BLOG POST: The EU’s Deportation Regulation is Today’s Jim Crow
A blog post by Emmanuel Achiri, Policy and Advocacy Advisor on Migration & Policing
On 9 March, the European Parliament LIBE Committee is expected to vote on a new Deportation Regulation that would significantly expand the European Union’s powers to remove migrants from its territory.
While framed as an administrative reform to migration governance, the regulation raises a deeper question: what happens when formally “neutral” laws function as mechanisms of racial exclusion?
History offers a warning.
What Were the Jim Crow Laws?
The Jim Crow laws were a series of state and local statutes in the United States that enforced racial segregation between Black and white Americans from the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. These laws restricted the civil rights of Black Americans by controlling their movement, opportunities, and access to public life. They mandated separate facilities for education, transportation, housing, and public accommodations, and imposed barriers to voting.
Although often written in formally neutral language, Jim Crow laws created and maintained a legal and social hierarchy in which whiteness was the dominant norm. Through law, bureaucracy, and everyday enforcement, they ensured that Black Americans occupied a permanently precarious civic position.
The lesson from this period is not only about explicit racism. It is also about how systems of racial hierarchy can be built through ostensibly neutral legal frameworks.
The Mechanics of the EU Deportation Regulation
The proposed EU Deportation Regulation introduces several sweeping measures.
First, it expands the list of countries to which people can be deported, including the creation of deportation centres outside the European Union. These so-called “return hubs” could also be used for families with children, introducing the possibility of administrative detention for minors.
Second, the regulation proposes lifetime entry bans and allows for detention for potentially indefinite periods without strong legal justification. These provisions would apply even to children.
Third, the regulation weakens procedural safeguards and legal protections that are fundamental to the rule of law. The result is a system where detention and removal can occur with fewer avenues for legal challenge.
Taken together, these provisions mark a profound shift in how migration enforcement operates in Europe.
Social and Legal Effects
Beyond the mechanics of deportation, the regulation would reshape the everyday lives of migrants in Europe.
It introduces obligations to leave a member state immediately, combined with harsh sanctions for those in irregular situations. These sanctions may include denial of social benefits, financial penalties, and invasive monitoring measures that compromise privacy.
At the same time, the regulation narrows pathways toward regularisation by prioritising immediate deportation over regularisation and integration mechanisms. Access to national residence permits would become significantly harder for those whose status is uncertain.
In practice, this creates a system where irregular status becomes a trap rather than a temporary condition that can be resolved through administrative processes.
A Mechanism of White Supremacy?
At its core, the regulation establishes a system for the systematic removal of racialised individuals from Europe. Migration status functions here as a proxy for race.
Just as Jim Crow laws used race-neutral legal language to enforce racial hierarchy, the EU Deportation Regulation uses migration law to regulate mobility and belonging in ways that disproportionately affect racialised populations – particularly people of African, Southwest Asian, Southeast Asian, and Latin American origin.
The effect is not accidental. It reflects a political project increasingly centred on protecting a self-imagined vision of a “pristine” or culturally homogeneous Europe.
When Migration Governance Becomes Racial Control
Evidence already suggests that migration enforcement in Europe operates within a broader landscape of racial discrimination.
The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has documented widespread racial and ethnic discrimination across the European Union. This includes racial profiling, violence, and the presence of far-right extremism within some policing institutions.
Expanding deportation powers in such an environment risk reinforcing existing patterns of discriminatory enforcement. This dynamic mirrors the operation of Jim Crow laws, which depended not only on legislation but also on social tolerance for discriminatory policing and administration.
Security as a Tool of Racialised Control
The regulation also expands vague categories such as “public policy” and “national security,” giving authorities broad discretion to designate migrants as threats. This logic has deep historical roots.
European colonial systems often framed racialised peoples and the descendants of colonised populations as inherent dangers to social order. That legacy continues to shape modern policing and migration enforcement.
Under Jim Crow, Black Americans were likewise portrayed as threats to public order – a narrative deeply tied to the historical legacies of slavery and racial domination. Security language therefore becomes a legal mechanism for racial control.
Raceless in Name Only
The Deportation Regulation is raceless in name, but not in effect. By removing legal protections and procedural safeguards, it will create a separate and legally inferior population through formally neutral law. Furthermore, its predictable social outcome is stark: Europe becomes a space where those racialised as white move freely and securely, while others are surveilled, detained, and rendered removable. This mirrors the logic of Jim Crow: a legal system that maintained racial hierarchy while claiming neutrality.
In our forthcoming report to be published in April 2026 titled: Raceless in Name Only: Whiteness and the Racial Governance of Mobility in the European Union, we dive into how historical and contemporary migration politics in Europe are governed by colonial logics and racial hierarchisation.
History Will Judge
The European Union has publicly committed itself to combating structural racism, including through its recent 2026 anti-racism strategy. Yet the adoption of policies that replicate the logic of racial exclusion raises a profound contradiction.
History has already judged the Jim Crow era.
The question now is whether Europe will learn from that history – or repeat its patterns under a different name.
