EU Agrees to Speed Up Returns for Unlawful Migrants
This matters for the management of migration flows and affects migrants staying unlawfully in the EU, who may face faster returns, as well as member states dealing with migration.
The policy is debated in terms of structure, funding, and institutional design. What is not debated - and what will determine the policy’s success or failure - is the character of the people who will implement it. We are told that the EU Parliament and the EU Council have reached a provisional agreement to simplify and speed up the return of migrants staying unlawfully. The headlines speak of efficiency, of streamlined procedures, of borders secured by bureaucratic agility. But I look past the machinery of the state to the moral formation of the citizens and officials who must inhabit this new reality. A law is only as good as the conscience of the man who enforces it, and a system is only as stable as the virtue of the people who sustain it.
The proposed reform addresses the administrative friction of migration enforcement while leaving the structural violence of border capitalism intact. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform.
The EU Parliament and the EU Council have provisionally agreed to simplify and speed up the return of migrants staying in the bloc unlawfully. On the surface, this appears to be a technical adjustment, a matter of bureaucratic efficiency. In reality, it is a political assertion. It declares that the primary problem with migration is not the inequality that drives people from the global South to the North, nor the labor exploitation that awaits them upon arrival, but rather the slowness with which the state can eject those it has already deemed surplus. The mechanism is clear: by streamlining the process of expulsion, the European Union seeks to reduce the cost of maintaining the border, not to dismantle the border itself.
Hannah More
The policy is debated in terms of structure, funding, and institutional design. What is not debated - and what will determine the policy’s success or failure - is the character of the people who will implement it.
My socialist opponent offers a diagnosis that is, in its structural analysis, undeniably sharp. He correctly identifies that the state’s interest lies not in human dignity, but in the maintenance of a flexible labor reserve, and that the current bureaucratic labyrinth serves the interests of capital accumulation rather than justice. I concede this point fully: the machinery of the state is often cold, and its efficiency is frequently purchased at the expense of the vulnerable. To pretend that these new rules are born of benevolence is to ignore the hard realities of political economy.
However, my opponent’s framework stops at the mechanism. He sees the gear and the lever, but he does not look at the hand that turns them. He assumes that if we remove the bureaucratic friction, the state will simply cease to exploit. This is a dangerous error. The problem is not merely that the system is slow; the problem is that the system is inhabited by people who have not been formed to see the migrant as a neighbor, but as a category. When we strip away the procedural delays, we do not remove the prejudice; we merely accelerate the expression of it. The speed of expulsion is a symptom of a deeper moral atrophy: the inability of the citizenry and the civil servant alike to pause, to reflect, and to recognize the image of God in a stranger who has no power to resist.
Consider the schools I established in the villages of Somerset. When I first began, the local magistrates were eager for order, just as the EU is eager for streamlined returns. They wanted rules that would keep the poor in their place without the bother of inquiry. But I found that rules alone produced only resentment and evasion. It was only when we began to teach the children - and indeed, their parents - the habits of self-governance, of duty, and of Christian charity that the community began to change. The law provided the boundary, but character provided the content. If we impose a faster return process on a population that has been educated to view the outsider with suspicion or indifference, we do not achieve justice. We achieve a more efficient cruelty.
The socialist argues that the state is the primary actor. I argue that the state is a reflection of the people who populate it. If the people are formed by a narrative of scarcity and fear, the state will act with haste and hardness. If they are formed by a narrative of duty and compassion, the state will act with deliberation and mercy. The “simplification” the EU proposes is a technical fix to a moral deficit. It assumes that the barrier to humane treatment is bureaucratic complexity. In my experience, the barrier is almost always a lack of moral imagination.
I have seen how easily the unexamined heart hardens. When I campaigned against the slave trade, I did not begin by arguing for new parliamentary procedures. I began by appealing to the conscience of the nation. I asked people to look at the suffering of others not as an economic variable, but as a breach of their own moral integrity. The abolition of the trade came not because the logistics of slavery became too expensive, but because the character of the British public shifted. They could no longer sleep while such evil persisted. The law followed the change in heart.
To reverse this process is to invite disaster. By speeding up the return of those deemed unlawful, the EU is signaling that efficiency is a higher virtue than mercy. This is a lesson in character formation, whether intended or not. It teaches the civil servant that their duty is to clear the ledger, not to seek truth. It teaches the citizen that the stranger is a problem to be solved, not a person to be known. This is the fruit of the new policy: a society that is more orderly, yes, but also more hardened.
My opponent speaks of the “capitalist state” as if it were a monolithic entity acting with singular intent. I see a collection of individuals, each making choices in the dark, guided by their habits and their education. If we do not address the formation of those individuals, no amount of procedural streamlining will produce a just outcome. We will simply have a faster machine for doing wrong. The question is not whether the border can be managed more efficiently. The question is whether we are cultivating a citizenry capable of governing themselves with wisdom and kindness, even when the law allows them to be swift and severe. The answer, I fear, is that we are failing them. We are trading the slow, difficult work of moral education for the quick, seductive promise of administrative ease. This is a bargain that history will not forgive.
