EU building 'Fortress Europe' with harsher new asylum regime
The new "Common European Asylum System" comes at a time when immigration is already falling.
VIENNA — It doesn't matter who you are, as a person: under new rules that took effect June 12 across the European Union, who you are is from where you came. Now anyone seeking asylum from countries like Iran or Nigeria can be held in a border detention facility and subjected to a new, accelerated screening process — and rapidly deported, including to places other than their country of origin.
The new rules, approved by the European Parliament, create a two-tiered asylum system. If past asylum-seekers from a certain country have been rejected at least 80 percent of the time, that means anyone from that country can be subjected to an expedited screening process. Applicants will also be presumed safe unless they prove otherwise.
"Many asylum seekers are likely to be subjected to the border procedure," Human Rights Watch notes in a guide to the changes, "which may involve detention for up to twelve weeks during the examination of the asylum application and an additional twelve weeks pending deportation."
Some countries are even formally declared "safe," further increasing the burden on applicants: India, Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia.
"Nationals originating in countries designated as safe can be automatically excluded from refugee status," the European Parliamentary Research Service explains.
All this comes as the supposed "flood" of people seeking refuge in Europe has become little more than a trickle. Take Germany: In 2026, it is on track to receive fewer new asylum applications than it did in 2011, when the Arab Spring began. In Austria, too, new asylum admissions are lower than they have been in more than a decade.
Overall, across the EU, there was a 27 percent drop in new asylum applications in 2025, following an 11 percent drop the year before.
What is happening is not a refugee crisis but a concession by Europe's political establishment. European policymakers, including many on the center-left, are ceding the narrative to the far right that something must be done about the purported scourge of people wanting to build their lives in Europe. And they are doing so despite the fact that their aging populations could use an actual influx of labor.
It won't work, either. The rules will make the asylum process more difficult for many people, but, as Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative told DW, the actual number of applicants likely has more to do with conditions outside of Europe than conditions within.
It also won't neutralize the threat posed by the far right, which is leading opinion polls in Germany and Austria even as the number of new immigrants declines.
Charles R. Davis
As The Redoubt has reported, right-wing extremists want to purge their countries to create racially pure, white ethnostates — a process they call "remigration," which demands the removal of citizens too. Asserting that there is a problem with immigration — and doing so despite facts and figures to the contrary — is effective only at increasing the salience of the issue, experts have told The Redoubt, while demoralizing young voters who do not share the xenophobia.
That young people, especially, are not on board with the EU's concessions to demagogues was on display in Vienna. The day the new asylum system took effect, The Redoubt witnessed scores of people marching through the city to protest.
Addressing the crowd before it marched through the city, an activist with the Rosa Rolling Safer Space, a refuge for women fleeing persecution, said they rejected "nationalist and racist narratives" about migration in European discourse.
"We will not stand by and watch as the European border and surveillance regime is further expanding," they said. "We are fighting back to build a world without borders and exploitation. And that's why we say, 'brick by brick, wall by wall, make the Fortress Europe fall.'"
Hundreds of people chanted it back.
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