Europe’s Values and Their Victims
On the dual use of refugees and the fight against them
Updated and expanded version of our 2024 article on the occasion of the EU Return Regulation of June 2026.
On Wednesday, June 17, 2026, the European Parliament in Strasbourg passed the new Return Regulation by a clear majority.[1] When the result was announced, members of the right-wing groups stood up, clenched their fists and chanted “Send them back!” – send them back.
The majority was carried by the Christian Democrats of the EPP, which also includes the CDU and CSU, by liberals and by the three far-right groups, including the AfD’s group; EPP chairman Manfred Weber, who had negotiated the compromise, was congratulated. The Social Democrat Delara Burkhardt spoke of “the darkest moment for me in the EU Parliament”.
The shouting was more honest than the outrage about it. What was passed was what the entire majority wanted, from the right-wing fringe far into the self-proclaimed center: camps outside Europe to which those who are not wanted are deported. Some shout it out, the others administer their ideological agreement with a serious expression. They agree on the goal; at most, they still argue about the tone.
The deported values
The outrage follows a script. SPD MEP Birgit Sippel speaks of a “merciless deportation policy” that does not do justice to “the German Basic Law, the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and principles of the rule of law”. The Frankfurter Rundschau headlines “The EU is deporting its values” and recalls the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize: “Does anyone still remember this former community of values?”[2] The Catholic bishops invoke the “inviolable dignity” of every human being, and Caritas warns against stigmatization.
That much is clear; the regulation is brutal and a dramatic escalation of the existing anti-migration policy, more on that later. And yet bourgeois criticism misses the decisive point. The EU is not deporting its values, it is getting serious about them.
This community of values, which pins the Nobel Peace Prize to its lapel, has always been an association of competing nation states that decides at its external border who is allowed in, and that wants to get rid of the people it cannot use. Sealing itself off is part of these values; it is what they mean in practice. Anyone who complains that the EU is betraying its principles has not understood those principles. Asylum law has always been the state’s right to determine for itself whom it recognizes as worthy of protection and whom it rejects – a means of selection in its own hands, one that the refugee precisely does not have.
The uproar over the broken “firewall” is also theater. Research by the Deutsche Presse-Agentur has revealed that the right and those labeled “far-right extremists” worked more closely together than previously known – agreements in a chat group, personal meetings.[3] Chancellor Friedrich Merz insists that they do “not work together with the right-wing radicals in the European Parliament”. The voting result says otherwise, and in substance the question is secondary anyway. In the matter of deportations, the “democratic center” and the right are not separated by their goal, but by the volume and by how they sell it to their voters. Some chant “Send them back”, the others speak of “consistent returns” – what is meant is the same.
What the regulation wants
At the heart of the regulation are the “Return Hubs”, return centers in third countries outside the EU. Anyone who is required to leave but cannot be returned to their country of origin – because that country refuses or because there are no diplomatic relations – is to be housed in such camps in the future, either as a final destination or as a transit camp.
The prerequisite is an agreement with a third country that accommodates the people and receives money or visa facilitation in return. Uganda, Kazakhstan and “states in Africa” are being discussed. Germany, together with others, is already looking for partners; Austrian Interior Minister Karner wants “a concrete project” by the end of the year.[4] Europe is therefore buying itself the right to unload people elsewhere.
Families with children may be deported; only unaccompanied minors remain exempt. Anyone with a return order must cooperate in their own deportation; otherwise they face cuts to benefits, confiscation of their passport, house searches and the seizure of personal belongings. Deportation detention will be extended to up to 24 months, and longer in special cases. This serves an openly stated objective: increasing the number of actual returns. So far, according to the Commission, only about one in four people with a return decision is actually deported. Migration Commissioner Magnus Brunner praises himself for “more control”.[5]
The regulation revises the 2008 Return Directive and complements the Pact on Asylum and Migration, which has been in force since June 12; the Council of the member states still has to give its formal approval, which is considered a formality. The rules on the Return Hubs are to apply immediately, the rest after twelve months.[6]
This is called “inhumane”, and the suggestion is that something has spun out of control here. The opposite is true. The harshness is intentional and justified for the EU’s superstructural purposes. Anyone who forces people who have nowhere to go to “cooperate in their own deportation” and takes away their passport has thought about how to break a will. Behind this stands a standpoint that the regulation merely thinks through to the end: the residence of these people is fully at the state’s disposal. Protection is not something the refugee possesses and brings with them; it is an allocation that the state grants or refuses according to its own criteria.
