Europe's black holes: The EU is moving to legalize offshore camps and strip migrants of their rights

On the morning of March 26, when the European Parliament voted by a tally of 309-206 to advance a new Return Regulation for migrants who are unlawfully present in the EU, something unusual happened: the right-wing coalition present in the chamber rose to its feet and erupted in applause. For the European People’s Party (EPP) and its allies, it was a long-awaited victory.

The regulation, which is still awaiting formal approval from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament, will allow member states to establish “return hubs” outside the bloc’s borders — in practice, detention centers located in foreign countries, where people whose asylum claims have been rejected may be detained during the appeals process preceding deportation.

The bill provides for the introduction of entry bans against deportees that are virtually unlimited in duration. Moreover, it will allow EU member states to negotiate returns to “unrecognized third countries.” This provision opens the door to cooperation, for example, with the Taliban in the context of the forced removal of Afghan nationals.

Perhaps the most controversial potential provision of the legislation involves the authorization of home searches, which could be conducted without a warrant in private residences and “other relevant premises” to locate people subject to deportation orders. For now, this specific provision has been removed from the text adopted by the European Parliament, but it remains part of the ongoing negotiations.

Several weeks before the vote, more than one hundred nongovernmental organizations, including Amnesty International, Doctors of the World, PICUM, and Caritas Europe, signed a joint open letter sharply criticizing the regulation and comparing the emerging framework to the regulatory environment enjoyed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, better known as ICE.

The new regulation is one of the most far-reaching migration bills in the history of the EU. For simplicity, it can be divided into four main components.

First, it establishes return hubs, allowing EU countries to deport undocumented migrants to third countries unconnected in any way to the deportee’s previous life.  As lawyer Maria-Teresa Gil-Bazo notes, this represents a fundamental departure from previous practice: “Until now, EU Member States could only detain irregularly present migrants as a last resort under specific circumstances.” Return hubs, by contrast, would move detention outside the EU’s borders — beyond the reach of the legal safeguards that exist within the EU.

The Commissioner for Human Rights for the Council of Europe, Michael O’Flaherty, has warned that this approach risks creating human rights “black holes,” and Amnesty International researcher Olivia Sundberg Diez, citing numerous studies, echoes O’Flaherty’s concerns. She argues that the approach deliberately creates opportunities for automatic — and, therefore, often unlawful — detention in third countries, violating the internationally recognized right to freedom of movement and the prohibition against the forced return of refugees.

The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), drawing on years of research in Turkey, Greece, and Poland, has concluded that the purpose of the new legislation is to “deter” migrants by discouraging them from attempting to enter the European Union in the first place. However, ECPR notes that detention and confinement often fail to reduce the desire to migrate.

At the same time, researchers have found that agreements with third countries create corrupt structures that subject migrants to suffering and encourage the use of migration centers as a source of off-the-books profits for state and non-state actors outside the EU. Countries and companies involved in such arrangements — such as Albania in the case of an Italian experiment — earn substantial sums by using migration as a bargaining chip.

Second, the regulation allows detention for up to 24 months. Current EU legislation limits detention to 18 months, and only in exceptional cases. Extending detention to two years for adults and applying the measure to families with children represents a dramatic escalation. Amnesty International and other human rights advocates argue that the move is being driven by nothing more than a desire to demonstrate cruelty. Indeed, the academic literature on migration simply does not provide convincing evidence that longer periods of detention correlate with higher return rates. By contrast, there is substantial evidence showing that prolonged detention causes serious psychological harm, especially to children.

The third element is the obligation to cooperate, yet another legally dubious provision, as it requires people subject to return orders to actively cooperate with the authorities who are seeking to deport them by providing information, attending meetings, and complying with procedures. The criteria for determining a “failure to cooperate” has been deliberately left as vague as possible in the draft text. Notably, the amendment applies even to people who are not subject to deportation in the first place — for example, because they face persecution, have serious health conditions, or because their country of origin refuses to accept them. As noted in an analysis by CEPS, such people “will be sanctioned for failing to facilitate a removal that legally cannot take place.” Human rights advocates argue that the bill would hold people liable for refusing to help the government unjustifiably punish them, amounting to a flagrant violation of human rights.

