In September 2015, the death of three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi sparked global horror and outrage. The photo of his body on a beach in Türkiye made headlines and news reports, highlighting the tragedy of those who fled the war in Syria in search of safety in Europe. This picture has crystallized the migration crisis involving more than a million people, which has put the European Union to the test.
Ten years on, the Community Club has changed: the growing influence of the far right – already present in one in three European governments – has radicalized attitudes and hardened immigration policies, which now focus on externalizing borders; This means that the European Union or its member states pay non-EU member states, which are often accused of violating human rights, to prevent migrants from reaching European territory.
The result has been a continuing reduction in irregular flows. In 2024, the UNHCR recorded the arrival of 199,400 people. But isolation has also caused more than 36,000 deaths at land and sea borders when trying to enter Europe (more than 32,000 in the Mediterranean alone), according to the International Organization for Migration. The pain of relatives and the invisibility of victims remains a disgrace to the defense of fundamental rights in the European Union.
The current European position, which has been criticized by humanitarian organizations and left-wing parties, is defended by Brussels as a way to put an end to the mafia and “take back control” of its borders. “Maintaining a balance between solidarity and responsibility is the key to our success,” European Commissioner for Migration Magnus Brunner said last Monday.
In 2015, Ilan wasn’t traveling alone. Like him, more than a million people – mostly from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq – arrived in Europe irregularly and another 3,500 drowned along the way, according to UN data. Some countries responded with solidarity gestures – Germany under Angela Merkel pledged to welcome a million asylum seekers in the following years – but pressure on external borders and a lack of consensus revealed the first cracks.
In November 2015, the Valletta (Malta) summit between European and African leaders marked the beginning of change: the EU began to look outward to manage migration and design protection policy. According to Jerome Tubiana, a consultant for Doctors Without Borders, Europe cannot implement its policies while respecting its own rules. “It has become a task to find places where the rules can be distorted,” says the author of the latest report. Power in the Sand: EU Overseas Policies and Trans-Saharan Migration Routes.
In 2015, the twenty-seven countries pledged to transfer 160,000 asylum seekers within two years to relief countries in the Mediterranean, but the agreement failed. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland refused, and other countries received only a small percentage: Spain, for example, welcomed only 16% of the planned 17,000. That failed attempt was the seed of the current Pact on Migration and Asylum, approved in 2024, the pillars of which are more controlled border management, faster asylum procedures, and “mandatory but flexible” solidarity and cooperation with third countries.
The turning point came on March 18, 2016, with what some called the “Pact of Shame”: the European Union committed to paying Turkey 6 billion euros to stop illegal immigration. This coalition established open prisons in that country and on the Greek islands, where thousands of asylum seekers were trapped in degrading conditions, which was denounced by Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, the United Nations and others.
Although the model seemed new, it was not new: Spain had already tested it with Morocco. Over time, European borders will begin not in Lesvos or Lampedusa, but in Libya, Niger, Mauritania or Tunisia. Commissioner Brunner believes that these reforms are necessary in the face of “growing frustration” and the “feeling” that European standards are “ignored”. “We need to restore trust between member states and EU citizens,” he added, stressing that human rights are “non-negotiable.”
Greene O’Hara, UNHCR representative in Spain, acknowledges her concerns: “There is nothing illegal in looking for solutions outside Europe, but it must be done transparently and without shifting responsibilities to the countries that already host the majority of refugees.” It also describes human rights violations in countries of origin and transit as “unacceptable.”
In 2016, the Balkan route – which crossed Hungary, Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia – was closed, leading to a significant drop in the number of arrivals into the EU: from one million in 2015 to 185,000 in 2017. But it was not a humanitarian success: more than 12,000 people died at European borders in those three years.
After the agreement with Türkiye, the European Union strengthened its migration control structure. In 2016, he created Frontex, the European border control agency, which in 2024 had a budget of 922 million euros, and faced complaints of human rights violations, such as hot returns and the use of violence, which led to the resignation of former executive director Fabrice Leggeri. The Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) was also launched, in theory to act against the causes of migration – poverty or insecurity – although the EU, according to MEP Estrella Galán (of the Left Group in the European Parliament), “requires cooperation in reality on border controls”.