Rosa Luxemburg
The proposed reform addresses the speed of administrative exclusion while leaving the structural cause of migration - capitalist expansion and imperialist violence - intact. This is not an oversight. It is the function of reform.
My opponent speaks of the “moral formation” of the citizen and the “conscience of the man who enforces” the law. He argues that the effectiveness of the new EU migration deal depends not on its bureaucratic efficiency, but on the virtue of those who implement it. This is a profound error, born of a philosophical idealism that ignores the material reality of the state. I concede that character matters in politics; a cruel official is worse than a bureaucratic one. But I reject the notion that individual virtue can override the structural imperatives of a system designed for exclusion.
The conservative argument rests on a dangerous illusion: that the state is a neutral vessel waiting to be filled with good or bad intentions. In reality, the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. The “provisional agreement” to streamline returns is not a moral failing of individual bureaucrats; it is the logical outcome of a political economy that requires a flexible, cheap, and disciplined labor force on one side, and a rigid, controlled population on the other. When my opponent asks whether we view the stranger as a person or a statistic, he misses the point entirely. Under capitalism, the worker is already a commodity. The migrant is simply a worker whose labor power has not yet been successfully integrated into the accumulation process, or who poses a political threat to the social wage of the native working class. To ask for “humanity” from the enforcer of a law that treats humans as inventory is to ask the hangman to weep while he pulls the lever. The machinery does not care about his tears; it only cares that the lever is pulled.
Consider the mechanism at work. The EU seeks to “speed up” returns. Why? Because prolonged uncertainty creates political instability. It allows for the formation of solidarity among the excluded and the precarious. It gives time for the working class to realize that their interests are not tied to the border, but to the abolition of the wage system itself. By making exclusion swift and efficient, the state removes the friction that might allow for political organization. The “efficiency” my opponent criticizes is, in fact, the primary goal. A slow border is a porous border. A fast border is a sealed border. The state does not want virtuous citizens; it wants compliant subjects who do not question the logic of the enclosure.
My opponent’s focus on the “conscience of the enforcer” is a diversion. It shifts the blame from the system to the individual, thereby preserving the system. If the problem were merely bad people, we could solve it by hiring better people. But the problem is not bad people; it is a system that rewards the processing of human beings as logistical problems. I have seen this before. In the early days of the Soviet Union, there were those who argued that the suppression of the Constituent Assembly was a temporary necessity, a tactical error by good men in bad times. I warned then that without democratic freedom, the “good men” would become the new oppressors, and the “tactical error” would become the permanent structure of a police state. The same logic applies here. The streamlining of deportation is not a mistake to be corrected by better training; it is the feature of a fortress Europe.
We must not be seduced by the language of “humanity” when it is used to mask the violence of capital. The conservative appeal to virtue is a form of moralism that has no power against the concrete interests of the bourgeoisie. They do not need you to be virtuous; they need you to be quiet. The “moral education” he speaks of is likely an education in obedience. True morality, for the working class, lies not in the private conscience of the policeman, but in the public struggle against the conditions that make the policeman necessary.
Let us look at history for a parallel. During the colonial partitions of Africa, the European powers did not debate the virtue of their soldiers. They debated the efficiency of their supply lines. The suffering of the colonized was an externality, a cost of doing business. Today, the migrant is the new colonial subject, processed at the borders of the former colonial powers. To ask for more “character” from the EU is to ask for more humane slavery. It is to accept the premise that the movement of people must be controlled, regulated, and ultimately restricted by the state. We must reject this premise. The solution is not faster returns, nor more virtuous guards. The solution is the abolition of the borders that the capitalist state uses to manage the crisis of its own legitimacy.
The conservative position is weakest where it assumes that the state can be reformed through moral suasion. The state is not a moral entity; it is an instrument of class rule. Until we dismantle the economic foundations that require such instruments, appeals to conscience will remain empty gestures. We must turn our attention not to the character of the enforcer, but to the power of the enforced. Only when the working class organizes itself across borders, refusing to act as the strikebreakers of the global proletariat, will the machinery of exclusion begin to creak. Until then, the “provisional deal” is permanent in its effects, regardless of how many good men sit behind the desks that sign it.
