Are EU migration policies undermining African interests?

Since the mass arrivals of 2015 recast migration as an existential political crisis in Europe, the continent has pursued a consistent and escalating strategy: push the problem outward. Outsource the checkpoints. Fund the fences. Pay African governments to do what European publics would find disturbing if done at home. And when those governments hesitate, threaten them with reduced aid, visa restrictions, or diplomatic isolation. This is the architecture of what scholars and human rights advocates now call migration externalization — and in 2026, it is moving faster, and further south, than at any previous point in post-war European history.

Africa as a Buffer Zone

On February 2 this year, British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper flew to Addis Ababa to announce what her office called “new cooperation on illegal migration from the Horn of Africa.” The visit was framed as a diplomatic partnership — an effort to work with Ethiopia on shared challenges. But the subtext was harder to obscure. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office noted that roughly 30 percent of people crossing the English Channel in small boats over the past two years originated from Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan — four countries either in active conflict or under authoritarian rule. In the year ending September 2025, the UK’s Home Office granted protection to 99 percent of Sudanese asylum claimants and 87 percent of Eritreans at first instance. And yet, the diplomatic priority was not protection — it was deterrence at source.

This contradiction — acknowledging the legitimacy of flight while funding its prevention — sits at the heart of European migration policy. It is not new, but it is deepening. Since the Schengen Agreement came into force in 1995, European migration management has treated Africa less as a partner than as a perimeter to be managed. The logic has been ruthlessly consistent: if you cannot stop them arriving, make it harder for them to leave.

“Governments accept to sign these return contracts because these contracts are conditioned to other financial supports from the EU to the country.”
— Senior official at an international organisation in The Gambia, quoted in research by the Centre for Migration Studies, May 2019

The European Union’s transactional approach to migration — conditioning development aid, trade concessions, and diplomatic goodwill on African cooperation with returns and border controls — has created a relationship that is, at its core, one of coercion dressed as partnership. Countries across the Sahel and Horn of Africa receive EU funding nominally earmarked for development, but which is increasingly redirected toward migration-related security operations. Mali’s government, battered by internal conflict, receives European support while being simultaneously pressured to curtail its citizens’ freedom of movement — a movement protected under ECOWAS free movement protocols that the EU elsewhere claims to support.

The Rwanda Lesson That Europe Hasn’t Learned

Britain’s failed Rwanda experiment offers the clearest cautionary tale. In 2022, the previous Conservative government struck a deal with Kigali under which Rwanda would receive substantial financial assistance in exchange for accepting “tens of thousands” of asylum seekers sent from the United Kingdom for processing and resettlement. The agreement was sold to voters as a revolutionary deterrent. It was, in practice, an expensive political performance. Only four volunteers — not forced deportees, but volunteers — traveled to Rwanda before the incoming Labour government quietly cancelled the scheme following the 2024 election.

The epilogue has been costly. On January 28 this year, Rwanda filed a £100 million international arbitration case against the United Kingdom, claiming that two payments of £50 million each remain outstanding. The British taxpayer, it appears, will be paying for an immigration policy that processed four people. Yet the political logic of the Rwanda model — offshore processing, the elimination of asylum applications on British or European soil — has not been discredited by its failure. It has been replicated. Italy has established processing centres in Albania. Denmark explored its own “Rwanda plan.” Greece has called for EU-wide “migrant return hubs” in Africa to fast-track deportations. The race to externalize is accelerating precisely as the evidence mounts that it does not work.

The New Pact: Europe’s Most Restrictive Turn Yet

The EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum, adopted in 2024 and due to come into full legal effect in June 2026, represents the most restrictive overhaul of European asylum law in the bloc’s history. Its provisions include the creation of detention centres outside the EU, accelerated deportation procedures, harsher penalties for those who fail to comply with return orders, and a “safe countries” list through which asylum claims can be rapidly rejected. A revised returns directive proposed by the European Commission in March 2025 goes further still, giving member states additional powers to restrict the movement of rejected claimants and centralizing deportation authority.

