(Photo by Sandor Csudai via The Organization for World Peace/CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED)
On January 29th, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the country would be sending up to 30,000 of “the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people” to a detention centre at Guantanamo Bay. As an American naval base in Cuba, the US’s move to house asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants in another country is the culmination of a major rise in anti-immigrant politics.
While the backlash against immigrants has always been an issue in Western countries, it has become even more politicized in the last decade. In previous elections, immigration has become one of, if not the key issue, in not just the U.S. but also France, the UK, Germany, Italy, and Canada.
Given this focus on immigration, many of these countries have been looking at more extreme measures to address legal and ‘illegal’ immigration. While Trump’s solution may initially seem unprecedented, it is simply an escalation of the gradual turn in recent years to outsourced migrant detention facilities. In 2022, under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the UK proposed to send backlogs of asylum seekers and prospective migrants to Rwanda to be processed outside of the country. In November of 2023, Italy signed a similar deal with Albania that has recently begun.
We must understand the Trump administration’s illegal and unconstitutional deportation of immigrants in the broader global context of immigration policy. Understanding how asylum cases are processed and why outsourcing this processing is a cause for alarm is crucial in organizing solutions to this consequential issue.
Western Asylum Policies: Similar Systems, Similar Shortcomings
Similar asylum regulation systems govern the United States and the European Union. In the latter, prospective asylum seekers are bound by the Dublin Regulation, which ensures that they must apply for residence in the first country within the EU in which they arrive.
For asylum seekers headed to the United States, the Safe Third Country Agreement allows the U.S. to refuse any applicants who did not first apply in other countries deemed ‘safe’ along their route. The Trump administration introduced the policy in its first term, the Biden administration half-heartedly repealed it, and now the Trump administration has reinstated it in its latest term.
Numerous groups have criticized these two procedures as regulations that heavily burden border states. These countries, including Greece and Italy in the EU or Mexico for the US, receive disproportionate numbers of applicants and act as a third party. In addition to being inefficient, these procedures have many human rights concerns.
As asylum seekers wait for authorities to assess whether or not they have followed these procedures, border agents often detain them in camps with substandard conditions. In particular, the detention centres run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump and Biden administrations have been particularly infamous for their separation of families, detention of minors, and other human rights abuses.
Outsourcing Asylum: The UK-Rwanda Scheme
As if the human rights concerns of the current system were not enough, the internal logic of Western administrations has led them to consider new systems that could be even more disastrous. Western nations are looking to outsource the application process to other countries rather than checking at their borders to see whether an asylum applicant has first applied elsewhere.
As the first high-profile example of a Western country outsourcing asylum applications, the UK’s proposal to contract out its asylum process to Rwanda presented several legal and moral challenges. First, the massively costly logistics involved in transporting asylum seekers seemed insurmountable. How would the government first send applicants from the UK to Rwanda, then back to the UK or their home country, all while maintaining adequate conditions for these people?
Then came the question of legality. Since people would be sent by the UK to Rwanda, how would they seek legal recourse if either UK or Rwandan authorities violated their rights in the process? These concerns came to a head in the 2024 UK election, and the successive government eventually cancelled the Rwanda scheme without sending any asylum seekers to the African country. In the end, the UK invested over 320 million pounds into the failed project.
Outsourced Asylum: From Albania to Guantanamo
Despite its eventual failure, Sunak and the Conservative Party’s Rwanda scheme has been influential. Germany, Sweden, and Austria considered similar proposals to outsource their asylum cases. In particular, it had an impact on Italy; Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni finalized preparations to outsource Italy’s asylum cases to Albania in February 2024.
Italy has largely ignored the same concerns raised in the UK case. Since it is not part of the European Union, EU regulations do not govern Albania, which has led to questions regarding undemocratic detainment, safe transfers from Italy to Albania, family reunification, and other legal consequences. Though Italy sent several dozen people in October to its pilot program, the project has faced obstacles and public backlash to the point that it likely will not proceed.
Against the backdrop of these developments in Europe, Trump’s new program for the mass expulsion of immigrants and asylum seekers has European models to follow. Despite this project facing the same legal and moral challenges as the ones that came before it, the U.S. expulsion program seems to be progressing further and more quickly than its predecessors. Invoking the legal framework that permitted the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, the U.S. government has begun transferring detainees to Guantanamo Bay.
While the European schemes have more or less failed, Trump’s plan is nonetheless proceeding. The selection of Guantanamo Bay as the location for the detention centre has symbolic significance — hundreds of detainees have been tortured and detained without trial at the Cuban naval base across several decades and under both Democrat and Republican administrations.
So far, the proceedings have continued this history. According to The Guardian, ICE is holding detainees without charge. As one of the most notable historical sites where U.S authorities systematically ignored domestic and international law, the recent development of outsourcing asylum to Guantanamo sends a dangerous signal of what is to come.
Flaws in Outsourcing as a Solution
One of the main reasons that countries consider these outsourced detention schemes is because they say they are overwhelmed with applications. The internal logic goes that if they can outsource these cases, they may be able to keep up with demand better.
Assuming that outsourcing will solve the backlog of applications is flawed, though; laws currently in place create several bureaucratic issues. Only a small fraction of applications from the ‘first country of application’ or a ‘safe third country’ are processed. How will introducing an even more complex element in processing asylum applications in a country bound by different legal standards help address the backlog?
What is potentially more dangerous, though, is the overall direction of political debate in the West and its stigmatization of immigrants. Referring to individuals as ‘illegal aliens’ dishonestly paints people in broad strokes. Immigrants, both legal and ‘illegal,’ contribute massively to the societies in which they live. In particular, ‘illegal’ immigrants are not just those who are undocumented but new generations and family members.
Beyond Outsourcing & Immigration Misinformation
To say there is an ‘immigration crisis’ is ultimately a convenient political framing device. In the United States, ‘illegal’ immigrants commit less crime than natives and legal immigrants, pay more in taxes than they collect in welfare, and provide a myriad of other benefits to the U.S. economy – similar evidence exists for a variety of European contexts.
Anti-immigration measures by Sunak, Meloni, and Trump are largely symbolic, using them for self-serving political gain. Leaders use these policies to signal to voters that they are ‘solving the crisis’ rather than addressing any institutional inequalities present in existing systems. Rather than pivoting to authoritarian measures, politicians should examine the ways the current systems fail immigrants and make efforts to address the hateful rhetoric that they have produced.
As noted by author Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, “[…] the alternative is not a new update of the regulations, but a rethink of how to build a genuine common asylum policy.” When the ‘legal’ channels of immigration are arbitrary, confusing, and dehumanizing, it makes ‘illegal’ immigration inevitable. Without addressing these root causes of insecurity, the current crop of ‘solutions’ will fail.
The Need for Humane Immigration Solutions
Unfortunately, as Western nations pull the ‘centre’ further and further right over immigration, there are grim prospects for progressive policy changes on this issue within the next few years. Even still, it is important to understand that current regulations across the Western world are insufficient.
As the current system continues to become even more unsustainable, alternative systems must, among other things, expand legal pathways to immigration, work to reduce the stigmatization of undocumented immigrants and reverse the harms that the militarization of border politics has created. Doubling down on the most extreme parts of the current system will only exacerbate its issues, not solve them.
Edited by Atena Abbaspourbenis