Nothing new in Europe
The only new thing about the Return Hubs is that they have now finally been ratified. Europe has been pursuing the matter for years. Its border regime does not end at its own coast; it begins at the external borders and reaches deep into Africa, to where other states and militias do, for payment, the work that would look bad in Europe. Italy has already moved deportation detention and asylum procedures to Albania; since 2016, a billion-euro pact with Turkey has kept millions of refugees away.
In Libya, a “coast guard” financed, trained and equipped by the EU pulls back the boats that wanted to reach Europe. Those intercepted disappear into internment camps, about which a UN commission of inquiry stated that people are “systematically tortured” there; documented abuses include murder, enforced disappearances, slavery and rape. Those who pay get out of the camps; those who have no money stay, are resold or beaten to death. “No money, no freedom”, as survivors describe it:
“Children are also not exempt from abuses; we documented allegations of rape and beatings of children by guards and smugglers. […] In Libya in July, Kameela, a 23-year-old Somali woman detained in Ain Zara detention center, told us she and her husband were held by smugglers somewhere in southern Libya, along with roughly 400 others, for three months in late 2017 and early 2018. She said she was repeatedly raped. “A big man there, a Libyan, he raped me. My husband couldn’t stop him, they held a gun to his head. Every night he did this to me. If I said, ‘don’t touch me,’ he beat me.” At the time we spoke, Kameela was seven months pregnant. She said the pregnancy was the result of the rape.” [7]
In Tunisia, also with European money, police round up Black migrants and abandon them in the desert. Between June 2023 and May 2025, human rights organizations counted at least seventy such collective deportations involving more than eleven thousand (11,000!) people, including pregnant women and children, abandoned in the borderlands with Libya and Algeria, without water or shade; some died there. These are the same “safe third countries” with which Brussels concludes its pacts.[8]
Those who nevertheless set off from the coasts are dying more often than ever. In 2025, the International Organization for Migration counted 1,756 dead and missing in the Mediterranean, including 97 children; since 2014, the figure is more than 33,000. The year 2026 is on course to surpass everything: by spring alone, around 990 people had drowned or disappeared, more than twice as many as in the same period of the previous year – one of the deadliest starts to a year since counting began.[9]
These deaths are the means of the border regime: those who drown serve as a deterrent. The drowned are the flotsam of an order that itself produces the regions of misery from which people flee – through war, through markets, through the normal operation of the world economy – and then treats the refugees as surplus people who shatter against the dividing line between one’s own people and foreigners.
A Cameroonian woman tells Amnesty about the Tunisian coast guard in its EU-sanctioned work of preventing refugees from making their way to Europe:
“They kept hitting our [wooden] boat with long batons with sharp endings, they pierced it… There were at least two women and three babies without life vests. We saw them drown and then we could not see the bodies anymore. I have never been so scared.”[10]
The contradictions of deporting – and their resolution
First, on the legal side. The Residence Act, Section 60 paragraph 1, states:
“A foreigner may not be deported to a state in which their life or freedom is threatened on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political conviction.”[11]
Paragraph 2 adds: not to a place where “there is a concrete risk of being subjected to torture”. And Article 3 paragraph 1 of the Basic Law: “All persons shall be equal before the law.” A basic right for everyone that applies equally “to Germans, foreigners and stateless persons”.[12]
A German citizen who commits murder goes to prison for a few years and then more or less continues their life (you can read a critique of prisons published by us here). An Afghan who commits the same act is, with some probability, also threatened with deportation – a punishment that can never hit the German. Even here, then, not everyone is equal before the law. And deportation, unlike imprisonment, often leads precisely to the place that Section 60 prohibits. The Federal Foreign Office says the following about Afghanistan:
“Systematic human rights violations occur, for example through torture, extrajudicial killings, corporal punishment and public executions. The rule of law and democracy have been abolished.”[13]
The same state deports people there.
