On June 1, the negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council reached a preliminary agreement on changes in EU policy against illegal migrants. However, experts believe that the justification of the new regulations is based on frank manipulation of statistics and opens legal holes for deportation to third countries. While the researchers are talking about the need to legalize and voluntary return programs, the “centrist” coalition of the EU, together with the ultra-right, secretly agreed, in fact, repression against illegal migrants. This approach puts European values – and democracy itself – at risk, human rights defenders and lawyers are sure.
On the morning of March 26, the European Parliament at a plenary meeting in Strasbourg voted to promote a new Regulation on the return of migrants illegally in the EU. Something unusual happened in the conference room: ovations Members of the right-wing coalition rose and applauded standing. The vote was held with a score of 389 against 206, with 32 abstentions. For the European People’s Party (EPP), its allies on the right and far right, it was a long-awaited victory.
The rules, which, as a result of the negotiations, now await the formal approval of the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament, will allow Member States to create “return centers” outside the bloc’s borders. In fact, these are detention centres in foreign States where persons who have been denied asylum can be placed pending deportation, appeal or other decisions.
The bill provides for the introduction of almost unlimited restrictions on entry for expelled persons. Moreover, it will allow EU member states to negotiate a return to “unrecognized third countries.” This provision opens the door to cooperation, for example, with the Taliban in the framework of the forced expulsion of Afghan citizens.
Another, the most scandalous, proposal of this legislation and even approves the searches at home. They will be able to be conducted without a warrant, in personal dwellings and “other relevant objects” to detect persons in respect of whom expulsion orders are issued. So far, this particular provision has been excluded from the text adopted by the European Parliament, but it still appears in the negotiations.
A few weeks before the vote, more than a hundred non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, the World’s Doctors, PICUM and Caritas Europe, signed a joint open letter that has sharply criticized the regulations and compares the emerging structure with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Control Service, better known as ICE.
Return or exile?
The new regulation is one of the most extensive migration bills in the history of the EU. For simplicity, it can be conditionally divided into four main parts.
First, it is the creation of return centers. The Regulation allows EU countries to deport illegal migrants to third countries that have no connection with the deportee. As the lawyer Maria Teresa Gil-Bazo notes in an analysis of The Conversation, this is a fundamental departure from the previous practice: “Until now, EU member states could detain migrants who are in the country illegally, only as a last resort and under certain circumstances.” Now the centers of return are taking custody beyond the EU – and, therefore, beyond the scope of the legal guarantees existing within the EU.
The Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner Michael O’Flaherty has warned that this approach risks creating “black holes” in the field of human rights. Amnesty International human rights activist Olivia Sundberg Diaz, citing numerous исследованияstudies, echoes O’Flaherty. She believed that such an approach deliberately created opportunities for automatic and therefore often illegal detention in third countries, which violated the internationally enshrined right to freedom of movement and the prohibition of the forced return of refugees.
The ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research), based on many years of research in Turkey, Greece and Poland, came to the conclusion that the purpose of the new legislation is to “intimate” migrants and keep them from trying to enter the European Union. However, according to ECPR, detention and detention often do not restrain migrants and do not reduce their desire to migrate.
At the same time, the researchers found that agreements with third countries create corruption structures that exacerbate migrants and stimulate the use of migration centers as a way of “black” earnings for state and non-state players outside the EU. Countries and companies involved in such agreements, such as Albania in the case of the Italian experiment, use migration as a tool for negotiation and earn a lot of money on this.
Secondly, the regulations allow detention for up to 24 months. Current EU legislation restricts the period of detention for 18 months, and then in extreme cases. Expansion to two years of adult detention and its distribution to families with children constitute a radical escalation.
Amnesty and other human rights activists believe that this is not conditioned by anything but the desire to be particularly brutal. Thus, in the scientific literature on migration there is simply no convincing evidence that longer periods of detention are correlated with higher returns. But there is strong evidence that prolonged detention causes serious psychological harm, especially for children.
