Europe’s New Border Reality: Criminalisation, deterrence, and the future of asylum

Vasiliki Papadima is a postgraduate student in International Relations and Diplomacy. Her work explores global governance, geopolitics, and international law, with a particular interest in migration, security, and the changing dynamics of European policy.

In this piece, Vasiliki explores how Denmark and Greece 'reveal the same direction' toward asylum deterrence and criminalisation but 'through different tools', with reference to Europe's wider trend of border externalisation, such as the EU-Turkey Deal in 2016 and the EU-Tunisia migration partnership in 2023.

Figure 1: Europe's New Border Reality, author's own illustration, case of Greece and Denmark

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Europe’s New Border Trend

Across Europe, a new border trend has taken hold. Asylum still carries the language of protection, but the system increasingly runs on deterrence. The change is not only about fences or patrols. It shows up inside procedures, shorter deadlines, longer detention, tighter surveillance, and fewer paths to permanence. Greece and Denmark reveal the same direction through different tools. Greece raises the cost of staying by criminalising irregular presence and expanding detention, making daily life feel like a countdown to removal. Denmark keeps protection deliberately temporary, making safety real but settlement uncertain, with status easier to review and withdraw. These models do not represent a sharp break with the past. They amplify an older European drift toward control that accelerated after 2015, and is now being consolidated through EU-wide rules applying from June 2026. 

Greece: Punishment as Policy

Figure 2: Author’s own Illustration, based on Law 4636/2019 and Law 5226/2025

In 2025, Greece introduced criminal penalties for irregular stay, including prison sentences of two to five years and a minimum fine of 5000 €. These measures were formalised through Law 5226/2025, published in the Government Gazette, and presented as part of a wider shift toward tougher enforcement and faster returns. The law removes the previous possibility of regularisation after seven years of residence, restricts subsequent asylum applications, and allows administrative detention for up to 24 months. Regularisation means a legal pathway that allows someone to obtain lawful status after living in a country for many years. Under the previous framework, it could be possible after seven years, but the new law removes that long-term route. It also restricts repeat asylum applications and allows administrative detention for up to 24 months. After a final rejection, people must leave within 14 days, reduced from the previous maximum of up to 30 days. The authorities can also impose electronic monitoring, if they decide it is necessary, as part of ensuring compliance with return decisions (Ministry of Migration and Asylum (Greece), 2025).

Figure 3: Sea arrivals to Greece, 2019 to 2025 (UNHCR, 2025).

The Figure 3 chart helps explain why “pressure” can dominate political debate even when overall numbers are not at a record high. It records 54,417 sea arrivals in 2024, while 2025 shows 30,157 while 2025 shows 41,696. What still drives political momentum is the shape of arrivals within the year and where they concentrate. In 2025, arrivals are heavily concentrated in a few locations, with Crete receiving quadruple sea arrivals (13,200) by September 2025 compared to January-September 2024, and the monthly trend shows sharp volatility. That combination creates a visible hotspot, which governments can point to when arguing for emergency-style enforcement measures. 

The government has defended this shift as a response to public expectations for stricter border control. At an Economist Impact SE Europe forum, the Minister for Migration and Asylum, Thanos Plevris, argued that Europe cannot absorb future displacement at scale and claimed that many arrivals are young men from countries without war or climate pressure, suggesting asylum routes are being used for economic migration. However, that framing is weak on the facts. For example, Sudan is among the top nationalities of people who seek asylum in Greece, and since further fighting erupted in April 2023, 150.000 people are dead, and millions are displaced. Describing arrivals from such contexts as coming from “countries without war” misleads about why people move and what protection needs look like. 

Also, the emphasis on “young men” does political work. It encourages audiences to read migration through a security lens and to link movement with risk and disorder. In reality, many routes disproportionately involve young men because journeys are dangerous, and families often send the person most physically able to travel first, hoping they can later support or reunite the family. Didier Bigo (2002: 70) captures this dynamic when he argues that the “migrant” can be cast as “both a public enemy breaking the law and a private enemy mocking the will of the politician”. In that setting, securitisation grows through a broader climate of unease, where multiple actors circulate fears and present society as under threat. The border then becomes a symbolic test of control, and spikes on particular routes become easier to frame as system pressure and “misuse”, even when the reality is more complex. Necessary Funding (the budgets and resources that pay for staff, systems, detention and reception capacity, surveillance, and return operations) is part of the new border reality because it turns political priorities into real capacity. AMIF, the EU’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, is not just “money for borders”. It is a multi-year budget that supports asylum systems, integration, returns, and solidarity across the EU. Across 2021–2027, it totals EUR 10.94 billion. Greece is one of the states that receives major EU support for migration and border management. That funding can improve reception and fair procedures. It can also expand enforcement capacity, such as surveillance, detention, and faster return systems, if governments treat “control” as the main measure of success. The point is not that money “stops arrivals”. The point is that money makes deterrence scalable.