The external dimension of migration policy has been strengthened through agreements with third countries. The European Union and Italy signed various agreements with Libya, although the United Nations classified the African country as “unsafe” due to cases of torture and mistreatment of migrants. Brussels has allocated more than 700 million euros since 2015 for “migration management,” while Italy invested about 150 million euros between 2017 and 2022, according to Oxfam. This agreement was renewed on November 2 for another three years. “Libya is a black hole,” Tubiana says. He added, “Europe says it is monitoring the situation and that the reports are confidential for security reasons.” This decade, the Coast Guard has intercepted at least 166,000 migrants in the Mediterranean and returned them to Libya, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Between 2015 and 2021, the European Union also allocated more than 400 million euros to Morocco and Mauritania, and in 2023 it signed a memorandum with Tunisia to obtain another 105 million. Egypt was the last signatory with 200 million euros. However, the lack of transparency makes it impossible to know how much money is being spent and where departures to Europe can be stopped.
Despite efforts, outsourcing departure control did not solve the problem, but only displaced it. “The EU blockade is like having a water jug full of holes and trying to cover it up: when you cover one of these holes, the water flows through the other,” Tubiana warns. “Migrants adapt, but the new routes are more dangerous.” While the Libyan Coast Guard increased its interceptions from 12% to 50% between 2017 and 2019, the death rate at sea rose from 2% to 7%, according to Doctors Without Borders, which for the organization contradicts the European narrative that its policies save lives.
This tightening has also led to human rights violations in several African countries that receive EU funding, as a recent investigation by El Pais newspaper revealed, as well as the increasing criminalization of NGOs that help shipwreck migrants, which are persecuted by national and European laws.
Ejection mechanism
The 2020 pandemic temporarily reduced the number of arrivals, but the 27 countries used that period to advance the Migration and Asylum Charter, which will enter into force in 2026. This set of ten regulations seeks a unified response to migration challenges. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has defended the idea as an effective tool to “decide who comes and under what conditions”, with faster asylum procedures and combatting human trafficking networks.
But for Galan, the agreement “led to an expulsion mechanism without guarantees, without legal or safe means, and without putting people at the centre.” O’Hara acknowledges some positive aspects: “It seeks to speed up the process of identifying protection needs and shorten the time to resolution. This is positive, as long as human rights are guaranteed.”
The new framework confirms that the externalization of border control has moved from a dispersed practice to the central focus of European migration policy. Brussels is moving towards this model, and Italy has once again become a laboratory since the government of Giorgia Meloni signed with Albania the establishment of a detention center for asylum seekers. “It has been paralyzed by the Italian courts, but in Brussels it is seen as an innovative model,” warns Galland. “The EU is encouraging countries to explore new formats, and we know that this is what it means.”
Others have already tried it. Denmark and the United Kingdom wanted to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, but justice prevented this. Recently, London and Paris agreed that France would accept returns from the shores of the English Channel in exchange for the UK accepting migrants with family ties.
According to diplomatic sources, during an informal meeting of justice and interior ministers in Copenhagen in July, humanitarian agencies such as the UNHCR were invited to analyze the legal framework for these models. Experts stressed that these “innovative solutions” are “completely legitimate” and have a solid legal basis.
Europe also showed solidarity, specifically with Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2022, when it activated the Temporary Protection Directive for the first time and took in four million Ukrainians. “This could have happened in 2016, but it didn’t happen,” Galland says. For Tubiana, the difference lies in the origin of the immigrants: “Ukrainians are white Christians, while Sudanese or black Muslims… are another story.”
According to Frontex data, between January and November 2025, more than 152,000 people arrived illegally in the European Union, most of them by sea, that is, 22% fewer than in the same period in 2024. Just over a thousand deaths were also recorded. These numbers may seem like a success, but, according to Tubiana, “in the long term, they will generate new crises in countries of origin and transit, leading to new displacements.”
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