Europe offers ways to curb illegal migration but no playbook for mass deportations

Want a preview of the battle to curb mass migration when Donald Trump takes office? Just look across the Atlantic, where European Union member states are systematically implementing – amid protests and legal setbacks – a dramatic series of measures aimed at keeping what the EU calls “irregular migrants” outside its borders.

Curbing or reversing the flow of migrants to the U.S. was at the heart of Trump’s successful 2024 campaign to return to the White House. While the U.S. and the world wait to see whether GOP presidential-nominee Donald Trump will follow through on plans to deport as many as 20 million undocumented migrants once he’s in office, some European countries are taking their own extreme steps.

Italy stands at center stage in the European refugee crisis. Because of the country’s long coastline and positioning at the center of the Mediterranean, the country is traditionally the most common landing point for would-be asylum seekers heading to Europe from North Africa.

Two years ago, Giorgia Meloni became Italy’s first-ever female leader after running on a platform that – like Trump’s three presidential campaigns – promised to drastically reduce the number of refugees that Italians blame for increases in crime, violence, prostitution, and unemployment. Instead, the numbers more than tripled.  

Then Meloni rolled up her sleeves. Through early November, the United Nations reports that Italy is on pace to receive the lowest number of refugees since 2020, when numbers were tamped down because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Meloni’s tough – and thoroughly controversial – strategy involves setting up two offshore processing centers in Albania, Italy’s neighbor across the Adriatic Sea. Italy will pay for and staff the centers. But supporters boast that migrants processed there would not stress Italian infrastructure and that anyone who fell between the cracks would still be as far from Italy’s borders as they were before they left Africa.

But critics say the central problem is that in Albania, which is not a member of the European Union, refugees would not benefit from the protections of the European Union’s asylum system, one of the core values of the European identity. Meloni even boasted of keeping that system at an arm’s length, calling her plan “proof of the pragmatism and effectiveness that have marked our action in the fight against illegal immigration.”

The plan, which was closely watched by other European states, has run into repeated legal hurdles from Italian courts, and despite being open and running for more than a month the centers have yet to process a single refugee. The setbacks prompted close Trump ally Elon Musk, who is also close to Meloni, to call for the judges involved to be removed. 

“These judges need to go,” Musk wrote on social media. That earned Musk a stern rebuke from Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, who said “Italy knows how to take care of itself while respecting its constitution.”

Some have labeled Meloni’s policies as “doomed to fail.” But her high-profile prioritization of controversial refugee policies is gaining traction in Europe, despite all of that.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the most vocal Trump ally in Europe, had taken a tough line on mass migration years before Meloni took office (last month he threatened to take a page out of the playbook of Texas Governor Greg Abbot’s playbook and bus migrants to Brussels, the European Union’s de facto capital).

But there are other more recent converts. Keir Starmer’s first foreign trip after becoming U.K. prime minister was to Italy, where he praised Meloni’s policies as an example for his country.

And in Germany, which has just reinstituted border crossing controls for the first time since the 1990s, the refugee debate has  fueled the rise of the disruptive, far-right Alternative for Germany political party.

Even in famously tolerant Holland, vocal government opposition leader Geert Wilders said last month that when it came to refugee policy there was “a new wind blowing in Europe.”