Another proposal concerns the sharing of refugees’ medical data. A joint analysis by PICUM and Doctors of the World identified a provision allowing medical information to be shared with law enforcement agencies and third countries for the purposes of deportation. First and foremost, human rights advocates and medical professionals argue that this violates European data protection laws, particularly the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It also creates real health risks that are well documented in the academic literature: when people fear that seeking medical care could lead to their deportation, they simply stop seeking treatment. In the European context, such a provision would all but inevitably lead to the spread of infectious diseases, unmanaged chronic illnesses, and preventable deaths among communities that are already among the most vulnerable on the continent.

Last but not least, more than 100 NGOs have signed a letter warning that the inclusion of the aforementioned warrantless search provision would effectively turn the EU into a replica of Donald Trump’s America, at least where migration policy is concerned. “We cannot be outraged by ICE in the United States while also supporting these practices in Europe,” says PICUM Director Michele LeVoy.

Over the past year, European politicians — in general, from parties that did not support the Return Regulation — have publicly expressed concern about the activities of ICE on European soil. This past February, when ICE agents were deployed to provide security for Americans attending the Winter Olympics in Milan and Cortina, demonstrations erupted across northern Italy, and several Members of the European Parliament supported the demonstrators by saying that the American move was unacceptable. Yet at the very same time, in committee rooms and in the corridors of the European Parliament, lawmakers were drafting and debating a regulation that effectively seeks to “import” U.S. migration policy.

Thirty-two people died at the hands of ICE in 2025, and in January 2026 Minneapolis residents Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were killed by federal immigration officers amid local opposition to their deployment. According to an analysis by NPR, the agency’s large-scale deportation operations have cost American cities millions of dollars and strained police department resources. Public health researchers have found that the presence of ICE officers discourages people from seeking medical care, using food assistance programs, and attending school.

Racial minorities, needless to say, bear a disproportionate share of the burden. Workplace raids targeting undocumented migrants discourage workers from reporting wage theft, unsafe working conditions, and human trafficking. Moreover, public funds that should be spent protecting workers’ rights are instead diverted to financing ICE. This, in turn, contributes to worsening labor conditions in those segments of the economy where undocumented workers are most heavily concentrated.

Nevertheless, reporting from across the continent shows that Europe is, in practice, already building its own version of the American system. According to a report published by a coalition of humanitarian organizations in February 2026, European immigration officers carry out an average of 221 pushbacks per day. More than 80,000 such efforts were documented in 2025, primarily in Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, and Latvia.

“Men, women and children — including individuals with critical medical conditions — are routinely subjected to beatings, attacks by police dogs, forced stripping, forced river crossings, and theft of personal belongings,” the report states.

In 2024, Belgium adopted a law allowing the EU border agency Frontex to operate within the country, raising concerns about the expansion of the agency’s role in domestic law enforcement.

Flor Didier of the Belgian human rights organization 11.11.11 characterized the contradiction by noting: “The images [from the U.S.] are shocking and the outrage is justified. But where is that same moral clarity when European border authorities abuse, rob, and let people die?”

As Amnesty International’s Sundberg Diez writes: “Europe has a level of institutional and judicial independence, as well as respect for human rights, that cannot be ignored. But the underlying political impulse is the same, and I fear the human consequences will be as well.”

Before the European Parliament voted on the Return Regulation this past March, an offshore return hub in Albania was already testing the practice of holding detained migrants outside the EU. The experiment was Italian, and judging from various assessments, its results were unsuccessful.

The agreement on detention facilities, signed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in 2023, was presented by official Rome as a revolution in European migration policy. The project was intended to speed up the processing of asylum claims from refugees originating in “safe countries.”

Two facilities — a processing center in Shengjin and a detention center in Gjader — were built on Albanian territory under Italian jurisdiction. The project was estimated to cost approximately €830 million over five years. Its stated goal was to move asylum processing outside Italy and accelerate the return of rejected applicants from so-called “safe countries of origin.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was quick to praise the deal as an example of “out-of-the-box thinking,” despite criticism and concerns raised by human rights organizations within the EU. However, what followed was a lengthy and highly visible lesson in how hastily conceived populist plans can collide with legal and logistical realities. First, as human rights advocates had predicted, Italian and European judges repeatedly refused to recognize the legality of holding migrants in Albania. Following a ruling by the European Court in 2025, a country can be considered safe for asylum purposes only if it is safe for everyone without exception. On that basis, Italian judges ruled that most of the asylum seekers transferred to Albania should not have been held there.

