Europe needs severity: Mass deportations, even re-migration, must occur

On the surface, it would seem that Europe’s establishmentarians are finally waking up. At the lead is Denmark, which has always been one of the few Social Democrat-run countries to understand the politics around migration. Ahead of their national elections, the country has announced a startling new initiative: Making it easy to deport people.

Or at least, that’s what the headlines said. The reality is much dicier: Copenhagen has decided to make it so anyone who has been sentenced to at least one year in prison eligible for deportation. The new policy does not mean that they will actually be deported, and the Danish government has acknowledged that their new policy may violate European human rights conventions, meaning it may never even get off the ground.

But Denmark’s strategy of keeping new migrants out and putting the façade of deportation on those who are here is, slowly, being co-opted across Europe. The United Kingdom send a fact-finding team to Copenhagen in order to copy their policies. The result? Refugees will have their status reviewed every 30 months, being returned if it is “safe”. Of course, that only will happen if a) the person is still legally a refugee and has not obtained some other status, such as a student visa, b) if their country is deemed “safe,” something any intelligent bureaucrat can get around, and c) if it does not violate a European rights convention.

Belgium’s government, for their part, has even said it would ignore a court ruling which claimed it was illegal to reject refugees who had already been accepted by other counties. But it seems to be only a matter of time before Belgium buckles here, too.

Courts have not only been a problem in Belgium. In Sweden, a court ruled that a 15-year-old who murdered someone for pay could not be deported. Why? Because he had no connection to Somalia, having come from there when he was three. Unlike Belgium, the Swedish government was too cowardly to ignore the ruling.

Still though, European leaders are by and large coming around to the idea that borders should not be completely open. Over ten years after Angela Merkel declared “We can do it,” Brussels is finally figuring out that they actually cannot. This year, the new “Pact on Migration” will go into effect, changing how new migrants are spread around the continent and allowing deportation to “safe” third-party countries.

But the solution proposed is not solving a current day problem – it’s solving a problem from over a decade hence. 

Even ten years ago, closing the borders would not have been enough. In 2015, over 1 million migrants came to Europe by sea alone – meaning in 2016 closing the borders would have been a half-measure. In the decades since, that number has exploded into millions of refugees, asylum seekers, “students,” “workers,” and families of the aforementioned groups.

Spreading new migrants around and allowing sporadic deportations to third countries is a 2015 solution in 2026, and it underlines a serious issue: That Europe’s solutions will not be enough.

Look at the slow pace of deportations in 2026. When Germany deports a single criminal Syrian, it garners headlines. When they deport 20 Afghans to Kabul, it seems as if they have actually done something. Which they have not, of course. There are at least 461,000 Afghan refugees in Germany. Deporting 20 per week would take Germany about 443 years, assuming that the population remains static (it won’t, given their high birth rates).

To actually solve the problem, truly mass deportations – even re-migration — must occur. Europe will need a level of harsh severity it has not had for a very long time.

To start, anyone convicted of a crime should be automatically deported. There should be no year cut-off, nor should there be an appeal. There should be jailtime and then a one-way ticket to the airport (unlike in Spain, where you simply are fined for raping children). To ensure that this swiftness can occur, any populist-right party which takes power should immediately act to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. No action has been taken because of its nomenclature – how could one leave? Don’t you see the sign? It says “human rights”! – and as a result, the ECHR has become something of a supranational constitution, overriding member states’ constitutions as it pleases. Appeals and endless delays turn what should be mind-numbingly simple processes into decades-long sagas; one simple deportation is extended into something which is ultimately never carried out.

There then needs to be a discussion of denaturalisation. The Trump administration has been expanding its efforts here, but as the topic is relatively new, it is still piecemeal. Europeans should not shrink from this. Deportation of only a few sex criminals and murderers will do nothing to stop the cultural replacement which has been ongoing (in Spain – again – schools have been instructed to take special care to create an inclusive experience for students practicing Ramadan).

The populist-right has continued to gain steam through the West as establishmentarians have doubled-down, on the promise of undoing what Brussels has wrought. But if they gain power and then do not change the Western paradigm, they will be rejected by voters. They must be bold and unafraid of action.

There is not an unlimited amount of time to act here. In a decade or so, the fight may become too difficult to carry out to its conclusion. The line must be drawn here. And the ascendent nationalists must be the ones to draw it.