The third point is the obligation to cooperate. This, too, according to a number of assessments, is an extremely legally incorrect provision of the regulations. It requires those who have been ordered to cooperate actively with the authorities seeking to expel them. This applies to the provision of information, attendance visits, compliance with procedures, etc. The criteria for the definition of “refusal to cooperate” in the text of the bill are deliberately left as расплывчатымиvague as possible.
This amendment applies even to persons who are not subject to deportation in principle: for example, because of the threat of persecution, health or because the country of origin refuses to accept them. As noted in the CEPS analysis, they “will be subject to sanctions for the inability to facilitate expulsion that cannot legally take place.”
In fact, according to human rights activists, the bill involves bringing people to justice for refusing to help the government unreasonably punish themselves, which constitutes a blatant violation of human rights.
Another suggestion is the disclosure of refugee data. A joint analysis of PICUM and Médecins in the World revealed a provision allowing the exchange of medical data with law enforcement agencies and third countries for the purpose of deportation.
First of all, human rights activists and doctors believe, this violates European data protection laws, in particular the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Then, it creates real health risks well-studied in the scientific literature: when people fear that going to the doctor can lead to their deportation, they simply stop seeking medical help.
When people fear that going to the doctor can lead to deportation, they just stop seeking medical helpThus, it is a mechanism that contributes to the emergence of infectious diseases, uncontrolled chronic diseases and preventable deaths in communities that are already among the most vulnerable in Europe.
The final and perhaps the most pressing issue in the regulations concerns home searches. The discussion of the final bill includes a proposal to expand the rules of procedure to allow the authorities to conduct searches of “places of residence or other relevant places” where the person subject to expulsion may be located. More than a hundred NGOs have warned that such powers are absurd and unacceptable. They will lead to searches of personal homes, offices, shelters and humanitarian organizations, that is, to police operations structurally similar to those conducted by ICE in the United States. “We cannot resent the actions of ICE in the United States while copying this practice in Europe,” said Michelle Leo, director of PICUM.
ICE as an Example of Efficiency
Over the past year, European politicians — not usually from parties that supported the Rescue Regulation — have publicly expressed concern about the activities of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in European territory. When ICE agents were sent to ensure the safety of Americans at the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina in early 2026, demonstrations broke out throughout Northern Italy. Several European parliamentarians заявилиsaid it was unacceptable. But at the same time, the rules of procedure were actually designed to “import” the migration policy of the United States in the halls of the committees and corridors of the European Parliament.
In 2025, 32 people died at the hands of ICE. In January 2026, two people, René Nicole Goode and Alex Pretty, were killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis. According to an analysis of NPR, mass deportation agencies cost American cities millions of dollars and deplete the resources of police departments. Research by scientists in public health has shown that the deployment of ICE stops people from seeking medical care, using food aid programs, and school attendance — harm, the elimination of which may take years. Racial minorities have a disproportionate burden.
Searches at workplaces in search of illegal migrants deter workers from complaints of theft, unsafe working conditions and human trafficking. In addition, government spending, which should be protected by workers’ rights, instead goes to the financing of ICE. And this, in turn, leads to a deterioration in working conditions in those segments of the labor market where illegal workers are most concentrated.
Nevertheless, reports from all over the continent show that Europe is already in practice creating its own version of the American system. According to a report by a group of humanitarian organizations from February 2026, the authorities conduct an average of 221 expulsions per day. In 2025, more than 80 thousand expulsions were recorded, mainly in Italy, Poland, Bulgaria and Latvia.
“Men, women and children, including those in critical medical condition, are regularly beaten, police dogs, forced undressing and stealing personal belongings,” the report said. In Belgium in 2024, a law was passed allowing the EU border agency Frontex to work domestically, which caused concerns about the expansion of the agency’s powers to domestic law enforcement.
Flor Didien from the Belgian human rights organization “11.11.11”.сформулировал
“Images from the United States are shocking, and the outrage is justified. But where is the same moral clarity when the European border authorities also abuse their powers, robb and allow people to die?Olivia Sundberg Diaz, Amnesty International’s representative for EU migration, пишетwrites: “In Europe, there is a level of independence of institutions and courts, as well as respect for human rights that cannot be ignored. But the fundamental political impulse is the same, and I fear that the human consequences will be the same.”
