The EU is changing on immigration

Last month, a majority in a European Parliament committee voted in favour of tightening the return policy for people without the right to asylum. At present, only 20 per cent of those ordered to leave the EU actually do so.

The changes to the relevant EU regulation allow EU Member states to set up so-called “return hubs” for rejected asylum seekers in third countries. Member states will also receive more possibilities for detention, which will now be possible for up to 24 months, and for long-term entry bans for those who have been ordered to leave the territory. Furthermore a system of a “European return order” will be created, enabling mutual recognition of national return decisions. 

What is striking about all this is that the stricter version of the new regulation was approved with the centrist European People’s Party (EPP), the largest group in the European Parliament, counting on the support of more right-wing groups, much to the displeasure of the left.

The legislative process is far from over, but the current proposals require that an asylum seeker sent to a “return hub” in a third country must have family members there, have previously resided there, or have passed through it during their journey to the European Union. It is also not possible to send unaccompanied minors there, and a contested point remains whether it would be possible to send families with minors there.

The idea is that whilst these people are staying in those return hubs, their return case will be processed. The EU Commission’s proposal requires, furthermore, that only migrants who have exhausted all legal remedies or people without valid residence documents can be sent to such a hub. Moreover, these centres can only be opened in countries that respect human rights and international law.

The Netherlands wants to take the lead, alongside Austria, Greece, Germany and Denmark, in returning asylum seekers who have exhausted all legal remedies to such hubs. EU member states still need to reach agreements on this with third countries, but it is nonetheless a major step. In practice, it enables an approach going somewhat in the direction of what Australia has been doing. It is also similar to what the previous British Conservative government attempted via an agreement with Rwanda. Still, there is a crucial difference: people will not be able to be taken to the EU’s return hubs before they have gone through the asylum procedure.

Since 2013, Australia has been sending people who enter the country illegally to countries with which it has an agreement, including Nauru. There, these people can apply for asylum, but even if their application is approved, they will still not be granted asylum in Australia. However, Australia does, according to a spokesman “support the government of Nauru to implement durable migration outcomes”.

In practice, this means Australia commits to arranging asylum for them in other countries. The country did this in the US, New Zealand, Canada, Cambodia and Nauru, among other places, but it did not have to do so very often., as it depends on case by case arrangements. Human traffickers soon discovered that few people were willing to pay for the risky journey to Australia if that meant receiving asylum outside of Australia in the best case scenario. As a result, the number of drowning deaths off the coast of Australia fell from more than 1,000 in the years before the introduction of the new policy model to almost zero, at least officially. The contrast with the supposedly morally superior European Union is striking. Some 30,000 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea over the past ten years in an attempt to enter the EU illegally.

One would think that the example of a first world country dealing with illegal migration in a humane way would serve as a reference for European governments dealing with a similar challenge. In practice however, the Australian model, also kept in place by left-wing governments over there, has been vilified in Europe. One returning criticism is that there would be poor conditions in the off-shore shelters in Nauru. However, the kinds of conditions in such shelters can also be optimised and are in itself unrelated to whether the model works or not to implement democratic choices on who is allowed to enter the territory and who is not.  

Left-wing ideology

Left-wing ideology, combined with disputed legal interpretations of the European Convention on Human Rights by judges in Strasbourg, has in practice resulted in a harsh, brutal policy.

Marc Bossuyt, former chief judge of the Belgian Constitutional Court and, as former Commissioner-General for Refugees, virtually the leading legal authority in Belgium in the field of refugee law, has put it as follows:

“By granting extraterritorial scope to Article 3 of the ECHR, the prohibition of torture, the Court holds the contracting parties – i.e. countries – responsible for the way in which other countries might treat expelled foreigners. (…) I firmly believe that the combination of the M.S.S. ruling in 2011, which undermined the European Dublin Regulation, and the Hirsi Jamaa ruling in 2012, which opened the floodgates to migrants trying to reach Europe by sea, led to the asylum chaos of 2015. In my opinion, these rulings contributed even more to this than the Syrian civil war and Angela Merkel’s subsequent ‘Wir schaffen das’ policy.”

At present, Spain is virtually the only EU member state still adhering to the old left-wing policy approach. It intends to regularise no fewer than half a million illegal immigrants, a figure which, according to police estimates, could rise to 1.2 million. Has the Spanish government ever considered that such a move might have a pull factor? Will these people at least need to pay a fine, which would be fair towards those that did not jump the queue?

The absolute minimum condition for regularising illegal immigrants should be the complete closure of the EU’s external border for illegal migration, following the Australian model. In 2025, however, a further 200,000 people entered the EU illegally.  

Germany alone recorded 168,000 asylum applications in 2025. Only 28 per cent of these were approved, meaning that the rest will ultimately have to return to their country of origin. Will that actually happen? To ask the question is to answer it.

