A preliminary agreement has been reached in Brussels between negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU on one of the toughest migration documents in the modern history of the European Union - the new Return Directive, which regulates the return of migrants unlawfully staying within the bloc.
Formally, this is framed as a technical update to migration policy. In reality, it represents the construction of a new architecture of coercion, in which Europe attempts to export its dirty work beyond its own borders while maintaining the rhetoric of human rights, humanism, and the rule of law.
This is no longer just a debate about migration. It is a debate about what the European Union itself is becoming: a community of rights built on norms, or a political machine that, under pressure from right-wing populism, is ready to create extrajudicial zones where a human being is reduced to an administrative problem.
Europe Applauded When It Opened the Door to Legal Darkness
On March 26, the European Parliament, during a plenary session in Strasbourg, voted to advance the new Return Directive. The result was convincing: 389 votes in favor, 206 against, and 32 abstentions. Yet, the main symbol of the day was not the numbers. The main symbol was the standing ovation.
Right-wing lawmakers stood up and applauded. For the European People’s Party, its allies on the right, and far-right groups, this was not a routine procedural victory, but a political breakthrough. They achieved what until recently was considered a marginal idea: moving migration detention outside the EU and effectively creating offshore return camps.
The new directive will allow member states to set up so-called return centers outside the European Union. In official terminology, this sounds neutral. In reality, it refers to detention centers on the territory of foreign states, where individuals whose asylum applications have been rejected can be placed while they await deportation, appeals, or yet another bureaucratic decision.
This is not merely an administrative reform. It is a displacement of responsibility. Brussels wants to retain control over a person's fate while removing the person themselves from its legal jurisdiction. This is precisely where the core concept of this entire narrative emerges - human rights black holes.
This is how the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Michael O’Flaherty, described them. His warning sounds less like a metaphor and more like a legal diagnosis. When a state exports detention beyond its borders, it creates a space where, although rights are not formally abolished, practically no one is capable of guaranteeing them.
"Return" as a Euphemism for Banishment
The word "return" functions as a political smokescreen in the European document. It sounds softer than "deportation," more humane than "expulsion," and more civilized than "banishment." However, the substance of the document demonstrates that it aims at a sharp expansion of the coercive apparatus.
The directive contains several key components.
The first is the creation of return centers in third countries, even in states with which the deported person has no personal, family, civic, or cultural ties. This represents a fundamental departure from the previous logic of European law.
Legal scholar Maria-Theresa Gil-Bazo, in an analysis for The Conversation, noted that until now, EU member states could detain unlawfully staying migrants only as a last resort and under specific circumstances. The new approach reverses this logic. Detention ceases to be an exception and turns into a management tool.
The second component is the extension of detention periods up to 24 months. Existing EU legislation caps the period at 18 months, which was already considered an extreme measure. Now, it is a matter of two years. Not only adults but also families with children could fall under this rule.
Human rights advocates point out an obvious flaw: scientific literature offers no convincing evidence that longer detention increases the efficiency of returns. However, there is a mountain of data on something else - the devastating psychological impact of prolonged isolation, especially on children.
The third component is the obligation to "cooperate" with authorities. At first glance, this looks like a bureaucratic formality: an individual must provide information, attend meetings, and comply with procedures. Yet, one of the most dangerous legal traps is hidden right here.
The criteria for non-cooperation are vaguely drafted. This means sanctions could be applied even to people who cannot be legally deported due to the risk of persecution, severe health conditions, or the refusal of their country of origin to readmit them. An analysis by CEPS explicitly points out that such individuals could be penalized for failing to facilitate an expulsion that legally cannot take place.
Simply put, a person could be punished for failing to help the state do to them what the state has no legal right to do.
Home Raids: Europe Looks at ICE and Copies the Worst
The most scandalous part of the package under discussion is the possibility of home raids. One iteration of the text included the right of authorities to conduct searches in "places of residence or other relevant places" where a person subject to expulsion might be located.
