LUXEMBOURG — European governments will debate how best to manage migration on Tuesday when they weigh in for the first time on a series of EU plans to appease growing public discontent.

The meeting of interior ministers in Luxembourg will precede a discussion among the bloc’s 27 leaders at a European Council in Brussels later this month, documents seen by POLITICO reveal. Among the ideas being discussed this week is a plan to send unsuccessful migrants to “return hubs” in non-EU countries as well as a rule to ensure that decisions taken on applications by one government are enforced by others.

“Across the EU we are currently only returning a small share of the third-country nationals illegally staying here,” said Rasmus Stoklund, immigration minister for Denmark, which holds the rotating six-month presidency of the Council of the EU. “This is a completely unacceptable situation.”

The rise of populist, anti-immigration parties across Europe is spurring the bloc’s more mainstream leaders to take action. But with many centrist politicians historically more sympathetic to welcoming migrants, there is little consensus over what’s proportionate and how it should be managed.

Tuesday’s ministerial meeting marks the first high-level political discussion on the European Commission’s proposed update to the EU’s deportation law. Politicians are having to grapple with the thorny question of how to ensure people can’t simply move to another European country if they are unsuccessful in securing a visa or claiming asylum.

EU governments are coming to believe that “we must be much more efficient in returning people with no right to stay in Europe,” said a EU diplomat, granted anonymity to speak about the sensitive draft plans. “The Commission has worked quite fast and delivered an ambitious proposal, enabling the establishment of return hubs in third countries, clear obligations for people in return position, and generally making return procedures more quick.”

The recognition of decisions made by other countries is currently voluntary, but with national authorities managing to deport only about one-fifth of the people they’ve decided should leave — a figure described by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen as “far too low” — the Commission looked at unclogging the system by allowing countries to remove people based on decisions made by other governments, without having to start the process anew.

Under pressure

Europe’s creaking migration system “threatens not only the security of our union, but also the social cohesion and the credibility of the European institutions in the eyes of the European citizens,” Denmark’s Stoklund said.

Von der Leyen said updating the legislation is one of her political priorities. Denmark is under pressure to get a deal among the 27 member governments by the end of the year that can be taken into negotiations with the European Parliament.

Under the proposed system, if a country like Greece, where many migrants from across the Mediterranean first arrive in Europe, decides to deport someone, and that person then moves to Sweden, the Swedish government will be obliged to deport them. 

Finding a deal won’t be easy. Critics of the plan say one of the difficulties with mandatory recognition is that it could incentivize border countries, which generally favor the mandatory system, to make deportation decisions and then simply allow those people to go elsewhere in the bloc, where they become someone else’s problem.

“There is an idea for Germany, for example, that if there is mutual recognition of return decisions, Italy would just reject everyone and let them cross the Alps and go to France or to Germany,” said Eleonora Testi, senior legal officer at the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, an alliance of NGOs.

Some countries are “wary of becoming magnets for secondary migration” if the law is designed in the wrong way, an EU diplomat said. Denmark has proposed a middle way where countries must accept other decisions as a core principle, but with clear exceptions, the same diplomat said. 

The proposed system could also cause legal and administrative headaches because of difficulties in dealing with appeals, meshing the legal systems of different countries, and translating decisions. 

Hybrid tactic

To add to the political tension, the Commission on Wednesday will publish findings on which countries are most under pressure from migration, and will propose how funds and support for those countries should be divided. 

Under a system agreed as part of the EU’s migration pact, governments can choose to either accept migrants from frontline states or support them with cash and staff. 

But some EU countries are unhappy with Italy and Greece — likely to be designated as recipients of that support — for not keeping their end of the bargain by refusing to handle migration cases as set out by the so-called Dublin rules, which stipulate which country should handle asylum applications (typically the applicant’s country of entry to the EU). 

According to the EU’s statistics agency, Italy received 42,807 requests from other EU countries to readmit asylum seekers or take charge of their applications in 2024 but accepted just 60. Greece received 17,163 requests but accepted only 26.

Poland, meanwhile, has been pushing for exemptions to commitments to take migrants, arguing it has already dealt with large numbers of irregular arrivals sent over the border by neighboring Belarus as part of a hybrid tactic to destabilize the bloc. In a statement over the weekend, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk insisted he had “said that there would be no relocation of migrants in Poland, and there won’t be!”

“It’s a difficult moment for these governments,” said Başak Yavçan, head of research at the Migration Policy Group, a non-profit organization based in Brussels.

“What they’re saying is that we need to be tough on these things because if we don’t it will be in the hands of the far right. But, by doing this, they’re actually letting the far right determine the terms of the debate and set the agenda.”