The European Union’s New Migration Pact

Credit Image: © Imago via ZUMA Press

On June 17, the European Parliament did something that would have been all but unthinkable a few years ago. By 418 to 218, it voted to rewrite the rules for sending illegal immigrants home. The measure was the culmination of a slow but unmistakable shift in Brussels, and the arithmetic tells the story: a policy once denounced as exclusively “far right” now commands a comfortable majority.

Under the new Return Regulation, a foreigner with no right to stay gets a formal expulsion order and is normally given 30 days to leave voluntarily. Those who refuse — who hide or destroy their papers, lie about their identity, or abscond — forfeit that grace period. A new “European Return Order” will be logged in the Schengen information systems, so that an expulsion order issued in one member state can be enforced by another without beginning the procedure again. Detention pending removal may last up to 24 months. And — the heart of the matter — states may set up “return hubs” in non-EU countries, sending migrants to a third country that is not their own, provided that country promises to respect their rights.

To see how far Brussels has come, recall its positions of not three years ago. In November 2023, Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, announced that migrants arriving illegally on Italian shores would no longer be processed in Italy but sent to centers built in Albania, a non-EU country, where their claims would be examined and, if rejected, the migrants repatriated. The reaction was furious. The European Commission denounced the scheme as contrary to EU law; the commissioner then responsible for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, declared the Italy-Albania arrangement outside the Union’s legal order; and much of the continent’s press called it cruel. An overwhelming majority of Europe’s ruling elites criticized Mrs. Meloni — only for the continent to turn around, scarcely 18 months later, and adopt the harshest migration regulation in the Union’s history, built squarely on her idea.

The new regulation solves several problems. The first was territorial: A migrant on European soil had to have his case handled on European soil; now it can be handled at an offshore hub. The second was that a migrant could be sent only to his own country or to one with which he had some demonstrable connection, a rule easily violated by arriving without papers and concealing one’s nationality; now such a migrant can be sent to any country with which the EU has an agreement. The third was elimination of the “suspensive appeal,” which could freeze deportation automatically, often for years. Fourth, the allowable detention period for foreigners who can’t be expelled rises from six months to two years. However, after those two years are up, as before, the foreigner must be released if there is still no way to expel him. Finally, entry bans on undesirables have been lengthened from five years to ten — even to lifetime bans for those deemed dangerous.

Whether any of this will work is another question, and here we should be wary. The biggest obstacle to deportation has never been European law alone but the refusal of migrants’ home countries to take citizens back. The figures are dismal: States such as Mali and Guinea readmit roughly one percent of those Europe tries to return, and even cooperative Tunisia accepts only about a quarter. A return order is worth little if the destination bolts its door. By the European Commission’s own reckoning, only about one return order in five is ever enforced; the rate reached 28 percent in 2025, which the Commission called the highest in a decade. With well over 400,000 people ordered to leave each year and most of them staying, the old system had become a polite fiction.

The political arithmetic of the European Parliament has changed. The return rules passed on the votes of a coalition running from the center-right through the hard right — the very alignment the center-left had spent years trying to wall off. The Alternative for Germany MEP Mary Khan was unusually optimistic about what it meant: “For years, illegal migrants have been able to delay, evade, or actively obstruct their deportation. Today, we are sending a clear message: Anyone who is here illegally will not make Germany his home.” She went on: “[T]he AfD has demonstrated what a right-wing majority can achieve. Only when the interests of citizens are once again placed first and the political firewall finally falls can Europe restore order, security, and control.” It was actually a Dutch liberal EuroMP who led the talks, Malik Azmani. He put it more soberly: “After almost 20 years of standstill, Europe finally has effective return measures.”

Not everyone applauded; the Catholic bishops’ commission for the EU warned that migration “is not merely a matter of procedures, statistics or border management.” “[I]t concerns human beings: women, men and children, each possessing an inviolable dignity that must remain at the center of every policy decision.”

The EU Migration Pact takes effect

The European Parliament’s vote did not come from nowhere. Five days earlier, on June 12, the European Union’s Pact on Migration and Asylum had entered into force across all 27 member states, ending a two-year transition period. Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president, hailed the moment, saying the Pact had created the conditions “to decide who can come to Europe, who can stay, and who must leave.” The package unites 10 pieces of legislation covering screening at the external border, asylum processing, and a common fingerprint database. Anyone arriving irregularly must now pass a common screening; claims from citizens of nations whose people seldom qualify for protection — those with an acceptance rate below 20 percent — are pushed onto an accelerated track meant to leave fewer openings to prolong a stay. On paper, Europe has at last equipped itself to remove the people it has ordered to leave.

