When Arab gangs assaulted large numbers of women on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, the police, German media, and elected officials deliberately suppressed what had happened. Unruly migrant mobs spoil the feel-good spirit that European leaders demand about Mideastern newcomers, and they portend rising intercultural friction. The authorities’ failed cover-up enraged much of the country.

The European Union script, entitled “Noble Asylum Seeker,” has played Europe all year. Multiculturalists, universalists, world savers, and globalists have all had a hand in its plot line, but the story faces narrative collapse. “After about 1.1 million arrivals in 2015, a majority of German voters want a rapid reduction in numbers and support the reintroduction of border controls to reach this goal as soon as possible,” Politico reports.

For months, EU and German officials have affixed an iron smile to acceptable public thought about these “refugees,” who might or might not be illegal immigrants. Restriction, let alone defense of Fortress Europe, meets wide contempt and condemnation. Open Borders are Europe’s “duty” and “moral obligation,” the Economist and other major news outlets insist. But several countries are backing off “Schengen” loose-border and visa agreements, and the EU is being tested.

Prescribed and proscribed thought has kept many Germans studiously silent on what’s actually happening. Holocaust guilt rules what is thought and said about race and ethnicity in the nation of 80 million. Most Germans, including young women, profoundly fear sounding like Nazis.

The Cologne suppression gives voice to long growing unease about what feels to many like an invasion. It exposes the divide between the German public and its leaders.

German chancellor Angela Merkel’s welcome to Syrian refugees last September opened up Europe, and what began then has not ended. From Munich to Hamburg since, trains have streamed into German railway stations, disgorging thousands of able, comfortably dressed young men who met no previously known definition of refugee. The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan calls Merkel’s gesture an “epic miscalculation.” That’s a nice way of putting it.

Now Merkel says she wants to stem the flow of migrants into the European Union, while keeping borders open. She remains unwilling to set a limit of 200,000 migrants to Germany in 2016. All German political parties agree to cap migrants this year at 500,000, says Politico.

“It is clear that the refugees can enrich the economic and cultural fabric of countries across Europe,” write Matthew Slaughter and Matthew Rees of Dartmouth’s Tuck business school in a perfect Open Borders echo from the U.S. “It is up to the continent’s policymakers to ensure that the refugees are given the opportunity to do so.”

But this is not at all clear, it turns out. German society, renowned for its good order and hard work, faces an influx of young, feckless, often belligerent men who are testing Europe’s territorial resolve, doing what strategists call probing.

The European Commission estimates three million additional migrants will enter the continent this year. Yes, that’s three million. “The chances of successfully integrating them is next to nil,” interjects the increasingly indispensable Daily Mail.

Do something, screams a rising minority in France, the U.K., Netherlands, Germany, and other countries. Nothing happens. Leftists worry solely about backlash. “After Cologne, we can’t let the bigots steal feminism,” writes the remarkable Laurie Penny in the New Statesman, conjuring “armies of Islamophobes and xenophobes who have jumped at the chance to condemn Muslim and migrant men as savages.”

The barely controlled influx of Syrians, Albanians, Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians, Pakistani, and Moroccans among others continues. All over Lesbos, volunteers await the next boats to arrive. From 2,000 to 4,000 migrants came daily through December to the Greek islands from Turkey. That’s half the number arriving in October, and closer to the number landing in Greece last spring.

The EU and Turkey signed an agreement on Nov. 29 to stop the Turkey-Greece flow of émigrés and firm up naval coastal patrols. The EU gave Turkey $3 billion to help manage the 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. Turkey apparently has as yet to stanch the flow of émigrés.

The men, women, and children migrating to Europe are of course mainly decent people who are not thinking strategically. They are acting out of opportunity and self-interest, not in a spirit of jihad or invasion. Only a relative few brazen louts actually flout authority, law, and order.

Still, the earnest electrician from Syria is likely to be unemployable in Germany or Sweden. A Pakistani graduated from high school might have the numeric base of a German sixth-grader. Even in the best-case scenario, what do asylum seekers add if they lack essential skills? What if they remain firmly attached to ideas and lifestyles illegal or repugnant in the West? Does Germany expect grown men who are semi-literate in Arabic to become even semi-fluent in the hard-to-learn German language, as Merkel insists they will?

Some migrants will prosper. More will do low-level jobs, go on welfare, or enter the cash economy. Not a few will slide enthusiastically into Europe’s ample demimonde. Undocumented, unpatrolled vagabonds roam the continent. Europe’s jails are already stacked with Muslim criminals.

Employment aside, Islam remains an all-or-none, theocratic proposition. Those assertive new neighbors from “Syria” who keep to themselves intend to be God’s victors. They see themselves on the right side of history. Postmodern existentialism escapes them. Folding into the cultural fabric of Europe is not part of their plan.

Integration into a European society of different languages, mores, and work habits is not automatic. The Quran (2:223) teaches good Muslim men that women should be tilled, cultivated like a field, and be subservient receivers of seed. Hmmm.

You say, 3 million more like-minded are headed this way?

The men of Cologne may be Borat-style rubes just off the Levantine turnip truck — and not too interesting to most European women. Catcalling girls, shouting ‘fikki, fikki’ in the streets, is not high-style courtship in Westphalia or Hamburg. In order to anchor themselves, some migrants are trying to marry any available German girl. Expect pressure from the EU to allow 2015 arrivals to import their own cousin brides, no questions asked.

Germany and Europe have not begun to come to grips with the undiminishing flood of would-be asylum seekers. German ministers say 3,200 migrants a day continue to enter the country, according to the Daily Mail.