Between October 2024 and January 2025, a total of 73 people were transferred to the facilities. Then Italian courts ordered all of them to be returned to Italy.

Later, a study conducted by an Italian university found that a single bed space in Albania cost Italy more than €153,000 — several times more than the €21,000 for a comparable place in a facility in Italy. More than €600 million was spent to set up centers designed to process 3,000 migrants per month. They now stand largely empty.

In addition, the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture warned that the Italy–Albania model calls into question the entire premise of processing migrants outside the country. Despite the enormous financial costs, conditions in the facilities were reportedly dire. The Italian government responded to these criticisms by using the centers exclusively for repatriations, with Meloni telling journalists that she was “determined” to press ahead.

In November 2025, delegations from Germany and the Netherlands visited the center in Gjader to assess the feasibility of establishing similar facilities of their own. According to a source cited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, several delegations expressed interest in the “possibility of renting parts of the camp.”

If ultimately adopted, the Return Regulation would effectively create the legal architecture that Meloni’s lawyers have been fighting for in court since 2024, as it would expand the concept of a “safe third country” in a way designed to effectively shield member states from responsibility for any harm suffered by refugees as a result of their return. This would provide the entire offshore-hub model with an EU-wide legal foundation that no judge in an individual member state could unilaterally block. As a result, Italy’s experiment in Albania — widely criticized as being expensive, ineffective, and inconsistent with established legal norms — would become a model for the European Union as a whole.

The new legislation was built around a single, seemingly alarming statistic: only about 20% of migrants who receive a deportation order in the EU are actually removed from its territory. This figure has been repeatedly cited — in speeches, press releases, and even the explanatory memorandum accompanying the regulation itself — as evidence that the current system is failing and that more radical new tools are urgently needed.

The problem, according to experts, is that this figure neither reflects reality nor provides meaningful insight. The Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) notes that migrants are routinely counted multiple times across different member states — for example, upon entry and then again at their place of residence, during informal movements between countries, or because of differing legal statuses in different jurisdictions — a fact that significantly inflates the denominator.

More importantly, many return orders are formally issued in cases where deportation was impossible or unlawful from the outset. As a CEPS analysis concluded, the low enforcement rate “reflects, in large part, legal constraints that no reform can override.”

Experts in migration policy have been making the same argument for years. Research conducted as part of the EU-funded FAiRproject at Erasmus University Rotterdam found that “policy measures such as EU agreements or accelerated residence permit decisions have relatively little impact on deportation outcomes.”

The factors that determine whether a rejected asylum seeker leaves the host country are far more often personal and contextual — for example, age, conditions in the country of origin, and economic circumstances. “Even in the most favorable scenarios, most rejected asylum seekers either remain in the Netherlands or migrate onward,” says researcher Arjen Leerkes.

Professor Hein de Haas of the University of Amsterdam led DEMIG, a five-year initiative funded by the European Research Council. De Haas has devoted his career to documenting what he calls the “fact-free” nature of migration policymaking, and his project produced some of the world’s largest migration databases while showing that restrictive migration policies often produce negative unintended consequences.

“Migration is a highly politicized topic,” he writes. Because migration policy is often tied to electoral success or failure, lawmakers and political parties do not prioritize evidence-based policymaking. Instead, they simply want to appear decisive.

Specifically, de Haas argues that while restrictive policies may reduce new immigration flows, they also reduce emigration through what is known as the reverse-flow substitution effect, as overly harsh policies actually disincentivize existing migrants to leave a country. For example, if obtaining the right to reside in a certain state requires a lengthy and difficult process, then people are reluctant to leave and risk having to start from scratch again, even when there are economic incentives to emigrate.

The same principle discourages migrants from returning home and instead pushes them toward permanent settlement. The risk of losing the ability to re-enter and thus become stranded in their country of origin may simply be too great a barrier to exit. In other words, visas and other restrictions can produce effects that are the exact opposite of those they are intended to achieve.