Albania as a testing laboratory
Before the European Parliament voted for the Regulation on Return in March, there was already a kind of laboratory to verify its central innovation – an offshore return center in Albania. The experiment was Italian. And his results, according to a number оценокof assessments, were unsuccessful.
The agreement between Italy and Albania on detention, signed by Prime Minister George Meloni and Prime Minister of Albania Edi Rama in 2023, was presented by the Italian Prime Minister as a revolution in European migration policy. The project was designed to expedite the processing for refugees from “safe countries”.
Two facilities — the Schenjinah processing center and a detention centre in Gyader, were built in Albania under Italian jurisdiction. This cost them about 830 million euros in five years. The stated objective: to postpone the processing of applications for asylum from the country and to accelerate the return of rejected applicants from so-called “safe countries of origin”.
European Commission President von der Leyen did not immediately slow down the deal to praise the deal as an example of “non-standard thinking”, despite criticism and concerns from human rights organizations within the EU.
This was followed by a long-lasting lesson on how hasty populist plans face legal and logistical realities. First, as human rights activists expected, Italian and European judges repeatedly refused to recognize the legality and admissibility of keeping migrants in Albania. Thanks to the decision of the European Court of Justice in 2025, in matters of refugee, a country can only be considered safe if it is safe for everyone without exception. On this basis, Italian judges ruled that the majority of refugees sent to Albania should not be there.
Between October 2024 and January 2025, three groups were transferred to these institutions, a total of 73 people. Within a few days, the Italian courts decided to return them to Italy. ИсследованиеA study conducted by the Italian university showed that one sleeping place in Albania cost Italy more than 153 thousand euros (several times more than in a similar center in Italy – 21 thousand euros). As a result, обошедшиесяmore than 600 million euros centers, designed to process 3 thousand migrants per month, were mostly empty.
One sleeping place for a migrant in Albania cost Italy more than 153 thousand euros, and a similar center in Italy - 21 thousand euros In addition, the Council of Europe Committee for the Prevention of Torture warned that the Italian-Albanian model casts doubt on the full prerequisite for processing migrants outside the country. The conditions within the centers, despite their huge cost, were terrible.
The Italian government responded to these restrictions by trying to bypass them. Instead of a fast track for refugees, the centers are now used exclusively for repatriation. Meloni told reporters that she was “determined” to move forward. In November 2025, delegations from Germany and the Netherlands visited the Gyader center to assess the possibility of creating their own similar facilities. According to a source quoted by the Heinrich Bell Foundation, several delegations were interested in the “opportunity to lease parts of the camp.”
The rules of return, if it is finally adopted, will actually create a legal architecture for which Meloni’s lawyers are fighting in court from 2024. It will significantly expand the concept of a “safe third country” in such a way as to overcome the case law of the European Court, and in fact remove responsibility from member countries for any harm caused to refugees as a result of return.
This would provide the entire model of offshore hubs a pan-European legal basis that no judge of an individual member state could unilaterally block. Thus, an ineffective, contrary to established legal norms and an expensive experiment in Italy in Albania will become a role model for the entire EU.
Manipulation of data for manipulation of politicians
The new legislation was built around one, sounding depressing figures: only about 20% of migrants who received deportation orders from the EU are actually expelled from its territory. These data were repeatedly used in speeches, press releases and in the explanatory note to the rules itself as proof that the system does not work and that new radical tools are urgently needed.
The problem is that, according to experts, this figure does not reflect reality and does not say anything. The Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) отмечаетnotes that migrants are regularly accounted for several times in different Member States (for example, at the entrance and at the place of permanent residence, when informally moving or due to different statuses in different countries), which is several times high as the denominator.
More importantly, many return orders are officially issued in cases where deportation was not initially possible or illegal. The low level of compliance with the law, as the CEPS analysis concluded, “reports largely the legal constraints that no reform can overcome.”