“Then he should not have committed a crime,” goes the objection. But what is criminal is determined by the same law that also decides on deportation. The “guest right” thesis – that whoever comes here has to behave as a guest – falls apart the moment one notices that the vast majority of those who do not behave are themselves among the “hosts”. Deportation for criminal offenses de facto turns refugee status into a prior conviction.
At this point one could shout “hypocrisy!”: the state is breaking its own law. This is how Taz and Frankfurter Rundschau express their outrage, and in doing so they miss the point. It is precisely deportation that carries out “equality before the law”. This equality does not promise that everyone will fare equally well; it means that all are subject to the same force that disposes over them and classifies them according to its standards. The law itself produces inequality: citizenship is the legal title by which the state claims some as its own and declares others removable. The contradiction that first glance discovers is in fact the truth of the purpose. The Return Hub is the rule of law at work.
Deportation as a suitable means
What happens to the deported is a matter of indifference to those in power, as long as the purpose is fulfilled. By now, the federal government is openly negotiating with competitors whom it previously, rightly, called “inhumane”. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) declares that “deportations to Syria and Afghanistan must be possible”, and his ministry has reached agreements with the Taliban and with Syria’s new leadership intended to allow regular deportations of “criminal offenders and threats”. In 2025, deportations to Afghanistan resumed – around 80 people on one collective flight – and, for the first time, also to Syria, where a man from North Rhine-Westphalia was taken after already serving his prison sentence.[14] The Frankfurter Rundschau sums up the logic: “Cooperation with the inhumane Taliban in Afghanistan? Has to be, then.”
The traffic light government (SPD, Greens, Liberals) had already decided that people without a German passport who support militant Palestinian groups on social media can be expelled – under certain circumstances without a court judgment; a like under a post classified as “glorification of terrorism” could be enough.[15] What counts as terror is determined by the German state. For a German citizen, the same statement would at worst result in a minor penalty, realistically none – for the Kurdish or Palestinian refugee, who judges the situation differently from someone who has never experienced this suffering, it becomes a threat: one word too many, and you are gone. The number of deportations rises, and the unwelcome person falls silent – two birds with one stone.
Symbolic politics with a system
In 2025, more than 22,000 people were deported from Germany, more than the roughly 20,000 in the previous year. At the same time, the number of first-time asylum applications fell by half, to around 113,000.[16] Dobrindt books both as a success of his “migration turnaround”. Yet even if the number doubled again: what deportation is supposed to be good for remains unclear.
“Deportation creates housing,” it is said. Germany lacks around 800,000 apartments, the result of speculation and the absence of public housing construction; most asylum seekers live in collective accommodation anyway. “Refugee crime” should not be “played down”, it is further said. Looking more closely, it is overwhelmingly about theft, shoplifting and “fare evasion” – riding without a ticket – in other words, about obtaining money. Those who do such things are usually poor. And immigrants are kept poor by the asylum regime itself: through work bans, unrecognized qualifications, collective accommodation in which strangers wait out their days in cramped conditions with nothing to do. Pro Asyl soberly states that criminality is a question of living conditions and not of nationality – “the vast majority of newcomers behave lawfully”.[17]
Behind the talk of “abuse of the welfare state” disappears the fact that the same state draws on the population of the world whenever it benefits its businesses. Since the recruitment agreements, it has brought workers into the country, just enough so that no company suffers from shortages and wages do not rise. “Guest workers”, “skilled workers” and “shortage occupations”; the calculation remains the same. Useful is whoever can be put to use; whoever is left over is deported. Deportation sorts the world’s population according to its usefulness for national capital.
