In my humble opinion, they have pushed Europe to a disaster if things do not get fixed in the next few years.
Are there cultures without corruption ? (no i'm not asking about headhunters in Papua New Guinea)
Some of the most well behaved and civilized cultures in the world, again in my opinion and only my opinion, had a double standard when they went out of their domains.
I am guessing that is alao human nature, though, but I find that somewhat corrupted behavior. It is fair to say that before mindsets were also different and should be adapted to the times before giving an extensive opinion on this.
But human and double standards, no matter the place or culture in the world, is quite common. I think things have improved in that sense but we are still very far from perfection, which does not exist anyway.
Also, and from my experience, you see more real humans in the face of scarcity. It is like the instincts pop up more quickly when there is less abundance in the environment.
It is not a matter of materialistic things available only though, but it is something that it affects definitely human behavior. Put in other words and in harsh vocabulary: just because someone looks good, it does not mean they are. Sometimes, conveesely, a desperate person could do things we would label as bad and probably the only thing that happened is that we saw those two people in very different contexts...
It is a complicated topic, but from Eruope to Asia (where I lived over a decade) and since the country where I have been most of the time is somewhat poorer (also cultirally different) you can see very different behaviors for similar situations or things that are very bad in Europe are somewhat ok here.
The topic of lying is one of those. For people here, it is not really important to stick to their word that much (except for family-related stuff). It is ok also to use lies as a tool to give excuses. I do not mean noone does that. Everyone has done some of that. What I mean is that for them there is no bad in doing it in that way, for me it would be a bad-looking thing I'd rather avoid most of the time.
This happens with so many things...
However, interestingly, if you look at US Department of State travel advisories, note those for the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Sweden and compare those with Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, for example. One element is that the very policies that the EU is pursuing contribute to the anxieties motivating such fears of terrorism.
Unfortunately promoting strictly enforcing immigration laws and borders makes you a right wing supremacist in the other progressive EU counties so they need to make themselves unsafe in order to virtue signal to the world how welcoming and tolerant they are.
In the media only. I do not know people who really think that if you ask, no matter left or right. Right wing people because they always thought in these terms somewhat (but not as much as you might think for a country like Spain). Left wing because they are starting to see this is already a matter of security, no matter their core ideas, they live in the real world, like everyone else.
In Spain for example immigration became already the first and most worrying topic according to the INE (National Institute of Statistics, biggest surveys in country). We have waves of like up to 5,000 in canary islands some weeks, like almost 300 per day in average. They also use the NGOs and take them illegally even according to our laws to Madrid in flights that are not tracked. All this has been researched and is known already nowadays.
That is why people get this worried. There are other problems related, but they ask citizens to follow laws and they workaround them however and whenever they deem appropriate. That is quite infuriating, more even so than the problem itself when you know security is related to this phenomena when it is too massive, and there is hard data that backs it up...
That is the reason why in many countries right wing parties (not the "soft right wing", which are kind of social democrats) are getting traction: security. In fact, my personal opinion is what they call far right is (almost all the time except very very few exceptions) more or less normal right wing and what they call "right wing", are just social-democratic parties.
But who am I to say... the media will jump to my throat, right? Anyway, many of us never cared or do not care anymore, because this has become already a matter of security.