Experts engaged in migration policy, put forward such an argument for many years. A study conducted under the Fair project of the University of Rotterdam Erasmus, funded by the EU and on the study of the management of repatriation migration, показалоshowed that “political measures such as EU agreements or expedited residence permits have a relatively small impact on the results of deportation”.
Factors determining whether the person who was denied would leave the asylum is much more often personal and contextual: for example, age, security in the country of origin, economic conditions. “Even in the most favorable scenarios,” says researcher Arjen Leerkes, “most of those who have been denied asylum either remain in the Netherlands or migrate further.”
Professor Hein de Haas from the University of Amsterdam led the DEMIG project, a five-year initiative funded by the European Research Council. Within its framework, one of the world’s largest databases on migration was created. Haas devoted his career to documenting what he calls “factual independence” to the nature of migration policy.
“Migration is an extremely politicized topic,” he writes. Because migration policies are often associated with success (or defeat) in the elections, legislators and parties do not prioritize the development of a fact-based policy, they just want to seem decisive.
His study found that restrictive policies often have an unintended effect: although it can indeed reduce new immigration flows, it also reduces emigration due to the so-called reverse flow substitution effect.
Border restrictions may violate the circulation of the population: for example, obtaining the right to stay in one country can be a long and complex process enough to risk it all anew and leave the country, even when there are economic incentives.
The same principle prevents the return of migrants and pushes them to permanently – the risk of losing the opportunity to return and get stuck in their home country may be too great. In other words, visas and other restrictions can produce an effect exactly opposite to the stated.
There is also a more structural aspect of the problem, which is completely ignored by the new regulation. The EU-funded I-CLAIM project describes описываетhow illegal migration in many cases is not so much a “weak border” as a consequence of the normal and expected functioning of the rules governing the European labor market. For example, a permit tied to one employer loses its force when the work ends. Or a migrant loses legal status when after a difficult year can not overcome the necessary income threshold. Or the family breaks up and one of its members is deprived of the legal basis for living (on family reunification) and so on.
In different labour market sectors, employees tied to employers turn migration control into a form of labor discipline: workers who risk losing their status, changing jobs, cannot defend their rights, give up unsafe working conditions or act in an organized manner.
The constant threat of deportation, according to the CEPS analysis, is a kind of deliberate tool for controlling workers. Simply put, he forces them to put up with poor working conditions, the violation of workers’ rights, so as not to risk their place.
The constant threat of deportation is a kind of deliberate tool for control of workersNone of these arguments are considered in the Refunding Regulations. The legislation does not contain a mechanism for the legalization of persons in an administrative impasse, does not provide for the protection of access to health care or education, does not propose ways out of the illegal situation, except for deportation. It tries to solve the symptom that occurs at the very late stage – the presence of people without documents – and does not pay attention to the mechanisms that generate it.
Unreasonable panic
In addition to specific provisions of the regulation, there is a broader question: what do the scale and nature of the “problem” actually say that this legislation is intended to solve?
The political narrative around migration in Europe over the years has been formed by disproportion between perceived and actual figures. A YouGov survey conducted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Poland and published in early 2026 showed that Europeans are significantly overestimating the number of illegal migrants in their countries.
Most people believe that there are more illegal migrants in their country than legal ones. What, of course, is exactly the opposite of reality: in the same France, for example, there are 13 times less than respondents believe. The notion of a continent besieged by illegal immigration and buried in crimes is politically constructed; The Insider wrote ранееabout such an anti-immigration theater and its unreliable foundations.
Yet this concept is remarkably sustainable. A Eurobarometer survey conducted in the fall of 2025 showed that immigration ranks second among the most pressing problems facing EU citizens, 20% of respondents named it.
Even more interesting is what happens when the results of the survey are divided into demographic groups. Data from the European Social Study (ESS) for 2023 and 2024, analyzed by the Berlin Research Institute of the Future, showed that young Europeans consistently hold more positive views on immigration than older generations, as are people with higher education.
