Sparks: EU reaches provisional deal on migrant returns: An effective and fair system?

Drafting laws to expel the desperate is merely the frantic activity of a sailor trying to bail out the ocean while the hull of his own character rots beneath him.

Each minister used the word 'efficiency' with a sharp, clinical precision, while in the corridor, a clerk quietly removed the extra chairs from the waiting room and turned off the heat.

Observing my own heart, I find that my zeal for 'expedited procedures' is always strongest when the person being hurried across a border bears no resemblance to my own kin.

Fear of the stranger is but a collision of atoms in the mind, a phantom produced by those who do not see that all bodies are temporary clusters returning eventually to the same infinite void.

Forget the speeches: the Council has calculated that the domestic cost of appearing cruel is finally lower than the political risk of appearing incompetent to those who hold the gates.

As water forced through a narrow aperture increases its pressure until the vessel cracks, so these administrative constraints only accelerate the turbulence they seek to contain within a failing geometry.

Drawing a line on a map and calling it a finality is the delusion of a monk in a cell who refuses to admit the stars are infinite and every point is equally the center.

The matter is this: any system that requires a thousand pages of legal jargon to justify the simple expulsion of a man is a system that has already lost its claim to common sense.

That a confederation should establish a mechanism for the summary removal of individuals, without the slow and sacred protections of due process, constitutes a structural defect that must eventually erode the liberties of the citizens themselves.

Treating human displacement as a sequence of discrete variables to be cleared from the operational stack ignores the fact that the underlying engine is powered by blood, not arithmetic.

The official account describes an 'effective return system,' but from the damp floor of the processing center where the guards never look you in the eye, it looks like a factory for human despair.

There is a gate across the continent, and the modern reformer is so eager to kick it down or lock it tighter that he has entirely forgotten why the walls were built in the first place.

They have polished the iron room and called it a doorway, yet the air remains just as thin for those whose only crime was hoping the walls were made of glass.

When the vessels of the state harden their hearts against the living green of a wandering soul, they choke the very channels through which the divine breath sustains the health of the whole body.

Naming this deal 'fair' is the ultimate victory of the ruling hegemony, which has so thoroughly defined the common sense of the border that the exclusion of the subaltern now appears as a neutral technicality.

Things that are unrefined: a proclamation of justice written on heavy, grey paper; the sound of a gate latching at midnight; a man being told to leave a place he has just begun to name.