The Pact also formalizes what officials have taken to calling “assertive migration diplomacy” — a diplomatic vocabulary that translates roughly to: cooperate with our returns and deportations, or face consequences. In December 2025, France’s Interior Ministry imposed visa restrictions on the Democratic Republic of Congo and threatened penalties against Namibia and Angola for their governments’ refusal to accept the deportation of undocumented migrants. These are not countries one typically associates with uncooperative governance; they are countries asserting that sovereignty over their citizens cuts both ways.

Amnesty International has been unequivocal in its assessment. The organization said the EU reforms mirror the “harrowing, dehumanizing and unlawful mass arrests, detention and deportations” conducted in the United States under the current administration. European leaders who invoke human rights values as a contrast to Washington’s approach might pause to consider that the world’s leading human rights watchdogs see the distinction as increasingly cosmetic.

Frontex: A Military Actor in African Waters

Underpinning all of this is the dramatic expansion of Frontex, the EU’s border and coast guard agency. Founded in 2004 as a modest coordination body with a budget of €143 million, Frontex is now projected to receive €1.2 billion by 2027 and €2 billion by 2034. It has been transformed into a quasi-military actor deploying advanced surveillance technology, rapid-reaction teams, and joint operations — not only in the Mediterranean but increasingly across West Africa, operating in concert with governments in Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali. A new command center in Estonia symbolizes the agency’s growing strategic reach: it now monitors migration from the Baltic to the Sahel.

Irregular border crossings into the EU dropped by roughly 20 percent in the first half of 2025, a figure that European officials cite as evidence that their strategies are working. What it more accurately reflects is that the geography of suffering has shifted. The International Organization for Migration recorded 760 deaths in the Mediterranean in the first half of 2025 alone. The Western African route saw a 41 percent drop in detected crossings — but deaths in the Sahara Desert, beyond the reach of European monitoring agencies, remain largely uncounted. When flows fall in one corridor, they surge in another. Channel crossings toward the United Kingdom rose 23 percent in the same period.

“EU border policies increasingly rely on a racialized view of African migrants as threats.”
— Report on EU border enforcement, 2025

What African Governments Stand to Lose

The pressure placed on African governments by European migration diplomacy creates dilemmas that go well beyond administrative inconvenience. Research conducted across West Africa makes the calculus plain: governments know that enforced returns reduce remittances — a financial lifeline that, in countries like Senegal and Mali, outstrips foreign direct investment. They know that returning migrants, many of whom risked everything and failed, face social stigma, family pressure, and a labour market that cannot absorb them. They know that deportations are, in the words of one researcher, “undignified” — and that indignity breeds political discontent.

At the same time, the incentives to comply are powerful. Development funding increasingly flows through migration-conditioned channels. Visa access to Europe — crucial for African business travelers, students, and diaspora communities — can be restricted at will under the EU’s revised visa code adopted in 2020. Governments in fragile states, dependent on European budget support and diplomatic goodwill, have limited room to refuse. The result is what ECDPM analysts describe as “duplicity” — states that publicly sign return agreements while privately doing little to implement them, threading the needle between European demands and their own citizens’ interests.

Niger offers a particularly stark example. Under pressure from European partners, Nigerien authorities conducted frequent immigration checks and deported ECOWAS citizens — nationals from neighbouring countries who, under regional law, have the right to move and settle freely. European externalization, in other words, was not merely hindering African mobility; it was actively dismantling regional integration frameworks that African governments themselves had built.

The Road Not Taken: Regularisation and Its Quiet Abandonment

The contrast with Spain’s current approach is instructive. While the rest of the EU races toward restriction, Madrid has announced a regularisation scheme covering all irregular migrants who have resided in Spain for more than five months and hold no criminal record. Between 500,000 and 800,000 people are expected to qualify — the overwhelming majority from Latin America. The scheme is not charity; it is policy grounded in economic reality. Spain’s population is ageing, its labour force shrinking, and its informal economy dependent on workers who currently live outside the legal system.

Regularisation schemes of this kind — of which European countries have conducted more than 40 since the 1990s — allow migrants to work and pay taxes, to be tracked by immigration authorities, and, critically, to travel and return home when conditions allow. They reduce the incentive for permanent irregular settlement by creating legal pathways that do not require permanent departure. They are not a surrender of border control; they are a pragmatic supplement to it. Yet across most of Europe, such schemes have been abandoned not because they failed, but because they became politically toxic in the age of anti-immigration populism.

