European Union leaders agreed at a summit on Thursday last week to work to speed up returns of migrants irregularly entering the bloc and requested that the European Commission urgently draft a law.

The direction of debate at the summit marked a change of course for the narrative around EU migration policy.

Member states supported Poland’s plan to temporarily freeze asylum applications from migrants being forced over the country’s eastern border by Russia and Belarus.

Several NGOs have said that Poland’s move to block migrants violates the EU’s charter of fundamental rights, but President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen argued it was legal as a temporary response to the “exceptional situation” whereby Minsk and Moscow have weaponised migrants to pressure the Polish system.

“Russia and Belarus…cannot be allowed to abuse our values, including the right to asylum, and to undermine our democracies,” concluded EU leaders.

“The European Council expresses solidarity with Poland. … Exceptional situations require appropriate measures.”

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen also expressed solidarity, saying she was pleased to see “full support” for the move to “cancel the right to seek asylum” in light of the Russia and Belarus’ “hybrid attack”.

“It is really, really important,” she told Danish news agency Ritzau.

In July, Finland took a similar initiative after facing the same migrant pressure along its eastern border with Russia.

As a result, two countries on the EU’s outer border have now temporarily closed normal asylum processing.

Prior to the summit, Denmark, Italy and the Netherlands had co-hosted a meeting of EU states that support accelerated returns of migrants illegally entering the bloc, and tighter security at the Schengen-zone’s external borders.

Frederiksen said the response to the meeting indicated a chance of course in European migrant policy.

“There was great interest in participating in the meeting, and there are also a number of countries that will participate in the future,” said Frederiksen.

“We agree to continue working with several measures. It’s a change – not just in European rhetoric – but also in thinking.”

On the way to the summit, she described Denmark’s previous attempts to pitch a stricter asylum and migration policy to the EU as “like shouting into an empty handball hall in Jutland”, but that now “the majority of European leaders want to tighten up immigration policy”.

Migration remains a sensitive topic in the EU bloc, even though the number of irregular migrants that arrived in Europe last year were a third of the 1 million seen during the height of the crisis in 2015, and numbers fell further this year, according to Reuters.

Still, in 2023 only 20 percent of non-EU citizens who were ordered to leave the EU were successfully returned, according to the EU border control agency Frontex.

Last Thursday, Von der Leyen said the Commission was working to improve this number and would soon present a law to deal with it.

The shifting narrative at the EU level reflects recent political swings to the right in elections in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Austria.

In Germany, the election results were fueled by crimes in the media that shocked and angered voters – such as a stabbing spree by a rejected asylum seeker that killed three and injured eight at a town party in the German town of Solingen.

Return hubs
At the summit, European leaders also discussed establishing “return hubs” in countries outside the EU, where rejected asylum seekers would be held while they await deportation to their home country, as long as it is safe for them to return.

Denmark was an early and vocal proponent of this measure, having first signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Rwanda on the subject back in 2021.

The process was scrapped in January 2023 after it was broadly criticised by other EU states, and a few months after a similar arrangement between the UK and Rwanda also saw fierce pushback from humanitarian groups.

But Frederiksen remains supportive of the return hub approach. In May, Denmark led 15 EU countries in issuing a issued a joint call for “complementary efforts” to prevent migrants from arriving at EU borders in the first place.

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“Now it is the majority who want to have control over the outer borders and begin to deal with more long-term solutions. For example, centers outside the EU,” she told Ritzau last week.

Von der Leyen said the discussion on how to organise these hubs was still in progress. Key questions would be how to establish whether a third country is ‘safe’, how long a migrant could be kept in a hub, and what to do if a return is not possible.

The right-wing government of Italy has already set up a return hub in Albania, to which it sent its first 16 men from Egypt and Bangladesh last week.

Meanwhile, the conservative Dutch government is considering sending rejected African asylum seekers to Uganda, according to Reuters.

But not all leaders were enthusiastic. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that the Albanian centre, which can house 3,000 asylum seekers, would only be able to handle a fraction of Germany’s total asylum requests and that a law on fast returns would be more helpful.

Scholz and other leaders also emphasized that the EU badly needs migrants to plug its workforce shortage as the EU population ages and its pensions systems come under increasing strain.

Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said migration was positive and something that Spain and other European economies desperately need to combat ailing birth rates and welfare states.

“Do we want a prosperous and therefore open Europe, or do we want a poor and therefore closed Europe?” Sanchez said.

“We need to address the migration phenomenon with future generations in mind, not the next elections.”