Through a package of nine new regulations grouped under the Migration and Asylum Pact, plus a tenth, the Return Regulation (which will likely follow this month), the EU is overhauling how it manages migration and asylum.
The rules are complicated, contradictory, full of uncertainty, and, most importantly, easily avoidable. We don’t have to look far to see why.
What changes today
To understand how Europe could and has been reimagining migration policies, let’s start with what changes now.
Under our current rules, asylum-seekers' applications should be processed in the country of first arrival. And as the vast majority of asylum seekers reach Europe by land or sea, they should, in theory, apply for asylum in the countries along the EU’s external borders (Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, and Cyprus).
In 2015, when 1.3 million asylum seekers entered the EU, that didn’t happen. Hungary, Sweden, Austria, and most notably Germany received much higher shares of first-time asylum applications than other member states – meaning that asylum seekers were not processed in their country of first arrival but instead transited through them to other member states.
This is called “secondary movement”, and reducing it is at the core of the new rules, as the EU looks to stop migration as early as possible. “The Pact's biggest change is the direction of travel,” Meron Knikman, senior EU advocacy adviser at the International Rescue Committee, told The European Correspondent.
To achieve this, the new rules aim to deter asylum seekers by making it harder to obtain asylum and travel beyond the member states on the EU's external borders.
Upon arrival, asylum seekers will first face the Screening Regulation. Data on their identity, health, security, and vulnerabilities will be collected. Biometric data will then be stored in Eurodac, the EU's asylum and migration database, where data will now be kept for 5 years instead of 18 months.
National law enforcement authorities will then be able to identify asylum seekers within all member states and check Eurodac to verify whether they have already been processed in another member state.
After an asylum seeker is screened and detained, the entire asylum procedure, including potential appeals of a decision, must now be completed within 12 weeks. That is very ambitious, if not unrealistic, experts argue.
“Member states are not able to take asylum decisions before a few years under the normal procedure. Two, three, four years sometimes. So, where is the miracle going to come from that will allow them to do it 12 weeks?,” Philippe de Bruycker, professor of asylum law at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, told us.
Migration reception centres in Europe’s external member states, particularly in Greece, have long been deemed inhumane, leaving asylum seekers in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. Dutch Green member of the European Parliament Tineke Strik visited Greece a month ago and explained in a press conference that “there's a huge shortage of capacity in almost all areas, if you think of interpreters, legal aid, medical care, immigration authorities, judges, and the guardians for the unaccompanied minors.”
“These shortages mean that asylum seekers cannot enjoy the full rights and the legal support that they need and are entitled to.”
If their application is rejected, they can be detained for another 12 weeks. And if there is a crisis, such as a “mass influx” of asylum seekers, these durations could be extended under another new regulation.
Finally, to complete the new direction of travel the EU is taking, there is the externalisation of migration. Agreements between the EU and Türkiye or Libya (through Italy) have already left asylum seekers in precarity while giving political legitimacy and money to autocratic regimes with poor human rights records.
Part of externalisation is the ever-present issue of return hubs: detention centres outside the EU where asylum seekers whose applications are rejected could be sent before being deported. This is expected to become legal under the EU's Return Regulation this month. So far, the only operational hubs are in Albania – which have become known mostly for their price tag, surpassing estimates by a few hundred million euros.
Migration à la Trump
And much remains uncertain. How are processes that usually take years supposed to be done in 12 weeks? How long are asylum seekers supposed to stay in return hubs, and how would conditions there be monitored? Some member states (Hungary, who else?) still reject the rules altogether.
What this uncertainty risks doing is harming those who are already most vulnerable, using obscurity as a strategy. “A lot of people live here with no status, no work, no house, and I think we will see more of this. We can already see an increasing number of asylum seekers who are homeless in our towns,” Alessandro Papes, who monitors the Balkan route for the International Rescue Committee, told us.
“The number of asylum seekers who are forced to live in abandoned buildings, or to live and sleep on the street for a period of time that could extend to two or three months, will likely rise,” he added.
The Pact does obscurity on steroids: accelerated procedures, insufficient capacities and informal assessments risk pushing more asylum seekers into precarity, like homelessness, from Italian train stations to the tents in which asylum seekers sleep in Brussels despite having a right to reception.
But obscurity already starts where you are born. Under new rules of what’s considered a “safe third country,” some applicants may find it hard to have their asylum claims assessed in the EU at all. “People from certain countries will be impacted the most. They have a higher burden of proof,” senior EU adviser Knikman said.
“If the EU deems that there is a third country where the EU considers that you can be safe, you can be moved, and your case will be assessed there,” she explained.
The catch? “There does not have to be a connection between the asylum seeker and the country, which means that the EU can send people anywhere.”
“I doubt that there will be a legal problem with that,” asylum law professor de Bruycker said. “But I have a moral problem with that, playing with people like that. Imagine sending an Afghan asylum seeker to Rwanda. Are we going to be told what will happen to this person in Rwanda afterwards? How would they integrate him? How would it be monitored? I have many doubts.”
If you wonder what this could look like in practice, the US government has started third-country deportations to multiple African countries. So far, the results have been inhumane and very expensive. Some cases have cost hundreds of thousands of USD per asylum seeker, only for people to be returned to the US or their country of origin.
A European paradox
What are we really trying to achieve with these rules?
Curbing irregular migration? The numbers of the 2015 crisis were a massive outlier, and irregular arrivals have since declined sharply. In the first few months of this year, irregular arrivals have already dropped by 40% compared with the same period in 2025.
But this is not really about the figures. Today’s rules are the result of more than a decade of far-right rhetoric on migration, which has turned the topic into a key concern for voters.
“Right-wing parties helped nudge this discussion towards socio-political issues, weaponising misplaced demographic and cultural anxieties over Europe’s foreign populations,” writes Lorena Martini of the European Council of Foreign Relations.
“In response, migration policy gradually transformed from responding to economic need to pre-empting threats: to European jobs, European sovereignty, and – crucially – European security.”
All this leads to a European paradox: we fight problems that we have already solved elsewhere.
While the EU builds a complex set of deterrence measures, Spain regularised 500,000 undocumented migrants in spring, helping long-term residents and addressing labour shortages.
But even Italy, at the forefront of externalisation, return hubs, pushbacks, and detention, plans to regularise about the same number of non-EU migrants as Spain to cover labour shortages.
Meanwhile, Poland and Czechia have been exempted from some of the solidarity contributions under the new rules, largely because they took in substantial numbers of Ukrainian refugees. The EU hosts around 4.37 million Ukrainians under temporary protection, granting residence permits and access to work.
These contradictions become most visible when we think of the potential behind the rules. The main argument for the changes has been, believe it or not, more unity. The EU's goal is to establish “a common asylum system at EU level, that delivers results while remaining grounded in our European values.”
By acting more harmoniously as a continent, Europe could offer asylum seekers more equal protection across member states while alleviating the pressure on key countries.
Instead, what we have today seems to be a misconception of our potential as a union. “It’s totally irrational,” de Bruycker explained. “We say we want to stop secondary movements of people within a single area without border controls. We have an area without borders, but we still have a brain as if they're there.”
So, where do the rules leave us? Member states will continue implementing the rules gradually, and we will monitor how they pan out over the next few months. De Bruycker thinks that progress will follow a familiar pattern. “The history of the EU always follows the same rhythm: reform happens in crisis, as we move from crisis to crisis.”
The danger of these rules is that we might be successful at deporting the crises elsewhere.