As the world heats up, Nazi wrecks are rising from the depths. Record-low water on the Danube has exposed warped remains of warships, some hulls still laden with explosives – Hitler’s Black Sea fleet, scuttled in 1944. Terrible heat buckles steel rails in Ukraine, helping Russian bombs and drones to cause even more fire and death. The same heat proliferated jellyfish that have stopped one of France’s nuclear plants, caused a major fire near Sizewell C in Suffolk and brought Hungary’s only nuclear facility to the brink of shutdown for lack of cooling water. Perils around nuclear infrastructure lead to re-opening gas plants that produce more emissions, which cause even more heat, which cause even more violence. The climate crisis resurrects the continent’s past and undercuts the roots of its future.
Earlier this month, standing in London under the fifth heatwave of the English summer, Nigel Farage posed in front of a banner reading “Operation Restoring Justice”. If he comes to power, he said, he will empty Britain’s prisons of foreigners. His spokesman explained that all 10,000 foreign nationals in British jails would be deported, and if their home countries refused them, they would serve their sentences elsewhere. The British press treats this as another Farage stunt – costed on a napkin, staged for the cameras. Unfortunately, for once, he is swimming with the European mainstream. For while Farage performed, the European Union was busy quietly legislating something similar, and something it would have found unspeakable a decade ago: the deportation of unwanted human beings to poorer countries for money.
When the Conservatives proposed flying asylum seekers to Rwanda in 2022, the scheme was ridiculed across the continent as a uniquely British folly. British courts found the scheme unlawful, and Labour scrapped it within days of taking office. The scheme became shorthand for cruelty combined with incompetence, the same mindset that produced Brexit.
But a change of season came from across the Atlantic. In March 2025, the Trump administration deported three planeloads of alleged gang members to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre under a paid agreement with Nayib Bukele’s government. The images recalled the Soviet gulag, outsourced but not modernised: shaved heads, shackled men stacked like cargo, guards in balaclavas. When some 250 Venezuelans were released in a prisoner swap in July 2025, they described beatings and torture – a “horror movie”, one said. By May 2026, the Trump administration had sent roughly 22,000 people to 26 third countries – South Sudan, Eswatini, the Central African Republic – chosen precisely because the deportees had no connection to them.
In 2023, Italian-run detention centres were created on Albanian soil. However, the European Court of Justice ruled in August 2025 that a country cannot be declared “safe” unless it is safe for everyone, and deporting people to unsafe countries is unlawful. Britain’s Supreme Court had already said as much about Rwanda in 2023. A decisive move came this June. The European Parliament approved the new Return Regulation, authorising member states to establish “return hubs” – offshore detention facilities in third countries for rejected asylum seekers. Detention for up to two years; entry bans up to ten, but nobody in Berlin or Brussels says “penal colony” or “Rwanda”. They say hubs, returns, effectiveness.
The first step was deporting aliens; the second is outsourcing the penitentiary for one’s own citizens. Denmark has chosen Kosovo, Sweden exports its criminals to Estonia. Germany leads a coalition with Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Greece, aiming to sign the deals with host countries by the end of this year. Germany’s interior minister Alexander Dobrindt has even proposed negotiating with the Taliban. Rwanda heads the list of 12 countries, from Ghana to Armenia, which the EU is scouting as hosts, most of them poor, overheated countries with little to sell but their territory. Nobody is holding press conferences in front of banners. That is the difference between Farage and the mainstream European leaders: not a showman’s con job but a quiet, practical and consistent – though outlandishly expensive – set of policies.
Historians recognise the shape of the thing being built. For three centuries, European empires ran on removal: Britain transported its convicts to Australia, France maintained Devil’s Island, Russia filled Siberia and, later, Sakhalin with exiles. The penal colony was empire’s sewage system – the metropole kept its cathedrals and developed its democracy while shipping its unwanted to distant colonies. What is being assembled now inverts the system. Europe no longer owns peripheries, so it rents them. Denmark is paying Kosovo €200m to hold 300 foreign convicts. Sweden, which pays an incredible €11,500 per inmate per month on its territory, is renting cells in Estonia’s Tartu prison for €8,500 a month. The Russian Federation denies its colonial endeavours, past and present, but official Russian usage retains “colony” precisely in the sense of penal colony: Russia has only eight prisons, and some seven hundred penal colonies.
Docile human bodies have become an export commodity, and poorer states have discovered a resource more reliable than oil: carceral capacity. Like resource rents, confinement rent flows to rulers rather than citizens. Like the oil curse, it rewards the country for building cages rather than schools. Like the Dutch disease, it corrupts even a country that would be a democratic and enlightened country without an overpriced resource. Like oil, the traffic in humans degrades both the seller and the buyer.