This making-use-of people is also adopted by bourgeois workers’ organizations. The German Trade Union Confederation argues against an even stricter migration policy by saying that “with the necessary support and the right conditions, refugees can be engines of development and prosperity”.[18] From the perspective of the state, of course, it is right about that too. According to the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), the German state alone needs at least 400,000 new migrants per year in order to sustainably secure “economic and social stability” in Germany. The same can be extrapolated to the richest states of the EU. DIW president Marcel Fratzscher writes in Die Zeit:
“A common misconception is that only highly qualified people – that is, employees with far above-average incomes – are economically and financially worthwhile workers for Germany. This is fundamentally wrong and a slap in the face to every German employee who works hard for medium or low wages. Especially in many systemically relevant basic-service occupations, people with a migration background work and secure public services. [Diplomatically phrased for ‘we need more foreigners because nobody in this country wants to slog away in care work for 15 euros an hour]'”[19]
In the comments on the Zeit article, one finds razor-sharp analyses of the contradiction between the base and superstructure of migration ideology. One user writes:
“But we live in a democracy, which literally translates as ‘rule by the people’. And the people have no desire for 400,000 migrants annually. Who or what even is ‘the German economy’ that it actually repeatedly possesses the hubris to want to rise above the ‘rule by the people’. […] The ‘German economy’, whatever that may be, MUST find a way to come to terms with the people’s desire for less immigration. It cannot work any other way.”[20]
That is almost Marxism already. So there is, regardless of the false insight from which the aversion to more migration stems, a contradiction between politics (and what it does in order to correspond to the anti-migration status quo) and what the German national economy needs in order to remain competitive. That is why the argument is of course not: “Without migration, this economy will collapse, therefore it needs more migration.” “The economy” initially has nothing to do with the interests of working people in this country. They have much more in common with a refugee than with their German-born boss.
Rather, the argument is this: deportations solve none of the problems they promise to solve, because those problems have other causes. Nevertheless, they are not without consequences. The state demonstrates that it is acting, that it divides its population into the people and surplus people and disposes over the surplus people. In doing so, it binds the loyalty of citizens whom it addresses as a national team in locational competition – a team whose well-being supposedly depends on the success of the nation and for whom refugees appear as a burden.
The consensus
That is the core. The contradictions of the conditions – poverty in a rich country, crumbling infrastructure alongside record arms spending, declining purchasing power alongside top profits – are loaded onto one group of people. The poverty that follows from class antagonism is treated as the work of expensive refugees. The criminality that arises from precarious situations is attributed to their “nature”. And the flight whose causes – the wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – the West has profited from and helped create appears as the laziness of people who “rest on our welfare systems” (sic).
That this accusation is also economically false should be noted in passing. In the “crisis year” of 2016, Germany spent around 21.6 billion euros in connection with immigration; in the “record year” of 2023, 29.7 billion, and in 2025, 24.8 billion euros. The same state that provided 568 billion euros to rescue the banks in 2008 – more than 800 billion adjusted for inflation – and that today is freeing up a special fund of hundreds of billions for rearmament is supposed to find these amounts too much.[21] The bank rescue package alone would allow refugees to be admitted for decades. The money is there. It is about the purpose, not the capacity.
What remains is the question that ignites the outrage: Is this fascism now? Anyone who points to the loudest loudmouth and calls on the “community of values” to turn back falls for the life-lie of liberalism – as if there were a good, human-rights-based EU that had to be defended against its derailment. What appears as the breaking of a taboo is the normal operation of the democratic state, carried by almost all those who bear responsibility within it.
The correct position therefore does not invoke deported values. It attacks the standpoint from which deportation follows: the nation that divides people into useful and surplus; the locational competition that first turns refugees into competitors and then declares them waste; the capital that procures and wears out workers as it currently needs them. The opponent is the consensus itself – which some pass into law and others merely sing out louder.
[1]“Send them back” – far-right extremists cheer deportations in the EU Parliament, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 18.6.2026 (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/migration-europa-eu-parlament-rueckfuehrung-rechtsextreme-brandmauer-li.3500957); EU Parliament gives green light for controversial Return Hubs, Der Standard, 17.6.2026 (https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000327691/); roll-call vote 418:218:30.
[2]Quote Birgit Sippel (SPD): Deutsche Welle, 2.6.2026. – Pitt von Bebenburg, “Migration policy: The EU is deporting its values”, Frankfurter Rundschau, 2.6.2026 (https://www.fr.de/meinung/kommentare/migrationspolitik-eu-schiebt-ihre-werte-ab-94333855.html).
[3]Cooperation between conservatives and the right as well as Merz quote: “EU clears the way for deportation centers in third countries”, Deutsche Welle, 2.6.2026 (https://www.dw.com/de/eu-macht-weg-frei-für-abschiebezentren-in-drittstaaten/a-77386464).