While this provision has been temporarily excluded from the text adopted by the European Parliament, it continues to feature in negotiations. This is precisely what has alarmed over a hundred non-governmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Doctors of the World, PICUM, and Caritas Europe. In a joint letter, they compared the emerging system to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement - ICE.
This comparison is not accidental. In recent years, ICE has become a symbol in Europe of a crude, militarized, police-centric migration policy. European politicians were eager to express outrage at the actions of the American agency. When ICE agents were deployed to ensure security at the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina in early 2026, demonstrations took place across Northern Italy. Members of the European Parliament spoke of the unacceptability of such a presence.
The paradox, however, is that at the exact same time, a document was being drafted in the committees and corridors of the European Parliament that effectively imports the logic of ICE into European law.
The director of PICUM, Michele LeVoy, formulated this with absolute precision: one cannot express outrage over ICE actions in the United States while simultaneously copying the practice in Europe.
According to data cited in American investigations and studies, 32 people died at the hands of ICE in 2025. In January 2026, federal immigration officers in Minneapolis killed Rene Nicole Goode and Alex Pretty. An NPR analysis showed that mass deportation operations cost American cities millions of dollars and drained police department resources.
Even more significant is the long-term social effect. Public health research indicates that when ICE activity intensifies in an area, people stop seeking medical care, avoid food assistance programs, keep their children out of schools, and fear reporting exploitation, wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and human trafficking. Migration police become not just a tool for deportation, but a factor that destroys trust in the state.
Europe risks reproducing the exact same mechanism.
Medical Confidentiality Under Attack: When a Doctor's Visit Leads to Deportation
A separate section of the directive addresses the issue of medical data. A joint analysis by PICUM and Doctors of the World revealed a provision that allows the sharing of medical information with law enforcement agencies and third countries for deportation purposes.
This strikes at several foundations of European law simultaneously. First, a conflict arises with the GDPR - the General Data Protection Regulation. Medical information belongs to the most sensitive categories of personal data. Transferring it for expulsion purposes turns a doctor into an element of migration control.
Second, this poses a direct threat to public health. When a person fears that a hospital visit will lead to deportation, they simply will not go to the doctor. The consequences are predictable: unmanaged chronic illnesses, delayed diagnosis of infections, a rise in preventable deaths, and a worsening sanitary situation in vulnerable communities.
Thus, migration policy begins to harm more than just migrants. It undermines the basic health infrastructure of society as a whole.
Albania as a Testing Ground: A Costly Failure That the EU Wants to Turn into a Model
Prior to the emergence of the EU-wide directive, an experiment already existed that demonstrated how this system works in practice: the agreement between Italy and Albania.
In 2023, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama signed an agreement to establish centers for migrants on Albanian territory. The project was pitched as a revolution in European migration policy. Its objective was the accelerated processing of applications from individuals from so-called "safe countries" and the subsequent return of rejected applicants.
Two facilities were established: a processing center in Shëngjin and a detention center in Gjadër. Formally, they were located on Albanian territory but fell under Italian jurisdiction. The project's cost was estimated at approximately 830 million euros over five years.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called the scheme an example of "thinking outside the box." However, it soon became clear that being outside the box in this instance meant a collision with legal reality rather than efficiency.
Between October 2024 and January 2025, three groups of migrants - totaling 73 people - were transferred to the Albanian centers. Within a matter of days, Italian courts ruled that they must all be returned to Italy.
The reason was fundamental. The European Court of Justice indicated in 2025 that a country can be considered safe for asylum purposes only if it is safe for everyone without exception. Relying on this logic, Italian judges refused to recognize the legality of detaining most of these individuals in Albania.
The financial outcome appeared absurd. A study by an Italian university showed that a single bed in Albania cost Italy over 153,000 euros, whereas a similar bed in a center on Italian territory cost around 21,000 euros. The centers, designed to process 3,000 migrants per month, stood mostly empty.
