Migration features prominently in Europe’s demographic debates, whether as a looming threat or as a silver bullet against ageing societies. With the EU’s normalisation of border externalisation and the far right’s growing emphasis on “remigration”, progressives have tried to reframe the debate around economic benefits, class, and inequality. But flawed narratives and a crisis of trust have blocked productive conversation. Former Green member of the European Parliament Judith Sargentini explains how we got to the current impasse – and how we might overcome it.
Green European Journal: Like other demographic debates, discussions about the future of migration tend to evoke extreme scenarios: mass climate-driven displacement on one side, intensifying competition for migrants on the other. Are these framings helpful?
Judith Sargentini: Both contain a grain of truth. Climate change will drive mass movement; the Syrian civil war was deeply intertwined with the climate crisis, as is the civil war in Sudan. At the same time, ageing societies across Europe will increasingly need labour migrants, whatever the anti-immigration rhetoric says. But rather than dwelling on extreme scenarios that breed fear and anxiety, we should focus on the kind of societies we want to build. Yes, there is a housing shortage, but what caused it, and what policies can fix it? The same goes for climate change: if we fail to stop it, people will have to move because of it. But what we should be focusing on is how to hold to account those who fail to act on the climate emergency.
How did the discourse on migration shift over the years you worked on it in the European Parliament?
As the only member of the European Parliament sitting on both the civil liberties (LIBE) committee – where migration files were handled – and the development (DEVE) committee, I witnessed an enormous shift in the narrative. Development funding had always been under pressure from the Right but was kept at an acceptable level on the basis that it would discourage migration. This was simply not true: when people are extremely poor, they lack the means to migrate.
Flaw in the debate
Successful development cooperation gives more people the opportunity to move. That is not an argument against it, but it shows a flaw in the debate. When that approach failed to deliver, the response was to cut development funds and build fences instead. We deluded ourselves into thinking that training and funding coast guards and police forces in Africa would stem migration flows to Europe. That, too, was flawed. There has been enormous misunderstanding about what drives migration and what can actually address it. Frontex had a budget of six million euros in 2005; by 2021, it was around one billion. We remain trapped in the idea that better border control will stop people from moving. All it achieves is more irregular migration.
As the EU seeks to diversify its partnerships in response to the collapse of the “West” as a normative power, what part can migration policy play?
Return deals leave Europe vulnerable to blackmail by autocrats
I would question whether Europe has ever upheld the values it professes. Returning people to countries that are not even their own has always been a deeply unilateral approach – and one that has left Europe vulnerable to blackmail by autocrats who weaponise the threat of mass immigration. Deals like the one Italy struck with Albania function as propaganda tools until a judge rightly rules them illegal.
Our entire approach to migration has been about sweeping dust under the carpet. We need to learn to listen instead. And this goes beyond migration: How do we engage with Global South countries? Are we treating them as equal partners? Are our trade agreements mutually beneficial? The Global South is not Europe’s wasteland. There has been enormous misunderstanding about what drives migration and what can actually address it.
How did we get to today’s debate, with its growing focus on externalising border management and the far right openly calling for “remigration”?
Return hubs
In 2019, my final year as a Member of the European Parliament, I was rapporteur on the Returns Directive. Even then, there were debates about “return hubs” outside the EU, readmission agreements with countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia based on supposedly voluntary returns, and discussions with Tunisia about externalising asylum procedures. These weren’t new discussions: the EU had already signed a readmission agreement with Ukraine in 2007 and one with Pakistan in 2010. Underlying all of it was the idea that beyond EU borders lies a kind of terra incognita – unused space where we can place the migrants we don’t want.
What is happening now is the logical continuation of that trajectory. The kind of agreement (Italian Prime Minister) Giorgia Meloni is pursuing with Albania has been normalised by what happened years ago with other countries. The direction of travel has been consistent.
As a member of the LIBE committee, you were also rapporteur on the erosion of the rule of law in Hungary under Viktor Orbán. What was the role of migration in his illiberal project?
Orbán used migration – the Syrian crisis and the refugees coming through the Balkans – as a way to convince his fellow European People’s Party members that he was on the right track (1). For many years, he succeeded in making others believe he had found a way to keep his country free of migrants. And he did – by locking people up at the border in deeply inhumane conditions or pushing them through to Austria, making Hungary unattractive to migrants and leaving neighbouring countries to deal with the consequences. It also helped convince his own citizens – you may recall the photos of Budapest’s central station filled with migrants waiting to move on – that he was keeping Hungary safe from people it couldn’t shelter.
It was clear that the deal would lead to pushbacks and abuses
This narrative proved remarkably effective elsewhere, too – including in my country, the Netherlands. Many social democrats were comfortable with the 2016 EU-Turkey deal. Part of the deal was a “one-to-one” mechanism: Europe would return all new irregular migrants to Turkey, including Syrians, arriving on the Greek islands. For every Syrian returned, the EU committed to resettling one Syrian refugee from Turkey. It was a way to “educate” people not to come to Europe uninvited. Even within the Greens, it took a long time to grasp what was clear to some of us from the start: that the deal would lead to pushbacks and serious human rights abuses.
In the Netherlands, two coalition governments have collapsed in recent years over asylum and migration policy, and these issues continue to be highly divisive. How do you make sense of this obsession?
