Declining Numbers: The Costs Behind Europe’s Migration Crackdown

wirtten on May 6th 2025

The number of irregular border crossings into the European Union has decreased by 31% in the first quarter of the year, asserted the EU’s border agency Frontex.

This decline was observed across all major migratory routes into the EU, with a drop ranging from 64% along the Western Balkan route (the one crossing Albania, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia) to 8% along the Eastern Land Border (covering Ukraine, Iraq, and Russia). 

While migration patterns are also influenced by a complex of factors, the data seems to suggest a continuation of the downward trend already observed in 2024, when irregular border crossing dropped by 38%, reaching their lowest level since 2021.

The truth behind the numbers: 

This significant decline is the result of increasingly stringent measures implemented by European Member States, including cross-regional agreements, expulsion programmes, border fortifications and externalisation of asylum processing, often in collaboration with non-EU countries to prevent refugees from even reaching the Schengen borders. 

Central to this strategy are collaborations with key border states in North Africa due to their geographical proximity to Europe and their pivotal role in migration routes at crossing the Mediterranean. These border externalisation agreements involve a range of measures aimed at stemming migration arrival at European offshores. They include EU funding for weapons and militarised borders across North Africa, cooperation with non-state actors, and the establishment of migration processing centres outside the EU. 

In return for their cooperation, the EU provides these countries with financial incentives and political support, effectively turning non-European neighbours into the de facto gatekeepers of Europe’s external borders. Turkey, for instance, agreed to host a massive influx of refugees fleeing conflicts and persecutions after the peak of 2015 Syrian civil war. The deal established illegal migrants arriving on Greek islands from Turkey to be returned to Turkey. In theory, the deal is one-to-one : for each Syrian returned, another Syrian refugee from Turkey would be resettled in the EU. In exchange, the EU committed €6 billion and pledged visa liberalization for Turkish citizens. 

Between 2007 and 2016, the EU granted €122 billion in arms export licences to African countries, including €137 million to Libya, despite being subject to both EU and UN arms embargoes. 

Similar deals have been concluded also with Egypt, Mauritania, Niger, Sudan -- all countries with poor human rights records .

These relationships have been criticised to contribute to legitimize authoritarian regimes who saw their security forces being strengthened through EU provided training and equipment. “Their criminal leaders see the chance of their lifetimes to build international legitimacy through their willing cooperation with the EU on migration. In this way we help badly governing and repressive regimes, that oppress their populations, to survive”, asserted Geert Laporte from the European Centre for Development Policy Management. He criticises the controversial migration policy for prioritizing short-term border control over long-term human dignity and democratic accountability.

Indeed, while these deals with non-European neighbours aim to curb irregular migration, they have sparked significant debate about their ethical implications. Humanitarian organizations and liberal critics argue the EU's asylum decline comes with a massive human cost, accusing the EU of being complicit but turning a blind eye for political convenience. 

“It is not only about the statistics. Let’s not forget that this is coming at the cost of people drowning in the Mediterranean”, said Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch to The Guardian . 

The New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum:

In June 2024, the European Parliament adopted the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum after years of negotiations. Comprising ten legislative acts, the Pact aims to harmonize procedures across member states, enhance border security, and establish a framework for solidarity and responsibility-sharing among EU countries. While the Pact is already into force, most of its provisions will be applied after a two-year transition period, starting from June 2026. 

As of now, the Union Framework is the only component of the Pact that is immediately applicable. It aims to facilitate the legal and safe resettlement of refugees from non-EU countries to EU Member States, providing a structured approach to humanitarian admissions. 

The Pact consists of 5 main pillars:

1. Screening Regulation: it introduces a pre-entry procedure aimed at quickly examining the profiles of asylum seekers, ensuring uniform health checks, vulnerability assessments, identity and security checks of people intercepted after an unauthorised border crossing, including those rescued at sea. Once the data is assembled, they will either be directed to the asylum procedure or to the return procedures, depending on their case.

2.  Eurodac Regulations: it upgrades the already existing Eurodac fingerprint database into a broader one which will be interoperable with other EU security databases. It will contain data of disembarked, apprehended, irregular-stay, resettled and temporarily protected persons from age six and up. 

3.  The Asylum Procedure Regulation: it introduces a streamlined two-track asylum system:

a.  Border Procedure: it applies to individuals coming from countries with a recognition rate below 20%, those listed by the EU as safe countries of origin (it has recently renewed to include Bangladesh, Kosovo, Colombia, Egypt, India, Morocco and Tunisia), but also all EU candidate countries (Albania, Bosnia, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia and Türkiye) except for Ukraine due to the ongoing war. It implies that individuals coming from these countries are not generally considered to be at risk of persecution and therefore unlikely to qualify for asylum, unless they provide concrete evidence of serious individual risk. These individuals won’t be permitted entry into the national territory and may be held in detention near the border during the process. Their request will be assessed in fast-tracked procedures designed to conclude within a maximum of 12 weeks; if rejected, they may be further held for up to an additional 12 weeks pending return to their country of origin or a safe third country. 

b.  Standard Asylum Procedure: it applies to individuals coming from countries experiencing civil war (e.g., Syria) as well as families with children under 12 years old. They should be granted entry into the national territory, provided with accommodation, and given the right to have their case heard by a judge.