A gruesome fact is that the current drought in Europe – we all know how horrible it is – pales in comparison with the relentless, unceasing drought in Africa. The further the climate crisis goes, the more people will migrate from south to north. This is the root of the matter, buried under the managerial vocabulary of “returns” and “hubs”: a growing share of the human beings being detained and deported are climate migrants. This category is massive and gets no legal recognition. The 1951 Refugee Convention recognises persecution; it does not recognise a failed harvest, a dead well, a fishery cooked out of existence. A Senegalese farmer whose land has turned to dust is, in the eyes of European law, an “economic migrant” with no claim – deportable, detainable, transferable to a hub. The law’s categories were drawn for the 20th century’s political emergencies; the 21st century’s climate catastrophe is political, too – in all ways but the legal name.
The circle is vicious in the precise sense: each turn accelerates the next. Carbon emitted over two centuries of European and American industry heats the planet. The heat makes the South progressively unlivable – the crops fail, the coasts flood, the states wage wars. People flee the south, and their arrival strains the north. The strain is harvested by far-right parties whose entire business model is blaming the migrant. They normalise deportation, and people are shipped to the South to make “third countries” even less livable, and the deporting countries even more prosperous. Organised by the economies whose emissions caused the drought, the return hubs hold the victims of the drought. Moreover, they save pennies for the countries that have already benefited from this circulation of human bodies and carbon molecules. And to make things even worse, the far-right parties that capitalise on migration turn deportation into a political show that promises to eradicate it – a promise they can never keep, for the migrant is their resource. Each deportation manufactures the conditions for the next migration. The machine feeds itself and devours the planet.
We know the means to disrupt the vicious circle. July 2026 was the hottest month in US history, eclipsing the record set in 1936 during the infamous Dust Bowl. Crops were dying, woods burning, and farmers fleeing. However, the Dust Bowl triggered a major shift in American politics by expanding federal intervention. It led Franklin D Roosevelt to create New Deal agrarian programmes, caused libertarian farmers to support federal aid and altered voting patterns and demographics in western states like California. A fresher example is a recent decision by the Hungarian government of Péter Magyar to construct a rock sill across the riverbed of the Danube to raise cooling water levels – a decision that had been blocked by Viktor Orbán’s far-right government. “The Danube has given us days, not months,” Magyar told the nation; construction began the next morning.
The Conservatives were mocked for Rwanda because they were early, loud and incompetent. Their successors across Europe are late, quiet and competent, which is worse. The wrecks in the Danube will be cleared by crews working around the clock. What Europe has legislated this summer will have to be cleared, too.
[Further reading: The age of deportation]
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Subscribe here to commentThe strongest point here is the one the piece almost buries: the 1951 Convention recognises persecution but not a dead well or a failed harvest, so a Senegalese farmer driven off his land is, in law, an economic migrant and deportable by default. That is a real gap, it is growing, and it deserves a whole column.
Instead it gets one paragraph inside a much wider tour: scuttled warships, Farage, Bukele’s prison, Danish cells in Kosovo, Russian penal colonies, the oil curse, the Dust Bowl and a Hungarian rock sill. Each item is interesting on its own, but they are placed side by side rather than connected, and the reader is left to supply the argument. Grant every fact and it is still unclear what follows — reform the Convention, reject the Return Regulation, something else? The closing line predicts that this summer’s legislation “will have to be cleared” but does not say by whom, or how.
Some of the refugees will be due to global warming and thus our own emissions, but I suggest that most are not. Most are leaving because (a) their own countries are a mess / oppress them, as opponents of decolonisation [where that applies] predicted would happen after decolonisation (b) they want a better future elsewhere. All very understandable, but not the moral obligation for us which this article’s lavish referencing of global warming implies. But producing spurious justifications for hundreds of thousands of foreigners being allowed into Britain, every single year, has become a fetish for progressives, as millions of the Labour party’s former supporters have noticed, which is why they have transferred their support to parties which propose an end to immigration and the removal of those who people should not be here.
Incidentally, if there are 10,000 foreigners in British prisons out of a prison population of 85,000, that is a remarkable testimony to the effect on crime of allowing these people in, in the first place. At around 11.5%, it sounds wildly disproportionate to their proportion in the population as a whole, suggesting a much greater propensity to commit crime. No doubt someone with the figures at their fingertips can elaborate.