For years, the European Union has had a strange habit. It wants to look firmer on irregular migration, but it has struggled to turn return orders into actual returns. So Brussels has kept reaching outward, striking deals with third countries, hardening border policy, and, increasingly, treating externalisation as a substitute for internal agreement. The European Parliament’s recent backing for a new returns regime, including the possibility of sending some people ordered to leave the Union to so-called return hubs outside the bloc, suggests that this logic is no longer a mere idea but part of the political mainstream.
That matters because return hubs are more than just a technical fix. Supporters present them as a pragmatic answer to a system that is widely seen as slow, fragmented, and ineffective. Critics see something else, namely an attempt to move detention, coercion, and legal risk just far enough away to make Europe’s migration problem look tidier than it is.
The real significance of return hubs lies less in whether they will work than in what they reveal about the EU’s governing instinct on migration. When control proves difficult at home, responsibility is pushed abroad.
The Road to Externalisation
The road to return hubs was paved long before the latest vote. Since the migration crisis of the mid-2010s, the EU has been trying to square three ambitions that sit uneasily together. It wants fewer irregular arrivals, faster removals of those denied the right to stay, and less public quarrelling among member states over who should carry the burden. The result has been a migration regime that grows denser by the year, even as its core tensions remain unresolved. The Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in 2024, was supposed to bring more order and predictability to this field. But one problem refused to go away. Yet even as the EU refined its internal rules, it kept looking outward for relief.
That outward turn was not limited to border control. Over the past decade, the Union has leaned ever more heavily on readmission arrangements, external partnerships, and cooperation with third countries to manage migration beyond its own territory. Returns sat at the heart of that shift. Eurostat data show a persistent difference between the number of third-country nationals ordered to leave and the number who are recorded as having returned. Yet even the European Parliament’s own research service warns that these figures are often used too casually, as if they offered a neat measure of state capacity rather than a messy picture shaped by legal appeals, administrative delays, and different national practices. Still, the politics were clear enough. Weak return rates became a standing argument for doing more outside the bloc. In that sense, return hubs are not a sudden phenomenon, but the latest step in a longer European search for migration management beyond the EU’s own territory.
How the New Return Machine Works
As currently drafted, the proposal is broader than its most provocative feature. More than just the creation of return hubs, it tries to rebuild the EU’s return machinery from the ground up, replacing the older framework with a directly applicable regulation and setting a common system for return, removal, and readmission across the bloc. One of its main innovations is the European Return Order, a standard form to be entered into the Schengen Information System. That would allow one member state to recognise and enforce another’s return decision when a person moves across an internal border, which is Brussels’ way of saying that administrative buck-passing should become harder.
At the same time, the proposal tightens the obligations placed on the people being returned. They are expected to cooperate with authorities at every stage, provide documents and biometric data, and remain available for the procedure. The deadline for leaving can be immediate and may not exceed 30 days, while detention, in some cases, could last up to 24 months. Most controversially, the text permits sending a person to a third country that agrees to take them under an arrangement made by the EU or some member states, as long as human rights standards and the principle of non-refoulement are properly followed. This is the legal framework that allows for the establishment of return hubs. In the Council’s own description, such hubs could serve either as staging grounds for onward deportation or as the final destination itself.
Frustration Becoming Policy
The Commission had already prepared the ground by the time it tabled its new returns regulation. Once the migration pact had dealt, however imperfectly, with asylum procedures and burden-sharing, returns emerged as the next frontier. The Commission’s case for reform rests squarely on the claim that the existing system is too fragmented, too slow, and too easy to evade. A directly applicable regulation, common rules across the bloc, and stronger recognition of return decisions between member states were presented as overdue repairs rather than a political departure. The Council has embraced much the same argument, presenting tougher and more streamlined return rules as a question of credibility as well as control.
Return hubs became thinkable in that setting because they answered several political needs at once. They offered governments a language of firmness without reopening the most toxic arguments over solidarity, relocation quotas, and legal pathways. In a climate where migration debates have hardened across the continent, the promise of faster removals has become one of the few things many capitals can agree on. Return hubs fit into that mood. They suggest action beyond Europe’s borders, where governments increasingly look for solutions whenever compromise inside the Union proves too costly or too slow. That helps explain why a proposal carrying obvious legal and humanitarian risks could still gather momentum. It addresses a long-standing political demand to project a sense of control, despite the uncertainty of practical outcomes.
Offshore on Paper, Disorganized in Practice
In practice, a return hub would need rather more than a defiant press release. First comes an agreement with a third country willing to host people ordered to leave the EU, setting out who is accepted, under what conditions, for how long, and what happens if the arrangement breaks down. Then comes the machinery. According to the EU’s own rights agency, these hubs are imagined as facilities in third countries, open or closed, where people would be held temporarily until member states or Frontex organise their onward return. That means accommodation, security, medical care, legal access, transport, and some credible form of oversight. No such hub has yet been established, which gives the idea a distinctly architectural quality. The concept has many blueprints but lacks an actual building.