The Council of Europe, through its Committee for the Prevention of Torture, further warned that the very model of processing migrants outside the country raises serious doubts. Conditions in the centers, despite the astronomical expenditures, were far from acceptable.
Yet, the political conclusion drawn was strange. Instead of abandoning the failed model, European politicians began to view it as a prototype. In November 2025, delegations from Germany and the Netherlands visited the center in Gjadër to study the possibility of creating similar facilities. According to data cited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, some delegations were even interested in leasing parts of the camp.
This is exactly where the new directive becomes particularly dangerous. It could provide this entire scheme with an EU-wide legal framework. What Italian courts blocked as a questionable practice may soon be legalized at the EU level.
The Core Statistic of the Directive: How 20% Was Turned into a Political Weapon
The entire architecture of the new document is built around a single figure: allegedly, only about 20% of migrants who receive a deportation order are actually expelled from EU territory. This statistic has been repeated across speeches, press releases, and explanatory materials as proof of systemic failure.
However, experts point out that the figure itself does not reflect reality.
CEPS notes that migrants are frequently counted multiple times across different member states: upon entry, during relocation, when changing status, and when registering in various administrative systems. This inflates the total indicator and creates a false impression of a total failure to enforce decisions.
Even more significant is another factor: many return orders are issued in situations where deportation is inherently impossible or unlawful from the outset. This includes instances where an individual faces persecution, when the country of origin refuses readmission, or when medical obstacles and international legal prohibitions exist.
In other words, a low return rate often reflects the presence of legal limitations rather than state weakness, and these boundaries cannot be dismantled by simply tightening a regulation.
The FAiR project at Erasmus University Rotterdam, an EU-funded initiative studying the management of return migration, reached a similar conclusion. Political measures - such as EU agreements, accelerated decisions, and administrative pressure - have a relatively limited impact on actual deportation outcomes. A person's fate depends more frequently on age, safety conditions in the country of origin, economic circumstances, family ties, and personal survival strategies.
Researcher Arjen Leerkes formulated this starkly: even under favorable scenarios, the majority of rejected asylum seekers either remain or migrate further.
Evidence-Free Migration Policy: Why Strictness Often Backfires
Professor Hein de Haas of the University of Amsterdam, one of Europe's leading migration scholars, has spent years examining what he terms the "fact-independent nature" of migration policy. His DEMIG project, funded by the European Research Council, compiled some of the largest databases on migration processes.
The conclusion reached by de Haas is highly uncomfortable for politicians: migration policy is frequently constructed not on data, but on the desire to project decisiveness to the electorate.
While restrictive measures can indeed reduce new inflows, they simultaneously diminish return migration. The more difficult it becomes for a person to enter Europe, the less willing they are to leave, even if they originally intended to return home temporarily or permanently. The fear of losing the ability to return makes their stay more permanent.
This is known as the substitution effect on return flows. A policy that declares a fight against irregular migration can, in practice, trap individuals within an undocumented status.
Another dimension of the issue is described by the EU-funded I-CLAIM project. It demonstrates that irregular migration often stems not from "weak borders," but from the structural design of the European labor market. A permit tied to a specific employer loses its validity when the employment ends. A migrant can lose their status if they fall below a certain income threshold, and a family member can lose their basis for residency following a divorce or the dissolution of a family relationship.
Thus, undocumented status reveals itself to be an internal product of the system rather than an external invasion.
In several sectors, employer-tied permits turn migration control into an instrument of labor discipline. A worker who fears losing their status will not complain about wage theft, demand safe working conditions, join a union, or change employers. The threat of deportation becomes a method for maintaining cheap and disenfranchised labor.
The new regulation fails to address this problem. It avoids looking at the root causes entirely, reacting only to the final stage - the presence of an undocumented individual. This is a policy that attempts to extinguish the smoke while refusing to see the fire.
Panic Instead of Statistics: Europe Fears the Image of Migrants, Not Migrants Themselves
The political hysteria surrounding migration has long existed independently of facts.