A survey of the Eurobarometer in the fall of 2025 showed that immigration is in second place among the most important problems for the EU: it was mentioned by 20% of respondentsClaire Kumar, a senior researcher at the Belgian research center ODI Europe, считаетbelieves that there is a discrepancy between what policies indicate the public attitude towards migration and what the data shows. The attitude of people to migration, as noted in studies, is largely stable, is based on deep-rooted values and is formed mainly at a young age, and also relatively slowly changes.
However, says Kumar, the importance of immigration (that is, whether the public perceives it as a primary problem) can fluctuate sharply, depending largely on the attention of the media and political narratives. The far-right parties have made impressive progress not so much in changing the view of immigration as such as in maintaining this issue in the top the political agenda, regardless of the main trends. As a result, the political situation is constantly set to a high-price emergency, regardless of what is really happening. This, in fact, gives right and populist politicians carte blanche.
(not) the centrist coalition
To understand what the new regulation can lead to, it is necessary to remember what has happened to the ruling coalition of the European Parliament over the past two years.
The coalition that supported the re-election of von der Leyen in July 2024 – the European People’s Party (EPP), socialists and Democrats, Renew Europe and the Greens – from the very beginning was, according to an analyst of the European Political Center, an inconsistent group, formally bound only by the vague “Statement of cooperation”. It was signed only from need and after the vote for von der Leyen. The Greens joined the vote late and reluctantly, under pressure, the Social Democrats had doubts, and Renew Europe was internally divided.
Von der Leyen, for her part, told the House that she would work only with parties that share pro-European values, advocate the rule of law, including international law, and for the support of Ukraine, and that he would defend their position against the far right. “The center holds on,” von der Leyen said after the election.
During 2024 and 2025, the EPP, led by Manfred Weber, a Bavarian politician who became the most influential figure in European parliamentary politics and was aiming for the post of chairman of the European Commission, began to systematically form an alternative majority with the ECR, the Patriots for Europe and the “Europe of Sovereign Nations,” when centrist talks stalled. By March 2026, the EPP had voted together with far-right groups 19 times since 2024. In March 2026 alone, the EPP voted three times with far-right groups.
The Reception Regulation was the most notable of these points. But even in March, he was not the only one. The EPP used the same coalition to block the report on the implementation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and to simplify the rules relating to AI. Harvard’s civil society researcher Alberto Alemanno, speculating on the Omnibus (a package of bills that reduce responsibility and demands from corporations), wrote in November 2025 that “for the first time in the EU’s history, political parties that have created and managed the EU since its inception have been pushed into the background.”
The vote on migration added a special raid by scandal, as it became clear that before him the deputies of the EPP coordinated their actions with representatives of far-right parties, including Eurosceptics and “Alternative for Germany”, in a WhatsApp chat. They exchanged in the messenger of draft texts and voting strategies. Thus, this happened outside the formal negotiation process, in which members of the “real” coalition, that is, the socialists and liberals, were to participate. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly attacked Weber with criticism, although he continues to deny that he knew about this chat.
The role in the Renew voting – the party of “radical centrists”, founded with the active assistance of Macron, also, by and large, looks like a capitulation to radicals. Malik Azmani, a Dutch liberal who acted as a rapporteur on the Rescue Regulations, eventually prepared a much more radical text than the Commission’s final proposal.
His version проигралаlost, and the EPP put forward its, even tougher alternative, developed in cooperation with the far right. Azmani, however, agreed to lead the parliament’s negotiating group in the trilateral (European Parliament, EU Council and EU countries) negotiations, and as a result, a sufficient number of Renew members supported the new version.
It turns out that the European “center”, not even counting the center-right, at every subsequent stage goes to meet the right, each time presenting it either as pragmatism or as a duty to voters, until their policies become indistinguishable from the far right. This is not a new idea: the strategy of centrist ingratiation before the far right has long been widely discussed, and The Insider has already written in detail about what it leads to.
