I am European! 

(first published in LinkedIn in December 2025)

Being European, for me, has never been confined to the place where I was born. Portugal gave me my roots, the Netherlands shaped my adulthood, and more recently Sweden entrusted me with the task of supporting strengthening its AI research landscape. My identity is carried in a Portuguese ID card, a Dutch passport, a Swedish driver’s license, and far more deeply in the freedom to move, study, work, and contribute across a continent that chose cooperation as its foundation.

But Europe is not only about people like me who move within its borders. Europe is also, profoundly, shaped by those who arrive from far beyond them: migrants, refugees, people seeking safety, opportunity, and dignity. They are not an external add-on to the European project; they are part of it. My friends, my colleagues, my research group are living proof. Science advances, societies stay dynamic, and our moral compass stays aligned when we recognise that newcomers are not a threat to Europe, they are one of its engines.

The political message must be clear: those who claim that migrants are undermining Europe misunderstand what Europe is. Europe has always been a work in progress, built by movement, exchange, and renewal. The right-wing narrative that blames “outsiders” for Europe’s challenges is not only morally wrong, it is also historically illiterate. Migration is how Europe has grown, innovated, healed, and reimagined itself. And equally important: we do not accept that others, whether foreign politicians or voices seeking to diminish us, define what Europe is or what being European means. Europe is not weak, obsolete, or in decline. It is defined by our joint actions and by the everyday reality of crossing borders, living, working, and interacting. Europe is a collective achievement born from resilience, cooperation, and the determination to build something stronger together than any country could build alone.

My life is possible because European systems (administrative, educational, scientific…) are designed to cooperate across borders. But my life is also enriched because Europe is bigger than its borders. The researchers who join my group, the neighbours who bring new languages to our streets, the families rebuilding their futures after displacement, they show, every day, what Europe can be when it chooses openness over fear.

Europe is not the bureaucracy some invoke in Brussels. Europe is what we make together: those who were born here, those who moved within it, and those who came from far away seeking a place to belong. The strength of Europe does not lie in purity or exclusion; it lies in the simple truth that we need each other.

And I stand proudly as a migrant who has benefited from this interconnected continent and who knows, from experience, that Europe becomes politically, economically, and morally stronger when it embraces newcomers instead of pushing them away.

I am European!