EU's "return hubs": a costly gamble on migration control
Can a network of offshore detention centers actually fix Europe's broken deportation system? Brussels says yes. The evidence says otherwise.
At a Glance
The EU reached a preliminary deal on June 1, 2026 to allow the creation of “return hubs” — facilities in third countries where migrants under final deportation orders could be held before removal from Europe.
Only 20% of the roughly 400,000 people issued expulsion orders each year actually leave EU territory — and the root causes of that failure go largely unaddressed by this new framework.
Human rights organizations and migration researchers warn the measure risks rights violations and could prove as expensive and ineffective as similar experiments in Italy and the United Kingdom.
This image is used for illustrative purposes only.
A deal struck, a mechanism still undefined
On June 1, 2026, negotiators from the European Parliament and the Council of the EU — the body representing member states — reached a trilogue agreement on a sweeping reform of European return policy. The centerpiece: legal authorization for member states to establish “return hubs,” offshore facilities in partner countries designed to temporarily house foreign nationals under final deportation orders while awaiting actual removal.
The agreement still requires formal ratification by both the European Parliament and the Council in the coming weeks.
The proposal builds on the EU Migration and Asylum Pact adopted in 2024, and on a broader return strategy unveiled by the European Commission — the EU’s executive arm — in March 2025 aimed at making removals “effective, firm, and fair.” The scale of the problem driving the initiative is stark: roughly 400,000 people receive expulsion orders from EU territory each year. Only about 80,000 — one in five — actually leave.
Who would be sent, and under what conditions?
Under the proposed framework, migrants subject to a final deportation decision could be transferred to a third country that has concluded an agreement with the EU or one of its member states. Once there, they would wait — for an unspecified duration — until either removed to their country of origin, transferred to another third country, or, in some cases, permitted to remain in the host country.
The European Commission has set out two formal safeguards: partner countries would be required to meet international human rights standards, and families with children and unaccompanied minors would be explicitly excluded. But these are principles on paper. Their practical application will depend entirely on case-by-case agreements yet to be negotiated.
Member states divided, partner countries unnamed
Five EU member states are actively backing the initiative: Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, and Greece. Berlin has set an ambition to conclude initial agreements with third countries by the end of 2026. France and Spain have both expressed reservations.
As for potential host countries, names circulating in diplomatic conversations — Senegal, Ghana, Mauritania, Rwanda, Uzbekistan — remain entirely unconfirmed. That vacuum reveals the underlying political challenge: third countries have no inherent obligation to accept migrants with no ties to them, and will inevitably seek concessions in return — commercial, diplomatic, or financial — whose cost to European taxpayers has yet to be calculated by any government.
Magnus Brunner, the Austrian European Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration, framed the reform as a reassertion of control: these measures would, he argued, allow Europe to better define who enters, who can stay, and who must leave. French Member of the European Parliament François-Xavier Bellamy, vice president of the center-right Republicans (LR) party and a vocal supporter of the text, put it more bluntly: anyone who enters Europe illegally should expect not to stay.
Analysis: a political bet on an untested mechanism
The deterrent effect is central to the pro-hubs argument. But Ravenna Sohst, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute Europe, a Brussels-based research center, judges that effect “probably limited.” The reason: the 80% non-compliance rate on deportation orders is not primarily a question of political will. It reflects structural blockages this framework does not resolve — missing identity documents, countries of origin refusing to readmit their nationals, gaps in diplomatic cooperation, and in many cases personal situations — minor children, medical conditions — that make forced departure physically difficult to execute in a rule-of-law state.
The available precedents counsel caution. Italy’s arrangement with Albania, operational since 2025 and modeled on the offshore processing concept, has proven costly and operationally limited — Albanian facilities have struggled to receive the expected flows under conditions that satisfy European judicial scrutiny. The United Kingdom’s partnership with Rwanda never achieved operational scale before being effectively shelved; both cases have been described by researchers as expensive and ineffective.
Scaling a similar model across 27 EU member states with diverging interests could cause costs to “explode,” warn researchers Paula Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik and Philipp Stutz in a paper published by Sciences Po’s Center for European Studies and Comparative Politics. The risk is real of constructing an elaborate legal and diplomatic architecture that yields marginal operational results.
There remains a question this debate consistently sidesteps: why do people ordered to leave EU territory remain there anyway? The answer is rarely pure enforcement failure — it is often found in the complexity of individual circumstances and the institutional limits on coercing departure at scale within a framework of rights.
The Bottom Line
The “return hubs” are less a migration solution than a political credibility test for a European Union that has been promising to regain control of its external borders for two decades. If the mechanism proves as costly and ineffective as its predecessors, the pressure will not shift toward less externalization — it will demand more.
The real question is not whether these facilities will work. It is what Europe is prepared to sacrifice, in rights and in public money, to appear as though they might.
Sources: France Info · European Commission · Migration Policy Institute Europe · Sciences Po CEE · EU Agency for Fundamental Rights · Amnesty International