The “compulsory solidarity” trap

Only on paper. Tucked inside the same Pact is a mechanism that may quietly undo much of what the new return rules promise. Brussels calls it the “solidarity mechanism,” and the Polish Ordo Iuris Institute, in its detailed study of the legislation, uses a blunter term: “compulsory solidarity.” It obligates every member state, each year, to come to the rescue of states judged to be under migratory pressure (at this time Italy, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus). There are three ways: accept migrants into its own territory, pay into a common fund (Solidarity Pool), or provide operational support — but this third form of “compulsory solidarity” requires agreement from the nation “under pressure.”  For example, Poland could send border guards, drones, and helicopters to help Spain guard its part of the EU external border rather than accept unwanted illegals who can’t immediately be expelled. However, unless Spain agrees, Poland has to take in people it doesn’t want or pay into the Solidarity Pool.

The number of migrants to be relocated across the Union is set at 30,000 people a year, and the minimum financial Solidarity Pool at €600 million. This is the origin of the much-quoted figure of roughly €20,000 per migrant that a state declining its share of unwanted people would owe: €600 million divided by 30,000.

Here the two halves of the Pact collide. The return system is meant to remove people who have no right to stay; the solidarity system is built to relocate them rather than remove them. And once the relocation machinery engages, the Ordo Iuris analysis warns, removal is harder, not easier: “Once the EU compulsory solidarity procedure has been activated, it will be impossible to expel relocated displaced persons who are ineligible for refugee status.” A migrant who cannot be sent home lawfully is shared out, not expelled. The Pact, in the Institute’s summary, will lead “to more efficient legalization of migration and a more equal distribution of the burden of hosting millions of illegal immigrants among the member states under the so-called solidarity mechanism.”

By forcing states with firm borders to shoulder responsibility for arrivals at someone else’s border, the Pact, in the Institute’s words, “attempts to force countries with strong border control policies into taking shared responsibility” — “another serious limitation of national sovereignty.” A nation that chooses, democratically, to admit very few migrants finds its prudence counts for little, because relocation quotas are calculated chiefly from the previous year’s arrivals elsewhere. Cautious countries become dumping grounds for the careless.

A court and a commission that answer to no one

None of this is accidental. Just look at the two unelected institutions that steer European migration policy: the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the European Union. Neither can be voted out, and both have leaned, for years and by conviction, the same way. On August 1, 2025, the court handed down two rulings that tie the hands of member states. In an Italian case about two Bangladeshis processed in Albania, it held that a country may designate a “safe” country only after effective judicial review, with the underlying information open to migrants and judge alike — a standard that makes the Albanian model nearly impossible to run by making it subject to judges. In an even more shocking Irish case, it ruled the republic liable for damages for failing to house an asylum-seeker even though it had no place for him. Ireland, the Court said, “may not avoid liability under EU law by pleading temporary exhaustion of the housing capacity normally available in its territory.” The duty to accommodate is absolute.

The Court’s appetite for discipline is selective. When Hungary refused to bend its asylum system to Brussels’s demands, the Court of Justice in June 2024 ordered it to pay a lump sum of €200 million and a further €1 million for every day of continued non-compliance — a sanction it justified as the answer to “an unprecedented and exceptionally serious breach of EU law.” The court’s vindictiveness was astonishing. The European Commission itself, acting as prosecution, had asked for penalties roughly one sixtieth that about: a minimum lump sum of about €1,044,000 and a daily penalty of roughly €16,400. This was the penalty for guarding borders too zealously. Would there have been any punishment at all if a state had admitted too many immigrants?

The Commission’s preferences are clear. The document on which the Pact is founded — the 2020 Communication on a New Pact on Migration and Asylum — promises “stronger governance of migration and borders policies, supported by modern IT systems and more effective agencies.” It pledges to “promote well-managed legal migration” by “addressing the root causes of irregular migration, combatting migrant smuggling, helping refugees residing in third countries and supporting well-managed legal migration.” Migration itself, the text insists, can “contribute to growth, innovation and social dynamism” under “a well-managed system.” As recently as December 10, 2025 — half a year after the supposed turn toward toughness — Mrs. von der Leyen used a Brussels conference to insist that, “We must open more safe pathways, legal pathways, to Europe. We must create more bridges between our continents.” She announced the perfect solution: “We have just agreed to create a new Talent Pool. It will match European employers and their needs with non-European jobseekers and their skills.” The president of the Commission, in short, was advertising fresh channels of migration into Europe at almost the same moment Parliament was setting up new ways to remove people.

