When German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders of European Union countries reached a deal with Turkey in March 2016 to try to manage the migrant crisis, they conceded far more than a down payment of 3 billion euros, it turns out.

Merkel, along with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, secretly agreed to accept 150,000 to 250,000 Syrian migrants directly from Turkey into Europe each year, according to the German newspaper Die Welt. Merkel, Rutte and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu reached an understanding on the number through a "gentleman's agreement," Die Welt reported, and they did not reveal this number to their fellow European leaders or the public.

Leo Hohmann, a veteran WND journalist and news editor, believes Merkel and Rutte kept the agreement secret primarily for political reasons: Both leaders knew they faced elections in their respective countries in 2017.

In Rutte's case, the secrecy appears to have paid off, as his VVD party maintained its majority in the Dutch parliament in Wednesday's elections, allowing Rutte to retain his position as prime minister.

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However, the nationalist Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders surged all the way to second place. In the process, Wilders had forced Rutte to move further towards the nationalist-populist right to win Party for Freedom voters.

Germany, meanwhile, will hold elections in September, and Merkel, although she and her Christian Democratic Union still lead most polls, has been losing support to the nationalist AfD party, which is expected to win its first-ever seats in the national parliament.

"Conservative parties have already made huge gains against their globalist counterparts in the polls, and globalists like Merkel are trying desperately to limit the political fallout of their open-borders, mass immigration policies that have been going on for decades," declared Hohmann, author of the new book "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and the Resettlement Jihad."

"Merkel has been going out of her way to appear conservative, backtracking on her previous plan of inviting the Middle East into Germany and tightening the rules on Islamists who have already arrived, even to the point of banning the burqa in public places. This is all window dressing meant to turn the tide of political momentum that is so fiercely against Merkel and her party. If she is re-elected she will go right back to work for her globalist masters."

Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, said Merkel and Rutte also would have been driven to keep their deal secret because they knew some of their fellow EU leaders would never accept it.

"There is growing discontent in the EU with the disastrous migration policies that Merkel and others insist on implementing," Geller told WND. "So increasingly they have to do their dirty work under cover of darkness."

As early as December 2015, three months before the full refugee deal was finalized, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused Merkel of reaching a secret agreement with Turkey.

"Beyond what we agreed with Turkey in Brussels there's something that doesn't figure in the agreement," Orban said at the time. "We'll wake up one day – and I think this will be announced in Berlin as soon as this week – that we have to take in 400,000 to 500,000 refugees directly from Turkey."

Orban attracted ridicule at the time, with European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans calling his allegations of a secret deal "nonsense." Orban was wrong about the number of refugees, and he was wrong that Germany would announce the deal within days, but he turned out to be right Merkel had agreed to a legal refugee quota.

America is headed down a suicidal path – but it's a subtle invasion, and not many Americans understand the full extent of the problem. Get all the details in Leo Hohmann's brand new book "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad," available now in hard copy or e-book at the WND Superstore.

Philip Haney, a former Department of Homeland Security officer and author of "See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government's Submission to Jihad," said the deal reminded him of the Iran nuclear deal: There was the deal on paper that the public saw, and then there was another hidden deal that only came to public attention later.

"Why is the West so compelled to be so acquiescing to the Middle East, to compromise themselves, their own integrity, for the sake of a goal that they consider so noble, so urgent to accomplish that they will mislead or possibly even betray their own citizens to accomplish?" Haney asked.

Hohmann said Merkel's desire to import such a large number of Syrian refugees was most likely driven by a practical desire to replace native Germans in a couple of ways.

"They want to replace the German work force with a cheaper model," he declared. "This is part of the globalist plan to redistribute wealth and increase corporate profits on the backs of the middle-class worker in the West, who is replaced in the manufacturing realm with workers from the Third World.

"Secondly, Germany has an economic problem of its own making, that being a declining population. This relates to a decline in spirituality in a post-Christian society. Abortion and extreme family planning measures, drug and alcohol addictions and sterile homosexual unions have all been embraced in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and other areas of Western Europe. This leads to extremely low birth rates and a need for more immigrants to prop up the economy. The fertility rates of European countries are dismally low, down to 1.5 to 1.7 children per woman – that's less than replacement. A nation cannot sustain itself indefinitely with a birth rate below 2 children per woman."

Geller, author of "Stop the Islamization of America," pointed out Merkel and Rutte were also motivated to offer such a generous concession to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan because they wish to keep him as an ally.

"Erdogan has been fulminating and threatening to flood Europe with refugees unless the EU grants Turkish citizens visa-free travel," she said. "Merkel and Rutte are trying to appease him. They do indeed want to make sure he remains a European ally, which he is not in reality; but they are operating according to an outmoded sense of realpolitik that assumes that gestures of goodwill will be responded to in kind. Erdogan, however, will not do this."

Haney, meanwhile, recognizes most migrants who arrive in Europe do not intend to ever return to their countries of origin. He anticipates big problems for the continent and eventually for the U.S. as well.

"They're going to spread out all over the entire continent, and it's going to create an untold amount of stress and secondary, downstream social problems," Haney warned. "And then, once they get an EU passport, they can travel anywhere else as well, on a visa waiver no less. The structure here in the United States is designed right now, if you have an EU passport, you're automatically qualified to come to America on what's called a visa waiver. You don't even have to apply for a visa. You can come for 90 days without one. So that's going to require us to reevaluate our immigration policy."

Hohmann, for his part, believes the present influx of Middle Eastern migrants threatens the very future of the entire European continent.

"If Merkel and the establishment are not removed from power, Europe as we know it will cease to exist within 10 to 20 years," Hohmann warned. "In fact, several high-profile European leaders, most recently Archbishop Carlo Liberati of Pompeii, has said Europe will be Islamic within 10 years. The reason is simple: Mass migration from the Middle East and Africa into Europe combined with the low birthrate of European families."

America is headed down a suicidal path – but it's a subtle invasion, and not many Americans understand the full extent of the problem. Get all the details in Leo Hohmann's brand new book "Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad," available now in hard copy or e-book at the WND Superstore.