Denmark: Protection without settlement

Figure 4: Old system vs new system, Denmark’s asylum and immigration rules. Author’s own illustration, based on Folketinget, Danish Immigration Service, and Statistics Denmark

Greece raises the cost of staying. Denmark removes the promise of settling.

Denmark has set out to keep asylum applications very low and has tightened rules to reduce long-term settlement. The core idea is “protection without settlement”. People may receive protection, but it is treated as temporary and can be reviewed or withdrawn, and permanent residence is harder to reach.

This shows up in the numbers. In 2024, Denmark recorded four new asylum claims per 10,000 people, compared with 20 per 10,000 across the EU. In simple terms, Denmark’s rate is about five times lower than the EU average. The numbers alone cannot prove why, but they do show Denmark is an outlier in the European asylum landscape. However, destination choice is shaped by more than policy design. Research shows that existing family and diaspora networks, language, labour market access, and geography strongly influence where people seek protection (OECD, 2023; World Development Report, 2023). Deterrent policies alone rarely determine destination choice. Denmark’s lower rate, therefore, cannot be attributed solely to restrictive reforms, even if those reforms may reduce its relative attractiveness over time.

Policy design helps explain what that model looks like in practice. Denmark shortened some refugee permits to one or two years and tightened renewals, so extensions can be treated more like a fresh decision than a routine step. It also made it easier to refuse renewal or revoke status if authorities judge that conditions have improved in the home country, even when the situation remains unstable. The result is uncertainty. People can be recognised as needing protection but still face repeated reviews and the risk of losing status. 

Outcomes reflect the same direction. Denmark granted 1,403 asylum approvals in 2022, compared with 10,849 at the 2015 peak. These figures describe grants, not applications, but they underline how much smaller Denmark’s asylum recognition numbers have become over the past decade.

Figure 5: Asylum applications withdrawn by citizenship, age, sex and type of withdrawal, annual aggregated data, Eurostat, 2025

Figure 5 adds another layer. A withdrawn asylum application is a claim that ends before a final decision, either because the applicant ends it formally or because authorities close the case after the person stops engaging with the process. A rise in these cases does not mean protection needs have fallen. It can signal instability in the system, with more claims ending early, before the state has even decided whether protection is required.

Denmark’s “protection without settlement” model did not appear overnight. A key turning point came in 2019, when the Social Democrats won government on a promise to protect the “Danish way” and bring migration down. The shift was not only about fewer arrivals. It was about changing what asylum leads to. Under the newer approach, protection is framed as temporary, and settlement is treated as something to be earned, not expected.

This is the core difference between the old and the new model. The older logic linked protection to a clearer pathway toward stability, family reunification, and eventually permanent residence. The newer logic separates protection from permanence.

Denmark shows how this model travels politically. The Financial Times notes Denmark is often presented as a template for tougher asylum policy, while warning it may not translate cleanly to other contexts. What travels is the political message. A government can claim it still offers protection, while making long-term settlement harder. The UK debate has increasingly drawn on this “Danish style” framing. UK policymakers have looked to Denmark as a way to answer far-right pressure, presenting a harder line on asylum as a defence of the welfare state, while also noting that asylum numbers fell across Europe after 2015, so Denmark’s decline cannot be pinned on one policy lever alone.

The Future of the New Border Reality

Figure 6: Greece vs Denmark: Two Routes to Deterrence. Comparative restructuring of asylum governance in Denmark and Greece. The author’s own analytical synthesis, based on Folketinget, Danish Immigration Service, Statistics Denmark, and Law 5226/2025

Figure 6 shows two countries taking different routes to the same outcome. Greece deters through punishment, shorter exit deadlines, and longer detention. Denmark deters by making protection temporary and settlement hard to reach. Put side by side, the patterns are hard to ignore. Asylum becomes less connected to stability and more connected to control, review, and return.

