Hungary may be celebrating Peter Magyar’s unlikely win over Viktor Orbán, yet the former PM’s hardline migration politics has already infected the European psyche – forming part of a broader, deeply concerning pattern brewing across the continent.

Even as asylum applications and crossings approach levels last seen in 2015, Europe has undergone a profound shift over the past year, shaped by the mainstreaming of Trump-era ideas and codified in new deterrence-first policies. Governments from Berlin to Brussels are now preparing for mass removals, offshore “return hubs,” and accelerated detention procedures.

There is no denying it: Europe is entering its own “ICE moment,” and the results will be strike at the heart of European identity. 

The United States has already shown where this path leads: expanded detention systems, faster deportations, restricted access to asylum, and a growing reliance on private infrastructure. Sixteen have died in ICE custody this year after prolonged confinement — predictable outcomes of a system designed to exclude rather than protect.

The European Union once positioned itself as a global standard-bearer for rights-based migration, grounded in legal frameworks such as the 1951 Refugee Convention. Even at the height of the 2015 European migrant crisis, its response – however flawed – was framed around ideas of asylum, responsibility-sharing and legal process.  

But now Europe is moving rapidly in the same direction as the U.S., with concepts such as “remigration,” once largely confined to far-right discourse advocating mass expulsions, increasingly shaping policy language and priorities across the continent.

Last month, MEPs voted in favor of expelling migrants to offshore “return hubs”. The proposal – widely criticized by human-rights advocates for its exclusionary logic – passed with a significant majority and opens the door to deporting people to countries they may have no connection to, alongside extended detention periods and harsher enforcement mechanisms.  

By June, the bloc’s new asylum regime will move from paper to practice: accelerated border procedures, wider detention powers, and transfers to third countries with poor human-rights records such as Libya, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. At the same time, governments such as Germany are openly discussing removals on a scale of hundreds of thousands before 2030.

Sweden, once regarded as a humanitarian superpower and a defender of asylum rights, is now undergoing a profound policy transformation. What was once unthinkable in political discourse is now normalized, debated not as an ethical dilemma but as an administrative necessity.

This is the collision point: rising movement meeting a system increasingly designed not to protect, but to make people disappear.

Mainstream commentary still treats these developments as pragmatic responses to pressure at Europe’s borders. But that framing misses the fact that the continent is moving away from a protection-based asylum model toward an enforcement-based migration regime whose purpose is deterrence itself.

As a Black Swedish parliamentarian, I see the key role race is playing to shape this moment. The logic underpinning this shift – about who deserves protection – is becoming harder to ignore.

Only in March the United Nations moved to recognize the transatlantic slave trade as a crime against humanity. Several European states abstained, while the U.S., Argentina, and Israel opposed the motion. The hesitation was unmistakable: responsibility – past and present – is becoming negotiable. And who we deem fully human is as tenuous and fragile as ever. 

I am not the only one raising alarm. Safwan Adam – a British entrepreneur and philanthropist whose Adam foundation supports education, integration and refugee inclusion initiatives across the UK and Europe – warns that deterrence policies reshape entire political systems once they take hold. “What begins as border control quickly becomes a system designed to make people invisible,” he told me. “When removal replaces responsibility, Europe risks losing not just credibility abroad but confidence in its own values at home.”

If offshore containment becomes normalized EU policy, migration will be displaced rather than solved – shifting responsibility onto poorer countries while weakening Europe’s legal credibility and reinforcing a global hierarchy of mobility in which protection depends on geography, race, and power.

We already see this in the US where soft power is rapidly fraying as communities shaped by generations of migration are facing heightened insecurity, family separation, and forced departure.

Europe now risks the same fate: abandoning the legal and moral architecture that once set it apart, and in doing so normalizing a global system of exclusion.  

Europe cannot retain moral authority by outsourcing it. It must restore meaningful judicial safeguards to any third-country transfers, reaffirm the primacy of asylum protections in practice rather than rhetoric, and resist the normalization of mass removal as a policy goal.

Otherwise, we risk repeating a history we claim to remember but seem determined to forget.Email