In April, the Dutch Senate voted on asylum legislation proposed by the previous government, in which the far right was the dominant coalition partner. One proposal would have effectively criminalised undocumented migrants – making it a criminal offence simply to be in the Netherlands without papers. It was struck down at the last minute because the far right withdrew its support, deeming it was not harsh enough. This shows how dramatically the terms of the debate have shifted. Ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable to be where we are now.
Disinformation
This applies at the local level, too: there is legislation requiring that asylum seekers awaiting their procedures be housed and distributed across municipalities, but some city councils are refusing to comply with the law. Also in April, riots broke out in a town ordered to receive 110 asylum seekers. Demonstrations turned violent, and the building designated to house these people was trashed, forcing the police to intervene. The old narrative – that migrants steal our jobs – has largely faded. Nowadays, much of the discontent is about housing. The housing shortage is real, but it is the product of decades of neoliberal policy and chronic underbuilding – not immigration. Yet this narrative has been deliberately cultivated and amplified. It is a form of disinformation that centre-right parties have helped spread.
This disconnect between rhetoric and reality is not uniquely Dutch. For example, Italy’s population remained stable in 2025 for the first time in 12 years thanks to net immigration, even as Giorgia Meloni’s government remains committed to keeping migrants out. If facts and figures have no hold, is the migration debate one that can only be won through narratives and emotions?
“We are not lying. We know that the other side is”
I’ve wrestled with this question for a long time. We are not lying; we know the other side is. But a lie is extraordinarily difficult to dispel, whether with facts or counter-narratives. You are permanently on the defensive, because if you dedicate your time and energy to dismantling a lie, you are not telling your own story. Every left-wing politician struggles with this, even though we have become skilled storytellers. I’ve taken courses on crafting better narratives, but I’m not convinced there is a winning formula – certainly not in a TV debate, where the incentive is often spectacle rather than truth.
After five years away from politics, I’m now an alderwoman in the city of Gouda. I have found that there is a profound crisis of trust – not only between citizens and politicians but also among politicians themselves. When I was group leader of [the Dutch Green-Left party] GroenLinks in the Amsterdam city council years ago, we disagreed fiercely with our opponents, but we shared procedures and maintained a working relationship. The same was largely true in Brussels: those of us who took the European Parliament seriously respected each other and shared common rules. Once that is gone, there is no basis for common ground and compromise.
Trust crisis
Back in 2015, I kept insisting there was no migration crisis – only a governance crisis. Now there is a trust crisis, and it runs through politics itself. That is the hardest thing to overcome.
The growing salience of immigration in public debate has clearly favoured the Right. Does that mean progressives would be better served by taking migration off the agenda altogether rather than trying to win the argument?
I think so, and the numbers support it, since asylum migration in particular is falling. In recent Dutch elections, we tried not to put emphasis on these topics, but they keep resurfacing because others drag them back in, and then everyone piles on.
In fact, the absence of migration from the political debate used to be the norm. When I started working on migration in 2009, nobody paid much attention to the issue, and nobody in my party wanted to touch it, because there was nothing to gain. Do it well and no one notices; make a mistake and you lose votes. It was only with the Syrian crisis that I suddenly had competition from within my own party, because the issue had become exciting. You could shine and make your name through it.
“Every time migration returns to the spotlight, progressives drift rightward with it”
Progressives in Europe are trying to win the migration argument in different ways, from the Danish Social Democrats shifting to the right, to Pedro Sánchez in Spain making an economic case for regularising migrants and UK Green leader Zack Polanski trying to reframe the debate around class and inequality. If you were a progressive leader today, which approach would you take?
It is easier to say this from outside government, but I think Polanski is right: “the boats” are not the problem. The real issues are affordability and housing and their root causes. But for that narrative to take hold, others need to follow, and what we see instead is the opposite.
Every time migration returns to the spotlight, progressives drift rightward with it. Which, in turn, shifts the debate further to the right. It is a vicious circle. I witnessed this in my own party. I recall colleagues arguing that we should only accept skilled asylum seekers. But that is not how asylum works.
The ongoing merger between GroenLinks and [the social-democratic] Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA) worries me on this front. As a Green, I believe in system change – in addressing root causes. But this is not the case for social democrats. If you are in a party that does not believe in system change, you take the current situation as a given, and all you can do is sand down the rough edges.
Green approach
What would you identify as the key elements of a green approach to migration?
Today, labour is a stronger driver of migration than asylum. A guaranteed minimum income and strong social security benefit both migrant and local workers: giving people the power to refuse jobs with poor conditions, while giving newcomers a real chance at integration. Less neoliberalism, in short.
“The point is giving people a choice to stay where they are if they so wish”
The second element is flexibility. Right now, we are effectively locking people in. You arrive in Europe, you get your papers if you are lucky, but if you leave, you lose everything. We should turn migrants into expats. Expats can move, go home, and resettle elsewhere without bureaucratic walls blocking their way.
Third, we need to look at migration in context and not as an isolated issue. Global redistribution of wealth, fair trade and investment, and decolonisation – these are not necessarily going to reduce migration numbers, but the point is giving people a choice to stay where they are if they so wish.
- Viktor Orbán’s far-right Fidesz party left the European People’s Party (EPP) in March 2021 to avoid being expelled.
This interview was republished with consent from the Green European Journal. See the original here.
Judith Sargentini (52) is a former Member of the European Parliament. Her party is the GreenLeft (Dutch: GroenLinks) party, which is part of The Greens–European Free Alliance, and the European Green Party. She is now an alderwoman in the Dutch city of Gouda.
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