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BySRSam Reyes·CMCal Morrow·EQEliza Quinn·DPDana Park
BREAKINGApril 16, 2026

How European Conservatives Fought Back on Migration

In late March 2026, the European Parliament voted 389–206 to approve a sweeping 'return regulation' that allows EU member states to build deportation centers outside the bloc and return irregular migrants to third countries with which they have bilateral agreements, even if those countries are not the migrants' countries of origin. The legislation was driven by a coalition of mainstream conservatives in the European People's Party (EPP) and far-right political groups, with Swedish MEP Charlie Weimers as a central figure. Trilogues with EU member states are expected in spring 2026, with further legislation expanding Frontex's powers forthcoming.

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⚡Both sides have significant internal splits on this story. Arguments below represent the dominant positions on each side — see The Divide below for the full picture.

As migration pressures mount, European right-wing parties are winning elections by promising border controls—but does cracking down on immigration actually solve the economic and social problems voters say they're voting against?

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Rules without consequences aren't rules
Conservative
For eleven years, EU member states watched return rates stagnate in the low single digits while populations grew furious at a governance class that could write rules but not enforce them. Bellamy's formulation — 'who comes to Europe illegally cannot stay' — isn't a slogan; it's the minimum condition for any immigration system to be credible to its own citizens. A legal order that announces consequences it never delivers is not a legal order.
Liberal
You're describing a real failure, but the solution you're celebrating doesn't fix it — it relocates it. Deporting people to third countries with which they have no connection, provided only that a bilateral agreement exists, doesn't enforce European law; it exports European legal obligations to whoever will sign a contract. The 1951 Refugee Convention doesn't contain a bilateral-agreement exception to non-refoulement, and 'we sent them somewhere' is not the same as 'we enforced the rule.'
Conservative
The EU-Turkey Statement already demonstrated that third-country arrangements can be built within a legal framework — it survived years of operational practice and was never struck down by the ECHR. The legal question isn't whether such arrangements are categorically impermissible; it's whether adequate safeguards are built in. That's an implementation challenge, not a verdict against the law itself.
Liberal
The EU-Turkey arrangement is your precedent for legal viability and mine for what goes wrong — human rights organizations documented systematic pushbacks and due process violations at the Greek-Turkish border under that very deal. A precedent that 'wasn't formally struck down' is a low bar when people were being pushed back in the dark.
EPP drafting with far-right groups
Conservative
The cordon sanitaire was never a legal principle — it was an informal elite arrangement that voters methodically dismantled from 2019 through 2024. When democratic elections return majorities that demand exactly this policy, and the Parliament passes it 389–206, calling that alignment 'extremism' is a way of refusing to reckon with the electorate rather than engaging with the argument.
Liberal
The vote count doesn't settle what you're avoiding: EPP MEPs coordinated with far-right groups through secret WhatsApp channels during the committee drafting stage. That isn't accepting far-right votes after the fact — it's inviting far-right minds into the room where the text was written. Those are structurally different things, and a 389-vote margin built that way tells you something about how the majority was constructed, not just that it exists.
Conservative
Legislative coordination during drafting is ordinary politics — the question is whether the policy produced is lawful and defensible, not whether the coalition that produced it is ideologically pure. You haven't argued the text is wrong because of who drafted it; you've argued who drafted it is disqualifying. That's a theory of contamination, not a legal or policy critique.
Liberal
The text matters and so does the process — when the dominant mainstream bloc abandons its own firewall not just in voting but in private legislative strategy, it normalizes a method, not just a margin. That's the structural shift, and a policy argument alone doesn't address it.
Rwanda precedent as operational warning
Conservative
The Rwanda comparison is the strongest version of the opposing case, and it deserves a direct answer rather than dismissal. The EU has genuine blood on its hands from Libya — funding coastguard arrangements that detained people in conditions documented by the UN as involving torture and sexual violence. Conservatives who invoke rule of law to justify this policy cannot then wave away what 'bilateral agreement' enforcement infrastructure looks like in practice.
Liberal
So you're acknowledging Libya — good. But then look at what you're actually endorsing: a regulation with no named third-country partners confirmed, no established human rights standards for the centers it envisions, and Frontex expansion still forthcoming. The Rwanda scheme cost over £700 million, was struck down by British courts, and removed zero asylum seekers. The EU's version is being written before the infrastructure it depends on exists. That's not a serious enforcement proposal — it's a political signal dressed as legislation.
Conservative
Rwanda failed partly because the UK moved unilaterally without a broader legal architecture; the EU is building multilateral bilateral frameworks with conditionality requirements. The answer to Libya isn't to abandon externalized enforcement — it's to demand that the agreements be negotiated under meaningful human rights conditionality with real Frontex accountability. That's the hard implementation work this regulation now creates political space to do.
Liberal
You keep saying 'conditionality' as if naming the requirement is the same as having it. The regulation passed without specifying which countries, which standards, or which enforcement mechanism catches violations — the conditionality you're defending exists as an aspiration in a text that provides no mechanism to make it real.
Progressive silence on return rate failure
Conservative
