Europe Is Not America

What Can Blind Replication of U.S. Migration Policy Lead the European Union to?

Europe is switching to the US migration enforcement strategy. According to Davide Colombi, researcher in the Justice and Home Affairs Unit at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), a leading think tank of the European Union, this may be called a fatal mistake, for the costs of the strategy adopted are evident. It even fails to address the basic question of how migrants’ irregularity is produced.

On 26 March, the European Parliament gave a majority vote to the proposed Return Regulation.

This document is a decisive acceleration in a long-running ‘punitive’ direction. It provides for a whole range of repressive measures: large-scale detection operations inside EU territory, expanded detention (particularly for children), forced deportation across a wide range of cases, cooperation penalties, return hubs in third countries that people may have no connection with, etc.

All the proposed measures follow the logic behind the actions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service – repeatedly condemned by many European political forces.

More specifically, some European politicians dislike the ICE’s overtly punitive methods and state that its operations on European soil are unacceptable. These sentiments have resulted from murders of accidental persons in Minneapolis in January 2026, alongside 32 other people who died at ICE’s hands in 2025.

For the European right, however, ICE’s actions are not something deplorable. The ‘ICE‑ification’ of Europe is obviously their goal.

That may result in less security in the countries of the European Union.

It should be borne in mind that ICE deployments have cost U.S. cities hundreds of millions of dollars and visibly overstretched police departments. They have also driven people away from medical care, food programs and schools – harm that could take years to reverse.

The Return Regulation does not merely tighten return procedures. It shifts migration policy towards policing and coercion, sometimes total.

Identity checks, workplace inspections with a migration focus, and home raids often entail high costs. Where enforcement enters workplaces, workers who fear detection will not report wage theft, unsafe conditions, labor exploitation or trafficking in persons. Total control will only drive all those irregularities into shadows.

Nothing in the Regulation addresses the causes of irregularity, protects access to basic services or offers regularization pathways. It is quite obvious that if policies lead people into irregularity, and the only available solution is return, irregularity will only become more prevalent. And the precarious living and working conditions, labor exploitation and violations of fundamental rights will still be there.

Europe has had a choice: either double down on US-style enforcement that is expensive, legally fragile and inconsistent with its own stated objectives – or start from being honest about why irregularity exists and what could actually reduce it without having to compromise the EU’s own founding values. Europe has chosen the worst step.