A YouGov poll conducted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Poland, published in early 2026, revealed that Europeans significantly overestimate the number of undocumented migrants in their countries. Many believe that irregular migrants outnumber legal ones, which is the exact opposite of reality. In France, for instance, respondents overestimated their numbers by approximately 13 times.
The Eurobarometer survey from autumn 2025 indicated that immigration ranks as the second most pressing issue facing the EU, cited by 20% of respondents. However, this indicator speaks less to the actual scale of migration and more to the political salience of the topic.
Data from the European Social Survey for 2023–2024, analyzed by the Berlin Institute for Future Research, shows that younger Europeans consistently view migration more positively than older generations. Individuals with higher education also tend to hold more open positions.
Clare Castillejo from ODI Europe explains this divergence through the concept of salience. Attitudes toward migration are often formed early in life and change slowly. However, the perception of migration as a primary problem can surge or plummet sharply depending on the media agenda and political campaigns.
Far-right parties have achieved success not necessarily by radically transforming public attitudes, but by achieving something else: keeping migration perpetually locked into an emergency framework. Consequently, politics begins to operate in a state of manufactured anxiety. In a state of anxiety, society more readily accepts measures that would provoke resistance under normal circumstances.
A Center Drifting Rightward: The Demise of the Cordon Sanitaire
To understand why this regulation became possible, one must look beyond migration to the shifting balance of power within the European Parliament.
The coalition that supported the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen in July 2024 comprised the European People’s Party, the Socialists and Democrats, Renew Europe, and the Greens. Formally, this represented a pro-European center, yet it appeared fragile even then. The Greens joined late and reluctantly, the Socialists harbored doubts, and Renew Europe was internally fragmented.
Von der Leyen pledged to work exclusively with parties that shared pro-European values, the rule of law, international law, and support for Ukraine, declaring that "the center holds."
However, throughout 2024–2025, the European People’s Party, led by Manfred Weber, began systematically building an alternative majority with groups to its right - the ECR, Patriots for Europe, and Europe of Sovereign Nations. By March 2026, the EPP had voted alongside far-right groups 19 times since 2024, with three such votes occurring in March 2026 alone.
The Return Directive became the most visible episode of this new parliamentary reality, but it was not an isolated one. In the same month, the EPP utilized the right-wing coalition to block a report on the implementation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and to deregulate artificial intelligence guidelines.
Harvard democracy scholar Alberto Alemanno, analyzing the "Omnibus" vote in November 2025, wrote that for the first time in EU history, the parties that established and governed the Union since its founding were effectively being sidelined.
A particular scandal emerged when it was revealed that prior to the migration vote, EPP lawmakers coordinated actions with far-right representatives, including Eurosceptics and the Alternative for Germany, in a WhatsApp chat group. Draft texts and voting strategies were exchanged there, completely bypassing the formal negotiation process with socialists and liberals.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly criticized Manfred Weber, though the latter denied any knowledge of the chat group.
Renew Europe, the liberal centrist party tied to Emmanuel Macron’s political project, also played an ambiguous role. The rapporteur for the regulation was Dutch liberal Malik Azmani, whose version proved significantly tougher than the European Commission’s proposal. When the EPP subsequently introduced an even harsher alternative developed in cooperation with the far right, Azmani nevertheless agreed to lead the parliamentary negotiating team, and a segment of Renew supported the new text.
Thus, the center did not merely yield to the right; it began speaking their language.
What Actually Works: Voluntary Return Is Cheaper, More Humane, and More Effective
Scientific literature on migration policy has long offered alternatives. These do not look spectacular in campaign ads, but they yield results.
The primary mechanism is voluntary return programs backed by robust reintegration support.
An analysis by the Center for Global Development shows that in the UK, such programs cost approximately £1,000 per person, whereas forced returns cost around £15,000. The difference is fifteenfold.