The progressive critique loses all credibility the moment it refuses to engage with return rates below 20 percent as a genuine governance failure. That failure isn't a footnote — it's the political engine that has driven electoral gains for nationalist parties across the continent and produced the very legislative majority you're now criticizing. If the liberal position can only oppose enforcement without naming a functional alternative, it will keep losing the democratic argument to people who at least have a proposal.
Liberal
That concession is real and the liberal position earns its own failures honestly: treating border management as inherently suspect rather than as a legitimate state function requiring reform accelerated the EPP's rightward drift and gave this legislation its political runway. A serious alternative has to name functional, rights-compliant return mechanisms — not oppose every form of enforcement as contaminated. But 'at least they have a proposal' isn't vindication. The Rwanda scheme was a proposal. It removed no one and cost a fortune.
Conservative
The difference between Rwanda and this regulation is that Rwanda was a unilateral political stunt by a collapsing government; this is a structural parliamentary majority encoding enforcement into EU law across 27 member states. Naming the failure of one flawed implementation doesn't substitute for the alternative you still haven't named.
Liberal
The alternative is investing in the EU's existing returns framework — bilateral readmission agreements with origin countries, not transit hubs — combined with a functioning common asylum system that processes claims in months rather than years. That's slower and less satisfying as a political signal, which is exactly why it keeps losing to proposals that look decisive and deliver nothing.
Non-refoulement under bilateral agreements
Conservative
The legal question around offshore centers is not whether non-refoulement can ever be satisfied in a third-country arrangement — the EU-Turkey Statement proved it can survive legal scrutiny when bilateral frameworks include procedural safeguards. The real question is whether adequate individual assessment happens before transfer. That is a serious implementation challenge that deserves serious engagement, not a categorical claim that any offshore processing is unlawful by definition.
Liberal
The EU-Turkey deal 'surviving legal scrutiny' and 'satisfying non-refoulement' are not the same claim. What the arrangement actually produced was documented systematic pushbacks — people returned without individual assessment, in direct violation of the principle you say it honored. You're citing operational continuity as legal validation, but the violations happened inside the arrangement, not despite it. Offshore processing introduces a structural accountability gap: once someone is in a center outside EU jurisdiction, enforceable rights protections exist on paper and nowhere else.
Conservative
Every enforcement system can be abused — the answer is accountability mechanisms inside the framework, not abandonment of the framework. The question is whether this regulation builds those mechanisms in, and that's a legitimate demand to make of its architects, not grounds for rejecting the legal architecture entirely.
Liberal
You're asking the people who coordinated with far-right groups in secret to write the accountability mechanisms for the centers they just legislated into existence. The demand is reasonable. The confidence that it will be met is not.
Conservative's hardest question
The Libya precedent is genuinely hard to dismiss: the EU has already demonstrated that it will fund and operationalize third-country migration arrangements that result in serious human rights abuses when political pressure to reduce arrivals outweighs accountability. Without naming specific partner countries, mandating enforceable human rights standards within bilateral agreements, and creating real oversight mechanisms for offshore centers, this regulation could produce exactly the abuse it is accused of enabling — and conservatives who invoke rule of law to justify the policy would be implicated in violating it.
Liberal's hardest question
The regulation's proponents are correct that EU return rates have been chronically and genuinely low — figures below 20 percent in many member states are documented — and the liberal position becomes intellectually hollow if it offers only opposition without a credible alternative enforcement mechanism that respects both rule of law and asylum obligations. If this argument cannot name what functional, rights-compliant return policy looks like, it will continue losing the democratic argument to people who at least have a proposal, however flawed.
The Divide
*Europe's left and right both fracture over whether the new return regulation is tough-but-lawful enforcement or a human rights catastrophe dressed in legal language.*
EPP MAINSTREAM
Supports the return regulation as legitimate EU-level migration enforcement that restores rule of law.
“We will impose a simple principle: who comes to Europe illegally cannot stay.” — François-Xavier Bellamy
POPULIST-NATIONALIST RIGHT
Backs the legislation but demands even greater national sovereignty over migration policy and rejects EU burden-sharing.
HUMAN RIGHTS / PROGRESSIVE
Opposes the regulation as illegal under international law and a capitulation to far-right politics that will harm asylum seekers.
“The European Parliament has greenlit punitive detention and deportation plans.” — Amnesty International
CENTRIST / SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC
Accepts stricter enforcement as political reality but argues the legislation lacks sufficient human rights safeguards.
The Verdict
Both sides agree
Both sides accept that EU return rates below 20 percent represent a genuine and consequential governance failure that has eroded public trust in the rule of law and created rational incentives for further irregular migration.
The real conflict
FACTUAL DISAGREEMENT: Whether the UK Rwanda scheme and Libya detention precedents are reliable predictors of this regulation's implementation. Conservatives argue those failures prove the need for strong conditionality and oversight in bilateral agreements; liberals argue those failures demonstrate that political pressure to deport systematically overwhelms accountability mechanisms built ex-ante, making this regulation's promise of safeguards structurally unlikely to survive implementation pressure.
What nobody has answered
If the progressive argument that border enforcement and asylum protection are fundamentally incompatible proves correct, and if the return rates this regulation is designed to achieve would require deporting people whose asylum claims have not been adjudicated in full legal proceedings, does the liberal position actually endorse indefinite residence for failed asylum seekers — and if so, what makes that different from the 'indefinite non-enforcement' conservatives say voters rejected?
Sources

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