How to take back control

If Europe’s elected politicians want to deport, but unelected institutions and treaty-based, EU-level directives and regulations pull the other way, the remedy is to fix the treaties and institutions. That is the argument of Taking Back Control from Brussels, published last winter by Hungary’s Migration Research Institute in cooperation with Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute. Its thesis is that “the only viable path forward is a fundamental rebalancing of competences: a return of competences from the EU to Member States.” The authors call this renationalization, and they insist most of it can be done now, without rewriting treaties. Every member state could opt out of the common asylum policy; let national parliaments suspend EU rules in a crisis; restore each state’s power to reach its own readmission deals; give EU money only to third countries that take their citizens back; permit long-term detention until removal; allow asylum claims to be processed in safe third countries; bar asylum applications after an illegal crossing; fund the border fences Brussels has refused to pay for; and cut off EU subsidies to NGOs that finance opposition to lawful border control.

But the authors are clear that tinkering with EU rules is not enough, because the deepest constraints are written into international law — and here their message reaches well beyond Europe. The 1951 Geneva Convention and its 1967 Protocol, they argue, have turned “a tool for targeted protection into a vehicle for universalized migratory mobility,” and the principle of non-refoulement (not turning back asylum seekers at the border) has made border control all but illegal. These rules “should no longer be treated as untouchable dogmas;” what “was intended to be a temporary safety net has become a permanent straitjacket.”

Because the world of 2026 bears no resemblance to that of 1951, the authors call on states to invoke the old doctrine of rebus sic stantibus — treaty obligations may lapse when the circumstances that justified them have fundamentally changed. States should withdraw from the 1967 Protocol, which Article IX permits on 12 months’ notice. Nations that are members of the Council of Europe should suspend or withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, and states should even revisit the UN Convention against Torture and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which enshrine the same principle of non-refoulement.

Twenty-seven nations, nineteen of them EU members, signed a joint declaration in December 2025 complaining that the European Court of Human Rights protects the wrong people. The lesson is not for Europe alone: so long as the post-World War II refugee regime is still treated as sacred for the whole world, no nation can fully control its borders. The agreements themselves must be reopened and rewritten.

There is reason to doubt the European Union’s tough new machinery will work as billed. The offshore model it invokes has been tried before: Mrs. Meloni’s Albanian centers, built to process some 36,000 migrants a year, handled only around 100 because Italian courts ordered the first expellees back within days by applying EU law then in force. Britain’s Rwanda scheme spent roughly £700 million to remove four people, all volunteers, before it was scrapped. These efforts failed because the courts struck them down — which is why its new regulation is designed chiefly to supply legal cover, but the inevitable legal fight will be waged before the very same judges!

This is the irony of Europe’s migration moment. The elected chamber, having at last listened to the voters, wants to deport; the unelected elites who write and judge the law remain wedded to a managed but massive inflow, and the Pact they drafted turns removal into redistribution. Tougher words will not change that. Only the harder course outlined in Taking Back Control from Brussels would let Europe’s nations decide who may enter and who must leave. Until then, the door remains open.

The Spanish example

Spain shows how redistribution corrupts political incentives. Early in 2026, the Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez unilaterally pushed through, by royal decree and without a full parliamentary vote, an amnesty for more than half a million illegal immigrants who could show they had lived in the country since the end of 2025; Spain’s own immigration agency reckons that between 750,000 and a million may ultimately apply. The predictable effect — predictable because it has been done so many times before — is to advertise to the world that reaching Spanish soil illegally and waiting is a reliable road to legal residency. The prospect of amnesty is among the most powerful pull factors in migration, and a residence permit issued in Madrid is, under the rules of the Schengen area, a key to the whole continent.

What makes this amnesty especially reckless is the very machinery of the Migration Pact. Spain has already been designated a “member state under migratory pressure,” which entitles it to lean on the solidarity mechanism — to have the other member states either take in its arrivals or pay for them. A government that legalizes the better part of a million people, then watches the beneficiaries disperse across the EU-27, keeps the political benefit at home and exports the costs. Mr. Sánchez, whose Socialist party has spent the past two years engulfed in corruption investigations reaching his closest associates and even his own family, is not a man much troubled by the long-term national interest. He has every reason to act boldly for his coalition today and not to weigh the burden, because under “compulsory solidarity” the burden is no longer mainly his. That is the deepest perversity of the Migration Pact. By promising to share out the costs of one nation’s irresponsibility, it does not merely fail to deter recklessness — it rewards it. Brussels has built a system in which the least responsible governments set the pace, and the prudent ones pay the price.