Removal of undocumented people becomes easier as far-right international continues to rise
Blade Runner (Freedom News, 22/06/2026)
An alliance of centre-right and far-right lawmakers won a vote for anti-immigration enforcement measures in the European Parliament last week. The Return Regulationis designed to speed up the removal of undocumented people and promises racial profiling, biometric control, expanded detention powers, and accelerated deportation to countries outside the EU. The approval was met with hearty applause and “send them home” chants from far-right MEPs, whose parties achieved historic gains during the 2024 EU elections in countries including France, Germany and Austria.
Thousands of immigrants die every year attempting to reach safety. Most of these deaths are unrecorded. In the Mediterranean, which has the world’s deadliest route for refugees, brutal push-back operations have contributed to the body count. Frontex—Europe’s version of ICE—has become the EU’s most funded agency, with its own ships, aircraft, drones, and weapons. Its 10,000-strong Standing Corps is the first and only pan-European armed force, operating with a budget that rivals those of small countries.
In the UK, the start of this year saw the Labour government celebrating record deportation figures, pushing through anti-migration legislation and cracking down on undocumented workers. All this has taken place amidst a domestic surge in racist riots that peaked this month with xenophobic pogroms in Northern Ireland. Reform UK performed strongly in May’s local elections and continues to lead in the polls nationally.
Connections with the super rich-backed far-right international currently raging across the US and much of the planet are not difficult to make, since much of its influence is orchestrated and amplified through the same social media platforms we use every day. The rising authoritarian movement materialises in many forms as fascism enters the twenty-first century. Perhaps Trumpism exposes best the ideological core of contemporary hegemony: domination as virtue, state violence as default.
Source: https://www.tni.org/en/mapping-fascism
While EU and UK leaders increasingly borrow from the social fragmentation strategies of the US, in an effort to remain competitive with the world’s economic superpowers, much of the Western left has continued to chase electoral windmills. Capital restructuring since the 80s has led to life being detached from collective decision-making, weakening unions and removing from societies much of the control they thought they possessed over governance. Many of the gains which had been painfully won through the labour struggles of the previous decades are being lost and we increasingly find ourselves defending scraps, unable to imagine viable alternatives to the neoliberal nightmare of TINA dogma: There Is No Alternative.
The incentive to submit to this order has been the promise for consumerist abundance and advanced services such as infrastructure and medical care. From the outside, millions look at the spectacle of so-called prosperity from a distance. Misery and the fear of a life in collapsing ecosystems, war zones and totalitarian regimes (all caused by what is happening inside) brings waves of desperate people to the borders with Mexico and the shores of Fortress Europe on a daily basis. The migration flows that the EU seeks to manage are nothing but a consequence of the same global economy from which the core continues to benefit.
Anti-migrant chants in the EU parliament are the expression of a cynicism that must be expected in this context. Border control is no longer a temporary response to a passing crisis, and foreign policy increasingly has to centre on keeping immigration contained at the source. After all, genocides have been a structural part of a centuries-old colonial system that has today reached its planetary limit and increasingly treats surplus population as disposable. In a way, the rivers of people returning to the source close an infinite loop, because there is no ‘new world’ left to colonise with Europe’s so-called ‘dangerous classes’—its surplus poor, displaced, and radicalised. Increasingly, capitalism’s only remaining ‘solution’ appears to be mass death. The systematic slaughtering of migrants on Europe’s shores is not a malfunction but a structural expression of a dead end.
The waves of migration will continue and further sharpen the divide between resurgent nationalism and emancipatory politics. Societies are being pushed to boiling point and the resulting discontent must be criminalised or diverted to racist myths of existential threats. Counter-insurrection balances out feelings of class hatred that would otherwise result in insurrections against the elites at the top. Racism and fascism return out of necessity as the ruling class needs to retain control—at the present time, the traditional social democratic parties are entirely unfit to express the feelings of resentment that simmer among both minority and majority populations. Electoral results across Europe confirm their irrelevance and push them to make far-right turns, or cease to exist.
Militarisation becomes the new organising logic as the Cold War’s ideological veneer dissolves and what remains is open competition, brute force, and intensified suppression of disagreement. Border violence, genocide, and militarisation all flow from the same unresolved root. The logic that obliterates Gaza and threatens the Kurds in Rojava, is the same logic that drowns migrants in the Mediterranean, assassinates them and their supporters in the US, demonises migrants in Britain, criminalises dissent, pushes fossil fuel and industrial-scale green energy projects, builds data centres, destroys ecosystems and elevates white supremacist narratives.
Governments and opposition parties can’t resolve the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Our ongoing task is to keep exposing this machinery and stand with those suffering or struggling at the front lines of resistance. Backing authoritarian regimes simply because they oppose the West plays the hand of the existing hegemony—for any conflict between states, we the people are always the only victims. True anti-imperialism isn’t about choosing sides in a geopolitical chess match, but about supporting every underdog that suffers under any regime. We need to build trust in our communities and come together as allies and co-conspirators against those who wage a social war against us. And we need to rethink the ideological habits that isolate us and make us appear like a lifestyle cult rather than a political force.
Palestine Action was proscribed because its targeted, disruptive tactics—like shutting down weapons factories—began to seriously impact arms production. Blockages and disruptions to infrastructure can force the hand of those in power, or make them reconsider their plans in the face of the increased cost to their operations. What gets criminalised is often what works. The task is not to patch a cracking system, but to resist through a variety of tactics, and build the ground beneath us before it falls.
Image: Mstyslav Chernov CC-BY-SA-4.0