African refugees and migrants fleeing war and dictatorships in search of safety on European shores. (AFP)
Europeans may be horrified by United States President Donald Trump’s draconian immigration policies, which include snatching people off the streets and deporting them without due process. But the European Union’s decade-long crackdown on irregular African migrants who — fleeing conflict, climate disasters and poverty — attempt to reach Europe in flimsy boats is equally appalling.
Worse, the European Commission seeks to double down on this approach: a leaked proposal for the next long-term budget cycle calls for conditioning development aid for African countries on meeting migration-reduction targets.
Africans comprise a fairly large share of the EU’s irregular migrants, with West and Central African countries accounting for about a third of those arriving in the first half of 2024. At least 11 million African-born migrants live in Europe — more than double the number living in Asia and North America — where they boost the labour force and ease economic pressures caused by a rapidly aging local population.
But many Europeans treat irregular migrants as a security threat, criminalising their entry and scapegoating them for broader societal problems.
After millions of Syrian, Afghan and Iraqi refugees fled to the bloc in 2015-16, the EU began strengthening “Fortress Europe”. Some countries, including Greece, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, built external border fences, while others, like Germany and the Netherlands, have reintroduced border controls.
Efforts to secure the bloc have included violent pushbacks against refugees and migrants at external borders — a violation of international human-rights law — and partnerships with third countries to curb flows.
According to Amnesty International, the EU’s externalisation policy, coupled with Italy and Malta’s hostility to rescue ships, were responsible for 721 migrant deaths in the Mediterranean in June and July 2018. More recently, several European rescue organisations blamed the deaths of 3000 people in the Mediterranean in 2023 partly on an EU decree enacted that year that severely restricted their response capacity.
There is a stark divide between how European and African governments view this issue. From Sweden and Poland to Italy and Germany, far-right parties have surged in popularity by stoking anti-immigrant sentiment, which has pushed many mainstream European politicians to embrace xenophobic policies.
By contrast, African governments largely oppose the EU’s forced return of migrants, for both humanitarian and economic reasons. African migrants are a vital source of remittances, sending back $100 billion in 2022 — more than the continent received in official development assistance and foreign direct investment combined.
These governments are also quick to note that they bear the brunt of African migration: of the more than 45 million Africans forcibly displaced last year, 34.5 million remained in the continent.
This does not absolve African governments of responsibility for their actions: poor governance, political exclusion and development failures have contributed to the migration surge. The lack of economic opportunities, in particular, has forced many young Africans to flee to wealthier countries. The continent has the world’s youngest population, with 70% in sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 30.
But instead of using its economic might to bolster growth and support job creation in Africa, the EU poured €500 million ($585 million) into its 2016 Migration Partnership Framework, a new way of working with source countries to reduce migration.
The resulting partnerships with Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal subordinated development aid to migration goals. This heavy-handed approach, particularly the EU’s obsession with negotiating the forced return of African migrants and pushing its own interests, failed to stem the flow of people, alienated African governments and undermined the bloc’s human-rights and development principles.
Now, the commission has its sights on hardening this negative-incentive structure and applying it more widely.
Overall, migrant arrivals in the EU declined by about 20% in the first five months of 2025. But this decline came after years of human-rights abuses by the EU’s third-country partners, which were effectively bribed to slow the movement of people.
In 2024, the European Court of Auditors criticised the bloc’s €5 billion Emergency Trust Fund for Africa for failing to address the human-rights risks involved in subcontracting migration policy to autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. That same year, more than 2000 African migrants died while trying to reach Europe.
The behaviour of these regimes is reprehensible. The Libyan coast guard has subjected African migrants to “unimaginable horrors” — sexual violence, torture, arbitrary detention, beatings and enslavement.
Tunisia’s security forces have raped women, beaten children, dumped others in the desert and reportedly colluded with smugglers. Last year, a leaked internal report from the European External Action Service warned that continued support for Tunisia, which has cracked down hard on dissent, would damage the EU’s reputation.
The cruelty on display in the bloc is no less shocking. Frontex, the EU’s border control agency, was reportedly involved in covering up hundreds of illegal pushbacks in the Aegean Sea.
Polish border guards forced migrants back into Belarus, where they were beaten and raped. Last year, three Egyptian teenagers froze to death after Bulgarian officers reportedly obstructed their rescue near the Turkish border. Many Sudanese asylum seekers continue to be held illegally in Greek prisons.
The EU’s current approach is ineffective and inhumane; its proposal to use foreign aid as a stick is even more so. To address the source of African migration, European policymakers must understand why young people embark on this perilous journey.
A 2019 report by the United Nations Development Programme, based on interviews with 1970 African migrants from 39 nations, conducted in 13 EU member states, found that they were typically educated above the average levels in their home countries and had held steady jobs there.
But only 38% said they had earned enough “to get by”. Unable to fulfill their ambitions in Africa, and with many facing war and repression, these young people looked to Europe for opportunity and safety.
Reducing migration from Africa requires contributing generously to its development, not funding third countries — many of them ruled by repressive regimes — to harden borders by any means.
The EU has cynically chosen the latter approach, eroding its moral standing. If the bloc wants to portray itself as a global force for good following the US’s retreat from the world stage, it must pursue migration policies that reflect our shared humanity, rather than self-interest.
Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara and Iraq. He is the author of The Splendid Tapestry of African Life: Essays on A Resilient Continent, its Diaspora, and the World (Routledge, 2025) and Global Africa: Profiles in Courage, Creativity, and Cruelty (Routledge, 2024).
This article was first published in Project Syndicate.
