Standing before a sea of Flemish and Dutch flags outside of the European Parliament in mid-July, far-right activists Martin Sellner and Eva Vlaardingerbroek led chants of “send them back!” Around 200 supporters of the Save Europe Act, an initiative calling for a moratorium and return of non-European migrants to the European Union, joined in as counter-protesters booed nearby. Later, campaigners unfurled a banner advocating remigration — large enough to be seen from the Parliament’s upper floors.
The demonstration was the latest sign that the term remigration is entering Europe’s broader political vocabulary. For its leading proponents, like Sellner, one of the founders of the Save Europe Act initiative, the concept extends far beyond just tighter border controls or higher deportation rates. It envisions removing not only irregular migrants, but also legally resident foreigners and, in some cases, citizens deemed insufficiently integrated — placing it well outside the boundaries of mainstream European migration policy.
But the idea is facing a series of legal and economic roadblocks. At the end of July, the European Commission ruled that the Save Europe Act violated EU law and refused to register the initiative for formal signature collection.
Remigration's growing influence, however, may have less to do with concrete policy than with shifting the terms of Europe’s migration debate. By advancing proposals that crash up against legal and economic constraints, analysts say, activists seek to legitimize ideas considered politically unacceptable while framing institutional rejection as proof that Europe’s elites have become disconnected from the public.
“I think remigration as intended by Sellner will never become a law, but it’s still important because we still see an important symbolic shift,” said Gaia Mastrosanti, a political analyst specializing in migration and European affairs and a former editor at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. “We see that the boundaries of language are changing, and what was once not considered possible is now a more legitimate proposal.”
Legal barriers as political strategy
The Save Europe Act, launched by Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek, calls for a “formal moratorium on new non-Western/non-European immigration” and “systematic and accelerated return (remigration)” of many migrants.
Those demands were always going to collide with EU law, according to Alberto Tagliapietra, programme assistant at the German Marshall Fund. “It's clear that their proposal, as framed, is illegal under EU law, as it would establish a discriminatory mechanism based on ethnic origin,” he said.
A week after supporters rallied outside Parliament, the Commission refused to register the proposal for formal signature collection, arguing that it violated both Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union — which commits the bloc to equality and minority rights — and Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which prohibits discrimination on grounds including race, nationality and ethnic origin.
The legal hurdles become even higher as remigration, as articulated by Sellner, targets categories of people who enjoy far stronger legal protections than asylum seekers or irregular immigrants, according to Mastrosanti. Attempting to remove citizens would be unconstitutional, she said.
But pushing those legal barriers is part of the point, she added, as anti-immigration activists try to broaden the scope of acceptable immigration debate.
Vlaardingerbroek has described the campaign as “pushing the Overton window in real time” while the Save Europe Act itself acknowledges that hitting legal barriers is part of the political strategy. “If the EU ignores the verified will of more than one million citizens, it would demonstrate the institution's democratic deficit and create a powerful mobilizing force for further action.”
So far, that seems to be the case. After the Commission rejected the initiative, Sellner vowed to challenge the decision in court and in August the group launched a new series of EU-wide demonstrations under the slogan “Europe United Against the EU.”
“The proponents’ decision to bring the case to court is more of a performative act rather than a concrete legal strategy,” Tagliapietra said.
Remigration goes far beyond mainstream immigration politics in Europe today, said Lukas Gehrke, director at the International Organization for Migration’s global office in Brussels. Rather than focusing primarily on irregular migrants and asylum seekers, he said, the concept challenges liberal migration policies more broadly.
For remigration activists, that means even Europe’s recent turn towards more restrictive migration enforcement falls far short of what they envision. In June, for example, the European People’s Party voted with right-wing parties to pass a more restrictive returns regulation. But the measure only applied to irregular migrants, not legal foreign residents nor citizens.
For that reason, while the June returns regulation was a “step in the right direction,” according to one right-wing, pro-European activist in favor of remigration, it didn’t go far enough. He said that return policies should be targeted at legal family reunifications, and not just illegal migration.
Remigration runs into economic trouble
The roadblocks facing remigration aren’t only legal but economic.
Italy has offered the most detailed remigration policy proposal across Europe, and offers a test case, Mastrosanti said. A citizen-backed remigration proposal dubbed “Remigrazione e Riconquista,” or “Remigration and Reconquest,” won over 150,000 signatures before reaching Parliament in June. Like Sellner’s vision, it defines remigration broadly to include all foreigners in Italy, and sets out a national program with economic incentives, charter transport and even micro-credit in the country of origin to facilitate departures.
The proposal would establish a Remigration Fund of €1 billion, expandable to €2 billion and bankrolled through already existing national integration funds and levies on remittances. Yet cost estimates suggest the well would quickly run dry.
The Italian Ministry of the Interior calculated in 2026 that executing one return would set the state back roughly €3,500. Removing all 339,000 irregular migrants in Italy would cost some €1.19 billion. Applying the same €3,500 return costs to even 10% of Italy’s foreign national population of 5.9 million people would lead to costs of €2.06 billion.
And the broader economic impact would be even greater. Foreign nationals contributed €177.2 billion to the Italian economy in 2024, while the aging Italian economy due to demographic decline means there is a demand for more workers, according to Mastrosanti. Last year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni even passed a “Flow Decree” to bring nearly half a million economic migrants into Italy over the next three years.
The economic calculus is similar across much of Europe, with work- and education-based migration pathways leading to net-positive contributions to public finances in countries including Denmark and the Netherlands, according to Bruegel, while asylum- and family-based migration has imposed greater fiscal costs.
But economic and legal roadblocks have done little to push remigration back to the margins. If anything the EU’s rejection of the Save Europe Act merely feeds a familiar right-wing narrative: that the EU isn’t acting in the interest of Europeans. For the flag-waving activists outside Parliament, then, defeat may carry its own political value.
“We saw this coming … it wasn’t a surprise,” said Vlaardingerbroek, in a video she filmed with Sellner for supporters after the Commission rejected the proposal. “Now we’re going to go into battle even harder.”
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