GeopoliticsMarket noteWednesday 30 September 2026, 21:25
Europe criticised Trump on migration. Now it is looking to Rwanda too
Five EU countries want to start sending rejected asylum seekers to countries outside the bloc next year, with Rwanda first. Rwanda also takes US deportees. Asylum claims are already down by a third.
By The Notebook Desk
Five EU countries want to begin sending migrants whose asylum claims have been rejected to countries outside the bloc by the first half of 2027, Thanos Plevris, Greece’s migration minister, told Politico on 29 September. The group, which calls itself the Core Group, is made up of Denmark, Austria, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands. Its first deal will be with Rwanda, according to two EU diplomats. Uganda and Uzbekistan are also under discussion.
It is one of several moves across Europe to tighten the rules. Swiss lawmakers have backed a plan to tax companies when they hire foreign workers, Bloomberg reported. On Thursday, Greece will ask EU interior ministers for a way to suspend asylum applications from new arrivals for a time when a country faces an emergency.
What Europe said about Washington
The turn stands out against what European leaders used to say about American policy. In January 2017, when Donald Trump barred travellers from seven Muslim-majority countries, Angela Merkel’s spokesman said the fight against terrorism “doesn’t justify putting people of a particular origin or particular faith under general suspicion”. François Hollande said that “when (Trump) rejects the arrival of refugees, while Europe has done its duty, we should respond to him”, the Associated Press reported.
In Trump’s second term the argument ran the other way, with Washington telling Europe to change. In February 2025, JD Vance accused European leaders in Munich of failing to control immigration, and Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, called his comments “unacceptable”, the AP reported. In December the US national security strategy said Europe’s migration policies were “transforming the continent and creating strife”, and set the goal to “help Europe correct its current trajectory”, ABC News reported. “Contrary to what some may say, woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure,” Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, replied in February.
The same destination
Europe rejected the lecture, but its policy is moving in the direction Washington urged. Rwanda agreed last year to take up to 250 people deported from the US, the AP reported, after an earlier British plan to send asylum seekers there collapsed. It is now also the first choice of the five EU countries.
Plevris says the plan differs from the British one. “We’re not talking about centers, in the sense that someone whose asylum is rejected is sent to a closed facility in a third country,” he said. Those rejected would go either to their country of origin or to a third country. He also admits that it would not move large numbers: “In reality, it is another means of exerting pressure that could increase voluntary returns.”
The numbers are already falling
The pressure on governments is political more than numerical. The EU received 672,350 first-time asylum applications in 2025, down 36% from 1,049,905 in 2023, according to Eurostat. The fall has continued this year: there were 269,355 in the first six months of 2026, 21% fewer than a year earlier, Eurostat’s monthly data show.
The votes have moved the other way. On 6 September the Alternative for Germany won 43.8% in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, more than twice the 17.2% of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats, Al Jazeera reported. All other parties still refuse to govern with it. Governments that tighten the rules are trying to take the issue back from parties such as the AfD before the next national votes.
What to watch
EU interior ministers meet on Thursday, when Greece presents its emergency plan. The Core Group wants its pilot running in the first half of 2027 and fully working in the second half, when Greece holds the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU. The group is still in talks with international organisations to monitor human rights in the countries that would take the migrants. Britain’s own Rwanda scheme was abandoned after years of legal challenges, and the EU plan is likely to be tested in the courts too.
Disclosure
This is analysis and opinion, not investment advice.