French president Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday, June 19th, that he does not support the creation of so-called migrant return hubs in third countries.
This week saw the European Parliament approve the construction of ‘offshore’ processing centres for failed asylum seekers.
Macron’s opposition to the facilities comes from what he presents as a combination of principle and pragmatism:
I’m not sure that these are the fundamental principles on which our Europe was built, and I don’t believe it’s effective either.
Like Macron, Spain’s beleaguered leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez used part of his own Brussels press briefing after the European Council summit to assert that Spain is also against return hubs, which he claims are “simply going to waste economic resources, and Europe doesn’t have many of those.”
Perhaps Sánchez was thinking of the UK’s doomed and costly ‘Rwanda Plan’—devised by his hapless British former counterpart Rishi Sunak, who might as well have just set fire to the plan’s £700 million (€807 million) budget—which voluntarily relocated just four migrants to East Africa before closing.
Sánchez admitted that his views, like Macron’s, were in the minority on this issue in Europe. Yet both leaders’ claims to be speaking for voters back home are also highly questionable.
