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

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.