The German StarthilfePlus program provided financial and professional assistance to over 15,000 individuals. Subsequent surveys revealed that 85% of returnees were satisfied with the program, while only 5% were actively preparing to remigrate.
This represents a fundamentally different approach. It proceeds from the premise that an individual makes a decision based on the existence of a viable future after returning, rather than out of fear of the police. If returning means poverty, danger, unemployment, and social collapse, an individual will resist. If it is accompanied by financial aid, employment, training, and reintegration, the likelihood of success rises.
There is also a second path - regularizing those who are already integrated into society and the economy.
Spain launched a new regularisation program for migrants, which drew sharp criticism from the right in the European Parliament. Yet, it is precisely this type of program that can achieve what the directive claims to seek: reducing the number of undocumented individuals, increasing the number of employed and tax-paying residents, and lowering the costs associated with forced enforcement.
Similar approaches have been utilized by center-right governments in Greece and Portugal. The research base indicates that a permanent, EU-wide regularization framework could serve as an effective measure.
For the far right, however, this remains politically unacceptable. Regularization dismantles their foundational myth - the myth of a permanent migration crisis that can be used as fuel for electoral mobilization.
Where Europe Is Heading: From a Union of Values to a Union of Exceptions
The Return Directive is not an isolated error. It is part of a larger structural shift.
Following the 2024 European Parliament elections, the radical right strengthened, and the EPP, together with groups to its right, secured more than 50% of the seats. Academic research demonstrates that the growth of the radical right coincides with a decline in commitment to liberal-democratic values, including the independence of the judiciary.
What was once referred to as the cordon sanitaire is effectively being dismantled. This is occurring not through loud declarations or official alliances, but through a series of votes, working papers, compromises, and informal chat groups.
Rosa Balfour of Carnegie Europe warns that EU institutions may begin turning a blind eye to deteriorating democratic standards if far-right support becomes essential for decision-making. Should that happen, the European Union's very ability to enforce its own legal mechanisms will be undermined.
In 2025, von der Leyen told the parliament that unity was of critical importance. A year later, this unity has indeed become more visible, but it is increasingly coalescing around the right-wing pole.
Significant questions regarding the directive remain. Trilateral negotiations between the Parliament and the Council are expected to proceed rapidly. Disagreements regarding return centers, detention periods, entry bans, and cooperation obligations are minimal. The main unresolved point is whether the final text will retain authorization for home raids.
Even after its adoption, the regulation will be implemented across 27 member states with differing administrative capacities, judicial systems, and political conditions. It will almost certainly face challenges in national courts and before the European Court of Justice. EU legal experts have already issued internal warnings regarding the document's potential incompatibility with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and international law.
Yet, the political machine has already been set in motion.
The Ultimate Question Is Not About Migrants: It Is About Europe
This entire narrative begins with migration, but it ends with a question about the nature of power.
For decades, Europe built its international authority on the assertion that law is more important than fear, the individual matters more than an administrative category, the court takes precedence over political panic, and dignity stands above borders. Now, it is designing a system in which a segment of humanity can be removed from public view.
Return centers in third countries are not just a migration tool. They represent a technology of political self-deception. If society does not see the camps, it does not have to see the suffering. If the court is far away, accountability is diluted. If a person is outside the border, the problem is treated as if it has vanished.
However, the problem does not disappear. It merely becomes less visible.
Black holes do not abolish physics; they only conceal what they consume. In the same manner, offshore migration policy will not abolish human rights, international obligations, or the social realities of European labor markets. It will merely create zones where violations are harder to see, harder to prove, and harder to stop.
Europe stands before a choice. It can acknowledge that migration requires a complex, honest, and evidence-based policy involving regularization, reintegration, labor protection, healthcare, judicial guarantees, and international cooperation. Alternatively, it can continue to project an illusion of toughness, replacing governance with fear and substituting administrative force for law.
The most dangerous aspect of the new regulation is not that it is harsh. The most dangerous aspect is that it attempts to turn harshness into the norm.