4.  Migration Management Regulation (AMMR): under this new “mandatory” plan, the EU aims to collectively resettle at least 30,000 asylum seekers annually. This regulation should help to decrease the pressure on Mediterranean frontline countries (e.g., Italy, Greece, Spain) and resettled persons are distributed among EU Member States based on their population size, GDP and the number of irregular arrivals previously received. To incentivize participation, the EU offers financial support to host countries for each person resettled (around €10,000-€12,000 per individual). Moreover, it also provides Member States with three options to manage migration flows: relocate a certain number of asylum seekers, pay €20,000 for each migrant they refuse to relocate, or finance operational support, such as staff and equipment. In other words, while participation is mandatory, state members have the flexibility to choose which form of solidarity they want to provide, allowing them to opt out of relocation by contributing financially or operationally instead. 

5. Crisis Response Regulation: it would allow member states to take temporary measures during times of massive migration influx. It involves an accelerated examination of asylum applications at the border, detaining asylum seekers for up to 20 weeks during their applications procedure and detaining rejected asylum applicants for up to 20 weeks while awaiting for their return journey to be organized. 

Challenges and limitations of the pact: 

However, the European Commission is struggling to defend the Pact. As of December 2024, only 14 countries respected the established deadline by which they were expected to introduce their national implementation plan in preparation for the full application of the Pact by 2026. 

Since the very start of the draft, both Poland and Hungary firmly opposed it, dismissing its capability of curbing migration. The Prime Minister Donal Tusk has explicitly stated that Poland will not implement the Migration Pact  in a way that introduces additional quotas of immigrants. He specifies that Poland is in a “unique situation” where its borders are facing considerable strain, referring to the large number of Ukrainian refugees that Poland already hosts. In particular, the Prime Minister mentioned the weaponization of migration flows by Belarus and Russia to destabilize the European Union. The Polish government sees these orchestrated migration flows as a form of “hybrid warfare” and, in response, enacted legislations that temporarily suspend the right to asylum for people crossing from Belarus. Exceptions would be made for vulnerable people and anyone who can “unequivocally prove they are at risk of suffering serious harm” if returned to Belarus. 

The European Commission, who initially threatened to open legal proceedings against Member States that ignore the reform, has relented and eventually published guidelines to allow the temporary suspension of the right to asylum in “exceptional” circumstances and for what is “strictly necessary”. 

However, this measure has been deeply condemned by several human rights organizations including Poland’s own commissioner for Human rights, considering it as a violation of international law, fearing that this will set a dangerous precedent for other countries to bypass asylum rights as well. The critic also comes from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees who claims that the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits returns to a country where people may face torture or inhumane treatment, should be respect in all cases , also in the context of “instrumentalization of migrants and refugees”.

Conclusion: a difficult path ahead

While the new EU Migration and Asylum Pact represents the ambitious and gruelling effort of the European Commission to create a common framework to deal with the migration crisis, its effective implementation remains deeply uncertain. In an era marked by geopolitical instability, rising far-right populism and growing anti-immigration sentiments, the Pact faces serious structural and political headwinds. 

At the same time, the Pact also fails to address the ineffectiveness of return and repatriation mechanisms: as of recent years, only about 20% of rejected asylum seekers are actually returned to their country of origin. The overwhelming majority of them remained stuck in a sort of legal limbo on European soil pending some form of regularisation. The Pact is weak at solving this problem because return policies mostly depend on national agreements with third countries.

Moreover, the EU promised to resettle at least 30,000 people annually, but this number remains modest, accounting for only 10% of irregular arrivals recorded in 2023.

Concerns are also growing over the fragile political commitment among member states, especially considering that Hungary, Poland and Denmark will be holding the next presidency of the Council of the EU. With the first two countries known for being expressively opposed to the Pact and the last being only partly affected by EU asylum policies as it obtained an opt-out from the EU’s Justice and Home Affairs policies in the 1993 Edinburgh Agreement, exempting it from the Common European Asylum System (CEAS). Furthermore, since the last decade, Denmark has integrated an increasingly harsh stance on immigration. In 2023, it revoked residency permits for Syria refugees, declaring that some parts of the war-torn country are safe for return, before backtracking after international backlash. It remains therefore unlikely that any of these three Member States is going to promote the Pact very actively, raising doubts of it really coming into force in its entirety by the summer of 2026.

Bearing in mind all these factors, we may expect to see even more fragmentation and hardline positions across the EU, more reliance on outsourcing responsibility to third countries and greater focus on the militarisation of border controls. Apart from further weakening of asylum rights, such a failure would be a powerful signal of the EU’s political weakness to deliver coordinated responses on shared challenges.