The Verdict
Where They Agree
The most significant agreement lies in their shared conviction that the state and its laws are not neutral instruments of administration but are expressions of a deeper power structure. More sees this power structure as the collective moral character of the citizenry, while Luxemburg identifies it as the capitalist class. However, both fundamentally agree that the proposed policy is not a simple technical adjustment but a political act that reinforces an existing order of domination. For More, the policy reinforces a societal disposition toward “cold, mechanical brutality”; for Luxemburg, it perfects the “machine of repression” for capital. This shared premise - that the policy’s primary function is disciplinary rather than merely administrative - is the unstated foundation of their critiques, even as they propose diametrically opposed solutions.
both debaters dismiss the official justification of the policy - improving efficiency - as a superficial cover for a more consequential agenda. They agree that “speed” is not a neutral good. More argues that hastening returns accelerates the expression of societal impatience and moral atrophy, making the system crueler. Luxemburg argues that speed is the core objective, designed to eliminate the bureaucratic friction that allows for resistance and solidarity. Their agreement that efficiency serves a darker purpose reveals a shared skepticism toward the language of bureaucratic reform, which they see as obscuring the real stakes of human dignity and political power.
Where They Fundamentally Disagree
The primary locus of change - individual conscience versus systemic overthrow. The empirical question here is whether changing the moral character of individuals within a system can fundamentally alter that system’s outcomes. More’s position, steelmanned, is that all systems are operated by people whose habits and virtues determine the quality of justice; therefore, the only durable reform is the moral formation of citizens and officials, which will eventually reshape the state’s actions, as in the campaign against the slave trade. Luxemburg’s position is that the state is a direct instrument of class interest whose institutional imperatives will inevitably corrupt or co-opt individual virtue; therefore, appeals to conscience are a diversion, and only the revolutionary abolition of the capitalist system can end oppression. The normative disagreement is over what constitutes meaningful political action: for More, it is the cultivation of personal virtue; for Luxemburg, it is class struggle.
The nature of the state as a reflection or an instrument. This disagreement is both empirical and philosophical. More empirically views the state as a collection of individuals whose aggregate character defines its actions; a virtuous populace begets a more just government. Normatively, she believes the state should be a reflection of the people’s moral character. Luxemburg empirically views the state as an autonomous structure designed to manage capitalism, which dictates the roles of the individuals within it. Her normative stance is that this instrumental state is illegitimate and must be dismantled. The steelmanned core of More’s argument is that the hand that turns the lever matters more than the lever itself. The steelmanned core of Luxemburg’s is that the machinery is designed to crush the hand that seeks to turn it gently.
Hidden Assumptions
- More-style: Assumes that a widespread, effective program of “moral formation” based on “Christian charity” is a feasible and politically viable project within contemporary European societies. If this is false - if such formation is impossible at scale or would inevitably provoke its own forms of exclusion - then her entire prescription collapses into wishful thinking, leaving the cruel machinery she decries intact and unchanged.
- More-style: Assumes that the “delay” in bureaucratic processes is primarily an opportunity for mercy and reflection by virtuous officials. If this delay is, as Luxemburg suggests, more often a source of prolonged suffering and exploitation for migrants rather than a space for justice, then More’s critique of speed loses its moral force and appears naive.
- Rosa Luxemburg: Assumes that the abolition of borders and the capitalist state would lead to a more free and equitable movement of people, rather than new forms of conflict or instability. If this core Marxist prediction is false, then her revolutionary alternative offers no practical solution to the immediate problems of migration management, rendering her critique a purely negative one.
- Rosa Luxemburg: Assumes that the interests of the native working class and migrant workers are fundamentally aligned and that any conflict is a false consciousness engineered by the bourgeoisie. If this is false - if there are genuine, material conflicts of interest between these groups over resources like jobs or social services - then her call for cross-border solidarity becomes significantly harder to realize.
Confidence vs Evidence
- More-style: The claim that “the machinery of the state is often cold, and its efficiency is frequently purchased at the expense of the vulnerable” - supported by historical anecdote (the slave trade) rather than specific evidence about the actual administration of EU migration policy. This is a broad philosophical assertion presented with the confidence of an empirical fact.
- Rosa Luxemburg: The claim that the EU policy’s goal is to “remove the friction that might allow for political organization” among migrants - tagged with inherent high confidence in her round 2 argument but posited as an unproven assertion of intent. This imputes a conscious political strategy to the EU institutions without citing evidence of such motive from policy documents or statements, treating a structural analysis as a revealed truth.
What This Means For You
When evaluating coverage of this policy, ask whose problem it is purporting to solve. Is the article framing the issue as a logistical challenge for the state, or is it examining the policy’s impact on the people it affects? Be suspicious of any analysis that treats “efficiency” as an unquestioned good without exploring its human consequences. To assess the validity of More’s argument, look for reporting on the training and discretion of the border officials implementing the policy. To evaluate Luxemburg’s, demand data on the economic factors driving migration and the business interests that profit from border enforcement. The single most telling piece of evidence would be a detailed study of what actually happens to migrants during the current “slow” process versus the proposed “fast” one - does the delay provide a meaningful chance for appeal, or does it merely extend a period of legal limbo and suffering?