The EU seems to be fully caught up in what has been defined as the “deterrence trap”: a full focus on restrictive measures that might offer short-term political relief but that will prove ineffective in the long run, providing extremist movements the tools to erode the political centre.
Alberto Tagliapietra
Over the past two years, a new trend has emerged in populist politics around Europe: remigration.
The term denotes a demand for the systemic deportation of irregular migrants, with fringes pushing it also to regular migrants committing “serious crimes”.
After years of diffusion in niche groups, it is now gaining space in the political debate around Europe, with policymakers claiming the beginning of “the era of deportations”.
The most recent achievement of this movement has been the approval of the Return Regulation at the European Parliament on 17 June.
Thanks to a voting alliance between the center-rights group and the far-right groupings (and with a last minute support from several liberal MEPs), the parliament passed one of its toughest pieces of legislation on migration.
The regulation, welcomed by “Send Them Back!” chants, will allow EU member states to remove irregular migrants and rejected asylum seekers to offshore detention centers in third countries.
It also grants unprecedented provision to law enforcement authorities, leading to what many observers are defining as the “ICE-ification” of EU migration policy.
A multi-billion effort, for what?
Beyond its evident threat to fundamental rights, as highlighted by the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, the concept of remigration also fails on economic grounds.
Take the case of Italy, where the first blueprint for European offshore hubs was established through the 2024 memorandum with Albania.
Italy is currently estimated to host 339,000 irregular migrants (over a population of 59 million). According to the Italian ministry of interior, the average cost of each return carried out in 2025 was approximately €3,600.
To this amount, we have to add the management cost of the infrastructure leading to returns. According to independent researchers, the average daily cost per bed in these structures is around €79, for an average stay of 40 days.
Considering these numbers, the total cost of remigration in Italy alone would amount to €2.2bn. Yet, these are very conservative estimates, as researchers have noticed that the real cost of the return infrastructure can be estimated at a 30-40 percent higher.
Offshore hubs offer no shortcut.
The centres Italy built in Albania costed around €74m, nearly double the initial €39 million budget. The cost per bed is approximately €72,000, compared to the average €5,000 in Italy. Considering all additional costs, the total five-year expenditure for the Albania scheme could easily reach €1bn, against the €670m envisioned by the Italian government.
This expenditure has yielded virtually nothing. After being recently repurposed into a return hub, the two centres currently stand empty.
From this partial overview, the performative character of these measures is already evident.
The aim is to create electoral tools, rather than addressing the problems of a system that is breaking down. A consistent part of the irregular population in Italy is, in fact, also a product of years of systematic weakening of the reception system.
Due to constant underfunding and bureaucratic delays migrants often find themselves stuck in transition. Even tools aimed at creating legal ways to enter the country often results in irregular staying.
The Italian government has been issuing around 450,000 work visas for 2023-2025 and 500,000 for 2026–2028 to address labour shortages in the country’s job market. For each work visa assigned, a residence contract to legally reside in Italy must also be given.
Yet, according to the latest data, only in 2025 out of the 26,000 third-country workers that entered the country under the scheme, just 14,000 received a residence contract. The remaining 11,000 can be considered to have slide into irregularity due to delays in obtaining documents or frauds from the job providers.
Stuck in deterrence
Looking at remigration with data in hand, it seems clear that the concept is barely workable. Even its proponents are often incapable of providing a clear explanation of how it would be implemented.
Yet, the success of its rhetoric reveals how European leaders seem to have abandoned a rational approach to migration policy.
The EU New Pact on Migration and Asylum, officially in force since the 12 June, is an example of this broader trend. Its unbalanced focus on stricter measures endangers fair process at the European borders while not really affecting people’s decisions to leave.
As found by a recent survey of the Mixed Migration Centre, surveying 4,000 people travelling along the Mediterranean routes, 64 percent of respondents said that stricter and deterrent measures would not affect their decision to continue their journey.
The new pact also pushes further than ever toward externalisation. The creation of return hubs not only consolidates a decade-long policy trend but elevates it to a new level, creating a framework to detain people in any third country that agrees to do so via a simple “arrangement” with a member state, implying minimal legal scrutiny.
This is the latest example of an “innovation” trend in migration management based on growing consensus that only informal and legally ambiguous measures can yield results.
The EU seems to be fully caught up in what has been defined as the “deterrence trap”: a full focus on restrictive measures that might offer short-term political relief but that will prove ineffective in the long run, providing extremist movements the tools to erode the political centre. By gambling on legally ambiguous measures to gain short-term results, the EU is endangering its own values, while placing thousands of people in more dangerous situations with the risk of not even achieving concrete results.