There is also a broader structural dimension to the issue — one that the new regulation largely ignores. The EU-funded I-CLAIM project describes how irregular migration is often the result not of “weak borders” but of the normal and predictable functioning of the rules governing Europe’s labor market. As noted in a CEPS analysis, in states where a migrant worker’s visa is tied to a single sponsoring employer, the constant threat of deportation functions as a deliberate mechanism of labor control, as it pressures workers to tolerate poor working conditions and violations of labor rights rather than risk losing their legal status in the country.

None of these arguments are addressed in the Return Regulation, which contains no mechanism for regularizing the status of people trapped in administrative limbo, provides no safeguards for access to healthcare or education, and offers no route out of irregular status other than deportation. Instead, the legislation attempts to address a symptom that emerges at the very end of the process — the presence of undocumented people — while ignoring the underlying cause.

Beyond the specific provisions of the regulation, there is also serious reason to doubt that the “problem” the legislation is intended to solve is actually of sufficient concert to warrant such a measure. For years, the political narrative surrounding migration in Europe has been shaped by a striking gap between perceived and actual numbers.

For example, a 2025 YouGov survey conducted in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, and Poland found that Europeans significantly overestimate the number of undocumented migrants in their countries. It showed that most respondents believe that there are more undocumented migrants in their country than legal migrants — the exact opposite of reality. In France, for example, the actual number is roughly thirteen times lower than respondents believe. The image of a continent besieged by undocumented immigration and overwhelmed by crime is politically constructed (and The Insider has previously written about this anti-immigration theater and the shaky foundations on which it rests).

Nevertheless, this misperception has proven remarkably resilient. A Eurobarometer survey conducted in the fall of 2025 found that immigration ranked as the second most important issue facing EU citizens, with 20% of respondents identifying it as one of their primary concerns.

Even more revealing is what emerges when survey results are broken down by demographic group. Data from the European Social Survey (ESS) for 2023 and 2024, analyzed by the Berlin Institute for Futures Research, showed that younger Europeans consistently hold more positive views of immigration than older generations. The same pattern is observed among people with higher levels of education, who also tend to view immigration more favorably.

Claire Kumar, a senior researcher at the Belgian research center ODI Europe, argues that there is a disconnect between what politicians say about public attitudes toward migration and what the data actually show. As research indicates, people’s views on migration are generally stable starting from youth and are rooted in deeply held values.

What fluctuates far more dramatically, Kumar argues, is the salience of immigration in a given person’s current conception of their world — whether the public perceives it as one of the most pressing issues facing society or whether it remains largely ignored, despite the facts on the ground remaining largely the same. That perception depends heavily on media coverage and political narratives.

Far-right parties have been particularly successful not so much in changing public opinion on immigration itself as in keeping the issue at the center of the political agenda regardless of underlying trends. As a result, the political environment remains in a constant state of perceived emergency irrespective of what is actually happening on the ground.

To understand where the new regulation may lead, it is necessary to recall what has happened to the European Parliament’s governing coalition over the past two years. The collection of movements that backed Ursula von der Leyen’s reelection in July 2024 — the European People’s Party (EPP), the Socialists and Democrats, Renew Europe, and the Greens — was always, in the words of an analyst at the European Policy Centre, an incoherent grouping held together only by a vaguely worded “Statement of Cooperation.” The agreement among them was signed out of necessity — and only after the vote confirming von der Leyen. The Greens joined the vote late and reluctantly, the Socialists and Democrats had their respective reservations, and Renew Europe was internally divided.

For her part, von der Leyen told Parliament that she would work only with parties that shared pro-European values, supported the rule of law (including international law), and backed Ukraine. She vowed that she would stand firm against the far right: “The center is holding,” declared von der Leyen after her reelection.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, EPP leader Manfred Weber, the Bavarian politician who became the most influential figure in European parliamentary politics and who had long aspired to lead the European Commission, began systematically building an alternative majority with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), the Patriots for Europe, and Europe of Sovereign Nations, taking advantage each time their respective negotiations with centrist parties reached an impasse. The EPP has now voted alongside far-right groups more than 20 times. In March 2026 alone, the informal EPP-far right coalition voted together on the Return Regulation, on calls to block a report on the implementation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, and on a proposal to streamline the rules governing artificial intelligence.

The migration vote became all the more controversial when it emerged that EPP lawmakers had in fact coordinated their actions with representatives of multiple far-right parties using a WhatsApp chat. Participants exchanged draft texts and voting strategies through the messaging app — coordination that took place outside the formal negotiating process, which was supposed to involve members of the EPP’s centrist partners in the ruling coalition. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly criticized Weber over the matter, though Weber continues to deny that he knew about the chat.

