EU Agrees to Speed Up Returns for Unlawful Migrants
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.
We must look closely at who benefits from this “simplification.” It is not the migrant, whose legal status remains precarious and whose right to remain is contingent on the whim of the state. It is not the citizen of the member states, who is told that faster returns will secure safety, a claim that confuses the movement of people with the source of social insecurity. The beneficiary is the capitalist state itself. The state requires a flexible reserve army of labor - workers who can be hired when profits demand cheap inputs and discarded when they become a fiscal burden or a political liability. The current system, with its labyrinthine appeals and procedural delays, creates an uncertainty that is costly for the state and disruptive for the capital accumulation process. By speeding up returns, the EU is not solving the crisis of migration; it is optimizing the management of human exclusion.
This is the essence of the reform trap. The reformers within the EU institutions believe that by making the system more efficient, they are making it more humane or at least more orderly. They fail to see that the disorder they fear is the only space in which resistance can occur. The delay, the bureaucratic entanglement, the legal ambiguity - these are not bugs in the system. They are the friction that allows for the possibility of staying, of organizing, of claiming a right to existence against the logic of the market. When you remove that friction, you do not create order; you create a more effective machine of repression.
The provisional deal reached by the EU Parliament and Council is the unity of the ruling class across national lines. For decades, the European project has been fractured by disputes over fiscal policy, military spending, and energy. But when it comes to the management of the excluded, the consensus is absolute. The EU Council and the Parliament act in concert because their interests are aligned. They both serve a system that requires the free movement of capital and the restricted movement of labor. To allow for the latter is to undermine the former. The “simplification” is therefore a defense of the accumulation logic. It ensures that the border remains a profitable instrument of control, generating revenue for private security firms, detention centers, and logistical contractors, while stripping the migrant of any leverage.
Critics will argue that the effectiveness and fairness of the system are questionable, and they are right. But this criticism stops at the level of administration. It asks whether the returns are conducted according to procedure, rather than asking why the returns are necessary at all. It is a critique of the method, not the motive. To demand a “fairer” return process is to accept the premise that the migrant is an intruder who must be removed. It is to accept the premise that the EU is a closed garden that must be kept free of weeds. This is not a humanitarian view; it is a proprietary one.
The true question is not how quickly the EU can expel those it deems unlawful, but why the EU relies on a system that produces such large numbers of “unlawful” residents in the first place. The answer lies in the global division of labor. The EU’s prosperity is built on the extraction of wealth from the periphery, which creates the conditions of poverty and instability that drive migration. To speed up the return of migrants is to attempt to erase the consequences of EU foreign policy and economic dominance without addressing the causes. It is like bailing out a sinking ship while ignoring the holes in the hull. The water will return. The migrants will return. And the EU will continue to spend its political capital on the illusion of control, rather than on the reality of solidarity.
Freedom is not a gift granted by the efficient state. It is a condition won through struggle. The reform offered by the EU Parliament and Council is not a step toward freedom; it is a step toward a more disciplined and less contestable form of domination. It removes the ambiguity that allows for hope, replacing it with the certainty of expulsion. This is the price of reform: it stabilizes the system by removing the very contradictions that might otherwise lead to its transformation. The worker who sells their labor must also sell their political consent. The migrant who is returned is silenced not just by force, but by the finality of the administrative decision. There is no appeal against the logic of capital, only against its implementation. And in speeding up that implementation, the EU leaves no time for appeal at all.