The UK’s experience is particularly telling. Net migration into Britain fell from a post-Brexit peak of 908,000 in the year to June 2023 to 204,000 in the year to June 2025 — a level consistent with the 2010s, and by any objective measure, manageable. In the same period, only 43,309 people — six percent of all non-EU arrivals — came by small boat. The overwhelming majority of arrivals came for work and study, filling positions in healthcare, agriculture, hospitality, and engineering that British nationals do not. And yet migration policy is consumed entirely by the asylum system, driven by an active parliamentary petition calling for offshore detention and mass deportation that has attracted almost 700,000 signatures, and by polling that now places immigration above the economy as voters’ chief concern.

The Longer View: Why These Policies Will Fail

The International Organization for Migration estimates that climate change, economic instability, and conflict could displace 85 million people from sub-Saharan Africa by 2050. The conflicts that are currently generating the largest shares of asylum claimants in Europe — Sudan’s civil war, Eritrea’s indefinite military conscription, Somalia’s collapse — are not amenable to border management solutions. They are political and environmental crises that require political and environmental responses. Externalizing their consequences to African transit countries does not resolve them; it concentrates suffering in places with fewer resources to manage it.

The medium- and long-term evidence on deterrence is also unambiguous: it does not stop migration, it redirects it. Flows from Tunisia dropped dramatically following a wave of arrests, desert deportations, and coast guard deployments — but researchers noted that what collapsed was not movement, it was the route. People took longer, more dangerous paths. The Frontex data on the first half of 2025 confirms the same dynamic: as the Western African route fell 41 percent, the Channel rose 23 percent, and the Central Mediterranean remained the most active corridor in the EU, accounting for four in ten irregular arrivals.

Strengthening autocratic regimes in exchange for migration cooperation — as the EU has done with Libya’s detention camp operators, with Tunisia’s government, with Sudan’s pre-coup security apparatus — introduces its own instabilities. Regimes that receive European legitimacy and funding for migration control become harder to hold accountable for human rights abuses. Their populations become more resentful. The conditions that drive people from their homes grow worse, not better. And the cycle intensifies.

A Call for African Resistance — and European Reckoning

The current moment demands two responses simultaneously. African governments — particularly those in West and East Africa that bear the greatest weight of European migration diplomacy — should resist the latest round of coercive frameworks with more than quiet non-compliance. The African Union has the institutional architecture to coordinate a collective response to externalization, to defend regional free movement protocols, and to insist that any migration cooperation be grounded in genuine development partnerships rather than border enforcement contracts. Individual governments that have signed return agreements without legislative oversight should be held accountable by their own parliaments and civil societies.

European leaders, meanwhile, face a more uncomfortable reckoning. The political logic of the current moment — demonstrate control, punish non-cooperation, make the journey more dangerous so fewer attempt it — may win election cycles. It will not solve the underlying dynamics. If the EU is genuinely committed to African development, it cannot simultaneously redirect development funding into border enforcement operations that serve European political needs at African expense. If it believes in human rights, it cannot subcontract their violation to North African partners and look away. And if it understands that its own ageing, labour-short economies will require significant immigration over the coming decades, it must begin building the legal frameworks and political narratives to manage that reality — rather than continuing to promise an impossible seal.

There is a harder truth here that European politicians are not yet prepared to tell their electorates: migration from Africa is not a crisis to be stopped. It is a structural feature of a world defined by profound inequality, climate disruption, and conflict — and of a Europe that will need workers, caregivers, and dynamism that its shrinking native populations cannot alone provide. The question is not whether that migration will happen. The question is whether it will happen safely, legally, and with dignity — or dangerously, coercively, and at a cost that is paid disproportionately by Africans who had least to do with creating the conditions that moved people in the first place.

Short-term political gains, purchased through diplomatic coercion and offshore detention, are not gains at all. They are deferrals — of the human cost, of the political reckoning, and ultimately of a Europe that must one day look in the mirror and ask what it was willing to do to other people in order to avoid having an honest conversation with itself.