The result is that Europe’s political “center” is moving closer to the right at each successive stage, and in the process its policies become increasingly difficult to distinguish from those of the far right. This is not a new observation. The strategy of centrist accommodation toward the far right has long been widely debated, and The Insider has previously written in detail about where such a trajectory can lead.

Professor Claudia Wiesner of the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) summarized one of the central concerns as follows:

“If the major faction in the European Parliament collaborates with groups that have previously acted against these principles and the rule of law, it will create a legitimacy problem for the EU. How can citizens trust von der Leyen’s commitment to defending democracy when she collaborates with Giorgia Meloni, who is undermining media liberty in Italy?”

The academic literature on migration policy provides a clear evidence base regarding which measures can actually help address problems associated with “irregular” immigration. The answer is not raids, prolonged detention, or offshore holding centers. Rather, the evidence points toward voluntary return programs combined with substantial reintegration support.

An analysis by the Center for Global Development, which examined existing assisted voluntary return programs, found that in the United Kingdom such models cost an average of £1,000 per refugee, compared with approximately £15,000 for a forced return. Germany’s StarthilfePlus program, for example, provided financial and professional reintegration support to more than 15,000 people. Follow-up surveys found that 85% of returnees were satisfied with the program, while only 5% were actively preparing to migrate again.

Spain’s new migrant regularization program, which has drawn sharp criticism from the EPP in the European Parliament, may in practice achieve precisely what the new EU regulation states that it seeks to accomplish, as it has reduced the number of people living in the country under irregular status, increased the number of working, tax-paying residents, and done so at far lower cost than intensive migration-enforcement measures. Center-right governments in Greece and Portugal have, somewhat surprisingly, used similar approaches, and the evidence demonstrating their effectiveness is substantial. Many researchers conclude that a permanent EU-wide regularization program for migrants would be an effective policy tool.

Predictably, none of this is reflected in the Return Regulation. Measures that reduce irregular migration through regularization are entirely unacceptable to the far right (and now to part of the political center as well), because they can be portrayed as encouraging and prolonging the “migration crisis.”

Migration policy does not exist in a vacuum. The Return Regulation is only one element of a much broader trend within the EU.

Academic studies of the 2024 European Parliament elections show that the rise of the radical right has coincided with a significant decline in support for liberal-democratic values, leading to a reality in which the EPP and parties to its right now hold more than 50% of the seats in Parliament.

The “cordon sanitaire” against far-right influence that von der Leyen had pledged to defend has in practice been dismantled through joint votes and coordination like the WhatsApp incident of March 2026.

Rosa Balfour, director of Carnegie Europe, warns that EU institutions may begin overlooking the deterioration of democratic standards within member states if doing so becomes necessary to retain far-right support. Under such a scenario, the EU’s ability to enforce its own legal mechanisms — the very tools that were previously used to constrain leaders such as former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — would be fundamentally weakened.

In 2025, von der Leyen told Parliament that “unity” was of “absolutely critical importance.” Members of the Commission were concerned about fragmentation and polarization, while diplomats from member states complained that Parliament was unable to act quickly and decisively. A year later, the results are evident: Parliament does indeed operate more cohesively, but only in the interests of the political right.

As for the detention regulation itself, trilogue negotiations between Parliament and the Council are expected to move quickly. On the main issues — return hubs, extended detention periods, entry bans, and cooperation obligations — disagreements are minimal. The principal unresolved question is whether the Council’s provision authorizing home searches will remain in the final version of the regulation. Civil society groups believe that this risk remains real, as the EPP has not objected to the provision, and some member states within the Council want it adopted.

Once finalized, the regulation will have to be implemented by 27 member states with very different administrative capacities and political environments, and if adopted, its implementation is likely to be uneven. It will also almost certainly face legal challenges in national courts and, very likely, once again before the European Court, which will have to determine whether the new legislative framework has resolved the legal problems that undermined the Italy–Albania agreement.

EU legal experts have issued internal warnings that the regulation may be incompatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and could violate international law. So far, however, those warnings — like the protests of numerous human rights organizations — have had little effect.