Yes, check Brexit and Marie Le Pen, politics in Poland, Hungary, Germany back in 2016. The refugee crisis was a central theme back then and anti-EU politics managed to gain significant grounds thanks to it. In UK, they even passed the mark narrowly and left the EU.

Sure, the refugees are never the only EU issue but the 2016 crisis pushed EU to its limits and even chopped of part of it. That's why EU was at the bring of collapse and if it continued there was as strong probability that anti-EU politics would prevail in other(than UK) EU states too.

One country left the EU and was made an example. Britain is worse off for it and didn't gain anything. The entire world had the pendulum swing to conservative governments, including the US which had even less refugees at the border.

I don't appease bigots. We are going to see many more refugees within our lifetime and the "1st world" cannot ignore the problem forever by sending them to different poor countries.

It's not the number of refugees that the EU can't handle, it's the fact that they're not white, english-speaking christians. We can bullshit around that, but statistically refugees commit fewer crimes and attain higher education in larger numbers than native-born citizens.

Germany, to give an example I can speak to, has a fertility rate around 1.5. Quite frankly most of the EU could really use the new blood if they could only get over the fact that those people weren't born on magical "EU soil"

You mean Brexit, which started 3 years before the Syrian refugee crisis and Marie Le Pen, whose support numbers moved from 17.8% to 21.3% after the Syrian refugees? That's your "major fracturing"? Meanwhile Poland and Hungary have been moving to a far right dictatorship pretty steadily.