Professor Claudia Wiesner of the European Center for Populism Research (ECDS) formulated one of the problems in what is happening:
“If the main faction in the European Parliament cooperates with groups that previously acted against its key principles and the rule of law, it will create a problem of legitimacy for the EU. How can citizens trust von der Leyen’s commitment to defending democracy if she is collaborating with George Meloni, who undermines media freedom in Italy?”Different approaches are possible
In the scientific literature on migration policy, there is a clear evidence base, what measures can actually lead to solving problems, in one way or another related to “illegal” immigration. And these are not raids, not long-term detention, and especially not imprisonment in offshore centers. The answer is voluntary return programmes with serious support for reintegration.
An analysis by the Global Development Centre, which has reviewed existing voluntary return programs, found that in the UK they cost an average of a thousand pounds per refugee, compared to £15,000 for forced return.
And, for example, the German program StartilfePlus provided financial and professional support for the reintegration of more than 15 thousand people. Subsequent surveys showed that 85% of the returnees were satisfied with the program and only 5% were actively preparing for re-migration. Forced deportation, on the contrary, is much more expensive (again, 15 times more in the case of the UK), is regularly challenged in court, difficult to execute and does not solve the problems of people who initially prompted them to migrate.
Voluntary return programs cost Britain an average of a thousand pounds per refugee against 15 thousand for deportationA new program for the legalization of migrants in Spain, which has caused sharp criticism from the EPP in the European Parliament, can in practice achieve just what the new EU Regulation is seeking in theory. It reduced the number of people with illegal status, increased the number of employees paying taxes to residents, all with much lower costs to enforce migration legislation.
The center-right governments in Greece and Portugal have used similar approaches. Evidence of their effectiveness is quite enough: researchers are inclined to believe that a constant pan-European legalization program for migrants would be an effective measure.
However, none of this is reflected in the Rules of Return. Measures that reduce illegal migration through legalization are completely unacceptable to the far right (and now for some centrists), as they can be presented as an encouragement and extension of the “migration crisis”. And this can undermine their main electoral platform.
Where Europe Goes
Migration policy does not exist in a vacuum. The return regulation is just one element of a much larger trend in the EU.
Academic studies of the elections to the European Parliament in 2024 show that the growth of radical right coincides with a significant decline in commitment to liberal democratic values, such as an independent judiciary. The EPP and the groups to the right of it now occupy more than 50% of seats in parliament.
The Sanitary Cordon (a multi-year political barrier that did not allow far-right parties to have a significant impact on politics and which promised to defend von der Leyen) was in practice dismantled by joint voices, documents, and in March 2026 – especially in a transparent way, through WhatsApp.
Rosa Balfour, the head of Carnegie-Europe, fears that EU institutions may begin to turn a blind eye to the deteriorating standards of European democracy, if the far right demands it, just to continue to enjoy their support. In this case, the EU’s ability to enforce its own legal mechanisms — the very tools that limited, for example, former Hungarian President Viktor Orban — will be fundamentally undermined.
In 2025, von der Leyen told Parliament that “unity” was supposedly “absolutely critical”: members of the Commission were alarmed by fragmentation and polarization, and diplomats from member countries were outraged by the inability of parliament to act quickly and decisively. A year later, there is a change: now the parliament is really working more coherently, but exclusively in the interests of the right pole.
As for the rules of procedure, ожидаетсяthe trilateral negotiations between the Parliament and the Council are expected to be held quickly. On the main issues – the centers of return, the extension of detention, restrictions on entry, obligations for cooperation – the disagreement is minimal. The main unresolved question is whether the provision on house searches from the Council in the final version of the rules will remain. Civil society representatives believe that such a risk exists; the EPP did not object to it, and some member States of the Council want to accept it.
The rules, after finalization, 27 Member States will have to be implemented with different administrative capacities and completely different political conditions. Implementation will be uneven. It is likely to be challenged in national courts and almost certainly again in the European Court, which will have to assess whether the new legislative framework has solved the legal problem that undermined the deal between Italy and Albania.
EU lawyers issued internal warnings about the incompatibility of the rules with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and international law. These warnings, as well as the protests of countless human rights organizations, have not yet borne fruit.