tolerant country that welcomes people from all parts of the world who are ready to work.

I do not see how that matches with the Send Them Back chant.

The second fact concerns the word back.

Back to where? For many there is no stable place to return to, and Germany is not always a distant witness to the reasons. There are nations it once ruled, with effects that lasted beyond colonial times; current conflicts in which it takes part through weapons and alliances; and protection promises it made and still must honor.

Take Afghanistan as one case: Germany promised entry to local staff, journalists, judges and human rights defenders who had worked with its institutions, then left thousands stranded when the new government halted the program.

Its former foreign minister Annalena Baerbock stated it clearly: We recognise our special responsibility towards the Afghans and particularly towards those whom we promised to welcome in Germany.

Such responsibility does not end because a parliament finds it awkward. To chant back is to direct people toward conditions that European policy, including Germany's, has sometimes helped create.

What scares me most is not that some politicians hold this view, but that they felt free to shout it aloud, with joy, inside the body created to stop exactly this.

The European Union was built on the ruins of the last continent that arranged itself around them and back. Its treaties promise protection, security and freedom, not as gifts but as the hard lesson from its own disaster.

Wednesday's chant does not only endanger migrants; it breaks the promise the Union makes to itself and plants in millions of us a question we never asked before: the freedoms, the living together, the equality Europe once offered us, were they ever intended for us, or only loaned on condition?

Today I am going to my work in Germany feeling, for the first time, afraid of people. Sadly.