Europe’s Asylum Seekers Are Someone Else’s Problem

By Tiernan Cannon | August 12, 2025 | 10:16am

Photo by Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet

Immigration Europe

Europe’s Asylum Seekers Are Someone Else’s Problem

The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch responsible for proposing new laws, has a plan for dealing with the continent’s unwanted refugee population. To boil it down: “out of sight, out of mind.” The Commission will seek to introduce rules that make it easier to transfer these people out of Europe to so-called “third countries”—that is, nations outside of the E.U. Obviously the proposal doesn’t actually use the word “people.” Imbuing asylum seekers with humanity tends to induce emotion into proceedings, so, for the sake of cold, hard, technocratic efficiency, “applicants” is the preferred term.

The proposal, submitted in May and intended to come into effect next year, subject to approval by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, aims to remove an obligation that an applicant can only be sent to a third country assuming that they have a genuine connection to that place. Whereas until this point, a connection might mean that this person had once lived in the third country in question, or that they had family there, it will soon come to mean, simply, that they passed through on their way towards Europe. It is, in other words, an arbitrary solution being proposed, tossed together for the sake of facilitating the increasingly xenophobic bluster of European leaders.

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Human rights groups are alarmed by the proposal. Olivia Sundberg Diez, Amnesty International’s E.U. Advocate on Migration and Asylum, responded to the news by recommending that, rather than wasting time and resources on outsourcing its responsibilities, the E.U. should invest in its own asylum system to ensure it is capable of actually helping those within it. “These proposals are yet another cynical attempt to evade the E.U.’s refugee protection responsibilities, shifting them to countries with fewer resources and less capacity to offer lasting protection,” she said. “Sending people to countries to which they have no connection, no support and no prospects, or may have only briefly transited through, is not only chaotic and arbitrary, but also devastating on a human level.”

It was not so long ago that the European consensus, at least rhetorically, was against such a move. The European Commission itself expressed “concern” when Denmark proposed to do something very much like this. There was also much self-righteous European tutting at Britain, when its Tory government sought to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, despite ample evidence that many of them—in particular members of the LGBTQ community—would not be safe there. The Labour government later scrapped the plan, after £700 million of taxpayers’ money was wasted on the failed scheme. Today Germany is reportedly negotiating with Rwanda to strike out a similar arrangement — despite the fact that Germany was, only a decade ago under Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s leader when it came to accepting refugees. But now, in the name of the country’s latent xenophobia bubbling to the surface once more, it is apparently pursuing this needlessly cruel, irrational policy.

Europe’s anti-migrant fervor and racism is certainly getting worse, but it is important to note that it has always been there. Even when its leaders were uttering banalities about respecting the human rights of refugees, it was already engaged in shadowy behavior that specifically violated those rights. Its border surveillance agency, Frontex, has long been known to engage in illegal “pushbacks,” forcing those who are aboard overcrowded, unsafe vessels back out to sea to face the elements and potential death by drowning. A recent joint investigation by Le Monde, Greek non-profit Solomon, and El País has also claimed that Frontex has, for years, been unlawfully spying on migrants and “suspect” civil society activists, before handing the information it gathers on them to Europol, the E.U. police cooperation agency.

Europe is even complicit in migrant transfers to third countries already, funding and facilitating the forced movement of people to places like Libya, where they face, according to a United Nations-backed inquiry, the threat of “murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape and other inhumane acts.” There are also reports of “desert dumps,” in which the E.U. supports and finances operations to drop tens of thousands of Black people a year into the deserts of North Africa to prevent them from getting to Europe. “There,” the investigators have written, “they are left without any assistance, water or food, leaving them at risk of kidnapping, extortion, torture, sexual violence, and, in the worst instances, death. Others are taken to border areas where they are reportedly sold by the authorities to human traffickers and gangs who torture them for ransom.”

All of which is to say, Europe’s record is already incredibly bloody—it just used to prefer to keep quiet about it. But now, in this Trump-inflected era of emboldened racism, it is politically expedient for leaders to be open about their lethal policies, and to expand them.

The global refugee crisis is not going to end. Climate breakdown, spiraling conflicts, and job displacement from technological advances will ensure that there will be an expansion of what the sociologist William I. Robinson terms “surplus humanity”—the people for whom capital has no use as workers. How to handle this surplus of humanity is a pressing concern for political and corporate elites, who fear its collective potential for revolt. At the most extreme end, Gaza offers a model for what can be done: annihilation. But there are other solutions, too, such as the construction of mega-prisons, the largest of which in El Salvador now houses 40,000 prisoners, most of whom are young, jobless and poor. Prison populations are soaring all over the world, with plans to construct more mega-prisons in place in countries including the United States, which already has one of the highest incarceration rates on Earth.

Europe’s border policies are part of this same phenomenon. The continent is gearing up to deal with all this “surplus humanity” that will seek to pass into its borders, not by funding a humane, fit-for-purpose asylum system, nor by trying to help assuage the conditions that are displacing all these people, but by pulling up the drawbridge. Dehumanize those that come to Europe seeking help. Disappear them to faraway countries for others to deal with, or, simply, push them back into the water and wait for them to drown. They are, in any case, not welcome.