A list of safe countries of origin

Another new EU policy is to provide for a European list of safe countries of origin, to speed up asylum procedures and make it easier to return people. Reportedly, this includes EU candidate countries, such as Turkey and Serbia, as well as Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Kosovo, India, Morocco and Tunisia. Also foreseen is that it will be up to the asylum seeker to prove that a country is not safe in their particular case. The European Commission may furthermore propose removing a country from the list if conditions in that country change.

In practice, many of these countries are reluctant to take their nationals back, so diplomatic pressure may be required. The British government recently threatened Angola, Namibia and Congo that their citizens would no longer be granted visas if their governments did not quickly improve cooperation on deportations. Expenditure on “development aid” must also be put on the table, not least because such funds tend to hinder development when they fall into the hands of the corrupt regimes that are the greatest obstacle to economic development.

Criminal illegal immigrants

The absolute top priority must in any case be the repatriation of criminal detainees residing illegally on the territory. Why not rent a prison abroad, where those detainees can stay free of charge after serving their sentences, until such time as they recover their papers or can persuade their country of origin to take them back?

Sweden is set to send some 600 prisoners to cells in Estonia later this year, so legally speaking, it is certainly possible. Illegal repeat offenders often find themselves back on the streets very quickly. Given the damage to society caused by such permissiveness, a prison abroad would likely be remarkably cheap.

Legal immigration

On top of all this, there is also the issue of the legal influx of foreigners. First and foremost, the focus must be on preventing benefit migration. Belgian MP Tomas Roggeman recently stated on this subject: “Only two countries have dared to calculate the fiscal impact of migration by nationality and set it against the costs of social security. The conclusions from the Netherlands and Denmark are the same.”

He thereby presented a graph clearly showing that people of North American or Western European nationality make a positive fiscal contribution on average, whilst people of African or Middle Eastern nationality have a negative fiscal impact on their host country on average.

At least, those are the findings of the Danish Ministry of Finance. If these are accurate, it does not mean that these are bad people, but that, on average, they cost the host country money. These are averages, which means that there are also many Africans who, on average, contribute to the tax system and many Western Europeans who cost money. An optimal approach therefore probably does not lie in discriminating on the basis of nationality, but rather, for example, in restricting family reunification.

This happens to be precisely an area where the EU still imposes restrictions on EU Member States, for example through an EU directive on family reunification from 2003, which limits how strict EU Member States may be regarding family reunification with non-EU citizens. This is despite the fact that such policy choices have little to nothing to do with the smooth flow of migration within the EU and should therefore not be a matter for the EU.

Amendment of international treaties

Migration is a timeless phenomenon, but mass migration is far less so. The mass migration we have seen in Europe over the past thirty years was not a wholly natural process, whereby people migrate because they have a job offer. On the contrary, that migration was partly driven by the prospect of benefits. In a study on this subject, the German IFO Institute states: “We have found evidence that the generosity of the welfare state adversely affects the skill-composition of migrants under free-migration (…) but it exerts a more positive effect under a policy-controlled migration regime.” 

Furthermore, as said, the violation of migration rules was facilitated by highly questionable interpretations of the European Convention on Human Rights by judges in Strasbourg. 

Moreover, there was also a tolerance for blatant violations of asylum law. Asylum seekers who travel to the country they have fled, something that led to an uproar in Germany, among other places, normally no longer have the right to refugee status, for example. Yet little to nothing is being done about this.

According to the UN, there are more than 120 million refugees worldwide. Current refugee conventions, such as the Geneva Convention, require that many of these are entitled to asylum, based on somewhat arbitrary legal interpretations. To get round this, European countries make it particularly difficult to apply for asylum. For instance, it is not possible to apply for asylum at embassies. Genuine political refugees therefore have almost no choice but to pay people smugglers.

The original version of the Geneva Convention from 1951 granted rights only to European refugees. It was not until 1967 that this was extended to non-European refugees, by removing the geographical restrictions that had been in place.

The idea that Europeans should offer a safe haven to Ukrainian refugees feels much more logical to many Europeans than the idea that they should offer a safe haven to Syrian refugees, especially when wealthy countries in the region, such as Saudi Arabia, kept their borders virtually closed to the latter during the duration of the Syrian civil war.

Political support

The new changes to the EU’s legal framework constitute a first step towards the Australian model. That, however, will not be enough

If there was political support for taking in millions of refugees in Europe, it would make sense to have a legal framework that imposes this on European countries, but such support clearly does not exist. The logical conclusion, therefore, is that the current international legal framework must be amended — including the Geneva Convention — and brought into line with what is accepted by Europeans. Some refugees will then not be granted asylum in Europe if such an amendment is made, but the current chaos in the asylum system, with its arbitrariness and deaths by drowning, will be brought to an end.

One solution that could offer relief to all refugees, including so-called “economic refugees”, is the concept of refugee cities. These are new jurisdictions to be established, administered by authorities that provide a robust level of protection under the rule of law, including for economic refugees. Now more than ever, this could be a solution, but it is quite evident that this is completely unrealistic politically speaking today. To improve the world, Europe would therefore have to get its own house in order first. The new changes to the EU’s legal framework constitute a first step towards the Australian model. That, however, will not be enough.