[4]Return Hubs, third countries (including Uganda and Kazakhstan, among others), money or visa facilitation and Karner quote: Der Standard, 17.6.2026; WELT, 18.6.2026; Deutsche Welle, 2.6.2026.
[5]Duty to cooperate, sanctions, deportation detention up to 24 months, return rate (around one in four) and Brunner quote: WELT, 18.6.2026; Deutsche Welle, 2.6.2026.
[6]Relationship to the 2008 Return Directive and to the Pact on Asylum and Migration (in force since 12.6.2026), pending Council approval, staggered entry into force: Der Standard, 17.6.2026; WELT, 18.6.2026.
[7]On the EU-funded Libyan “coast guard” and the internment camps: UN Commission of Inquiry on Libya (2023), “systematically tortured”; Human Rights Watch, “No Escape from Hell” (https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/01/21/no-escape-hell/eu-policies-contribute-abuse-migrants-libya); SOS MEDITERRANEE, “No Money, No Freedom” (https://www.sosmediterranee.org/torture-and-extortion-of-migrants-in-libya/); openDemocracy.
[8]On the EU-cofinanced collective deportations into the desert by Tunisia (at least 70 cases, more than 11,500 people, June 2023 – May 2025): Amnesty International, “Tunisia: Rampant violations against refugees and migrants”, November 2025 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/11/tunisia-rampant-violations-against-refugees-migrants-eu-risks-complicity/); ECRE (https://ecre.org/).
[9]Mediterranean dead/missing: IOM, Missing Migrants Project (https://missingmigrants.iom.int/region/mediterranean); Mediendienst Integration (https://mediendienst-integration.de/fluechtlinge/fluechtlinge-in-der-eu-und-eu-asylpolitik/wie-viele-todesfaelle-gibt-es-auf-den-fluchtrouten-in-die-eu/). 2025: 1,756 dead/missing (including 97 children); since 2014 more than 33,000; 2026 by spring around 990, more than twice as many as in the same period of the previous year.
[10] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/11/tunisia-rampant-violations-against-refugees-migrants-eu-risks-complicity/
[11]Section 60 paragraph 1 Residence Act (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/aufenthg_2004/__60.html).
[12]Article 3 paragraph 1 Basic Law; on its classification as a basic right for everyone, see our article “The Basic Law, Property and Democracy”, Kritikpunkt, May 2024 (https://kritikpunkt.com/de/das-grundgesetz-eigentum-und-demokratie/).
[13]Federal Foreign Office, travel and safety information Afghanistan (accessed June 2026), https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/de/service/laender/afghanistan-node.
[14]Dobrindt quote and agreements with the Taliban and Syria’s new leadership: BMI press release, December 2025; ZDFheute (https://www.zdfheute.de/politik/deutschland/dobrindt-abschiebungen-syrien-afghanistan-100.html). On the scale of Afghanistan deportations in 2025: Mediendienst Integration. On the Merz federal government (sworn in 6.5.2025, CDU/CSU-SPD; Dobrindt/CSU interior minister, Wadephul/CDU as foreign minister): German Bundestag.
[15]On the expulsion of non-Germans for “glorification of terrorism”, see our article “Against all those who are against it”, Kritikpunkt, July 2024 (https://kritikpunkt.com/gegen-alle-die-dagegen-sind/).
[16] Deportation and asylum figures 2024/2025 (more than 22,000 deportations in 2025 after around 20,000 in the previous year; first-time asylum applications -51% to around 113,000): LTO (https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/asylpolitik-bundesregierung-2025-weniger-asylantraege-mehr-abschiebungen); Tagesspiegel.
[17] Pro Asyl, “Facts against prejudices” (https://www.proasyl.de/).
[18] https://www.dgb.de/fileadmin/download_center/Positionen_und_Thesen/241029_Grundlagenpapier_Flucht_Asyl.pdf
[19] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-02/migrationsdebatte-deutschland-wahlkampf-wirtschaft-arbeitskraefte
[20] https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2025-02/migrationsdebatte-deutschland-wahlkampf-wirtschaft-arbeitskraefte
[21]Figures on immigration costs in 2016 and on the 2008 bank rescue as well as the special fund: see our article “Profits and Wars”, Kritikpunkt 2024 (https://kritikpunkt.com/de/profite-und-kriege/).