Additionally, every step depends on sustained cooperation from states outside the EU and on onward removals that may be slow, contested, or simply impossible. If that chain breaks, a hub risks becoming less a transit point than a warehouse with a foreign postcode. The Italy-Albania arrangement is not the same model, but it is a useful warning. Extraterritorial migration schemes can look brisk on paper and then stumble in practice, especially once courts, logistics and questions of legal responsibility catch up with them. Offshore governance, it turns out, has a habit of traveling with its problems, as issues related to accountability, enforcement, and human rights often accompany these arrangements.
When Control Moves Abroad, So Do The Risks
The legal objections begin with a simple point. Moving a person out of the EU does not move the law out with them. The proposal insists that any transfer to a third country must comply with fundamental rights and the principle of non-refoulement, which bars states from sending someone to a place where they face persecution, torture, or other serious harm. But that formal safeguard does a great deal of work. The EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, UNHCR and the UN human rights office all warn that sending people to hubs in third countries would raise difficult questions about access to asylum, judicial review, detention conditions and the ability to challenge removal in practice. Once a person is outside the Union, legal protection may still exist on paper, but it can become harder to exercise, harder to monitor, and easier for governments to describe as somebody else’s problem.
That is why critics see return hubs not merely as an administrative device but as a test of responsibility. If people are held for extended periods while onward deportation proves slow or impossible, hubs could drift from transit facilities into sites of prolonged confinement by another name. The European Council on Refugees and Exiles also argues that the proposal strengthens detention powers and weakens procedural safeguards at precisely the moment when the system becomes more coercive and less transparent. The humanitarian concern is not only what may happen at the point of return, but also what may happen in the long wait before it. A policy designed to make removal look more efficient could instead produce a chain of legal limbo, outsourced custody, and diluted accountability. Europe may discover, once again, that distance is not the same thing as a solution.
Not Everyone Is Buying It
Politically, return hubs have drawn support less because they are settled policy than because they signal resolve. The Council has framed the new return rules as a way to make the system firmer, faster, and more credible, which suits governments eager to show that irregular migration can still be controlled. Yet even within that camp, agreement is thinner than it looks. Greece, for instance, welcomed the tougher provisions on return hubs in the Council text but still abstained on the general approach, arguing that the shift to mandatory mutual recognition of return decisions remained too hesitant and that parts of the transfer framework were too vague.
Parliament’s backing suggests that this argument now reaches well beyond the hard right. Greece’s abstention suggests that even supporters disagree on what a tougher system should actually look like. The more the proposal moves from legislative text to actual implementation, the more awkward questions are likely to surface about cost, legal exposure, and which third countries, exactly, would agree to host such facilities.
Outside the institutions, the mood is far less accommodating. ECRE has attacked the proposal as a significant expansion of coercive return powers with weaker safeguards, while Amnesty has portrayed Parliament’s vote as an endorsement of harsher detention and deportation practices. In the western Balkans, where speculation about possible host states so often lands, Collective Aid has warned that hubs in Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia would deepen detention, weaken safeguards, and push people further from lawyers, medical care, and asylum procedures. Even politicians in the region are reluctant to queue. In May 2025, Albania’s prime minister, Edi Rama, called his country’s deal with Italy a one-off and said Tirana had rejected similar requests from other countries. That matters politically as well as morally. Return hubs are often sold in the EU as a problem-solving device. Elsewhere, they can look more like a polite request for other countries to absorb the consequences of Europe’s own migration impasse, which raises questions about fairness and international responsibility in addressing migration issues.
Externalisation Comes of Age
Return hubs may never work as neatly as their advocates hope. They require dependable third-country partners, robust legal safeguards, and a degree of administrative control that European migration policy rarely manages to achieve for long. Yet their significance lies elsewhere. What matters is that they have moved from the outer edge of the debate toward the center of EU policymaking. That alone tells a story about the Union’s current instincts. Faced with persistent political pressure on migration, it is increasingly willing to move control outward when agreement at home remains elusive.
That makes return hubs more than a technical fix for a struggling returns system. They are a measure of how the EU now seeks to govern migration through deterrence, distance and cooperation with third countries, even when the legal and humanitarian costs remain uncertain. Supporters see a firmer and more credible system. Critics see responsibility repackaged as logistics. In that sense, the real question is what kind of Europe this process will lead to.
Questions
- Can the EU externalise returns without also externalising legal and moral responsibility?
- Are return hubs mainly a practical solution to low return rates, or a political signal meant to show control?
- What would return hubs mean for the third countries asked to host them, and for the EU’s relations with them?
Readings