Now zoom out. This “border reality” did not arrive overnight. It has been building step by step, often outside public attention. The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum is a package of EU laws intended to make asylum and border procedures more uniform across Member States, including new screening and faster border procedures. It entered into force in June 2024, with most rules applying from 12 June 2026 after a transition period. Symbolically, the Pact signals that what began as “crisis management” after 2015 is now being normalised into a permanent EU architecture.

In December 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen framed migration as a question of control, arguing that Europe must decide who crosses its borders, not smugglers, and pointing to Frontex data showing a 26 per cent decrease in detected irregular border crossings at the EU’s external borders in 2025 compared with 2024. The statistics help explain why this language resonates. Eurostat recorded 165,350 first-time asylum applicants in the EU between July and September 2025, a 25.9 per cent decrease compared with the same period in 2024. Frontex also reported a 26 per cent fall in detected irregular border crossings in 2025. Falling numbers are then presented as proof that tougher control works, reinforcing deterrence as a model rather than a temporary response.

This emphasis on control also deepens alienation. Europe maintains the language of order and legality while shifting the practical consequences of enforcement beyond its own territory. The 2023 EU-Tunisia migration partnership illustrates this dynamic. Framed as cooperation, the agreement placed migration control at its centre and moved responsibility southwards. Journalistic investigations later documented migrants being expelled by Tunisian authorities to desert border areas and abandoned without water, shelter, or assistance. Deterrence becomes externalised, harm becomes less visible to European publics, and accountability becomes harder to trace. This logic is not new. It echoes the 2016 EU-Turkey Statement, which aimed to curb arrivals by returning people arriving irregularly on the Greek islands to Turkey, paired with EU funding and resettlement commitments, shifting control and humanitarian exposure outside the EU’s core.

When journalists documented migrants being taken by bus and abandoned in desert border areas, the footage here exposed what externalised enforcement can produce in practice. Responding after viewing the recordings, European Commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Šuica framed the situation (video time stamp 21:23) as involving two fatal outcomes for people on the move, death in the desert or drowning at sea, and argued that disengagement would leave space for other powers, including Russia or China. The response links the humanitarian crisis to geopolitical competition. Alienation emerges as both moral and political. Suffering is acknowledged, yet responsibility is reframed as unavoidable.

Europe is not simply getting weaker. Its choices are getting narrower. Internal divisions, legal commitments, and reliance on external partners mean the EU often pays a higher political and economic price for disagreement than for compliance. US pressure amplifies that dynamic by raising the cost of refusing American demands. In September 2025, President Trump urged the EU to impose tariffs of 50% and even up to 100% on some Chinese and Indian goods as an indirect way to squeeze Russia. The EU did not comply. When Washington becomes more transactional, including threats toward partners, European leaders tend to pursue two responses at once. They tighten control where domestic politics demands visible action, and they deepen partnerships where strategy demands leverage. That is why you see selective closure and selective openness in the same story. Europe narrows the space for irregular and distressed movement because border control is the fastest, most legible signal of authority. At the same time, it pursues alliances that include managed mobility, because skills, technology, and supply chains now sit inside geopolitics. Chatham House describes this dynamic in the EU–India relationship, arguing that the late January 2026 summit reflects both sides’ push to diversify and deepen ties amid pressure from the Trump administration, with initiatives on skilled migration expected alongside other strategic agreements.

Article 13

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.

2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14

1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948)

Conclusion

Understanding this future border reality requires looking beyond the border itself. The World Development Report 2023 shows that migration is shaped by both fear and opportunity, and that destination country policies decide who can move safely and legally and who is pushed into irregular routes. It also warns that the pressures driving movement, including conflict, weak governance, and failing public systems, are expected to intensify in the decades ahead. That is why the “new border reality” is not a temporary phase. It is a long-term condition. In geopolitics, borders are never only lines on a map. They are tools in a wider game of power, bargaining, and deterrence. Migration will remain part of that game because it sits at the intersection of security, labour, identity, and influence.

To understand where Europe’s border regime is heading, you have to look backwards as well as forwards. Many of the regions whose citizens are now most exposed to irregular routes and harsh classifications are regions shaped by European colonial rule and post-colonial extraction. Those histories helped structure today’s inequalities in state capacity, wealth, and mobility rights. The past is not an excuse, and it is not a slogan. It is part of the mechanism. When Europe frames people from these places as problems to deter, while selectively opening pathways for the mobility it wants, it is not only managing movement. It is managing responsibility. The future of the new border reality will be decided not only by new laws and new agencies, but by whether Europe can face the historical relationships that still sit behind who gets to move, how, and at what cost.