Brussels – In the fourth quarter of 2024, 124,935 non-EU citizens in the European Union were ordered to leave a member country. Compared to the third quarter of 2024, the number of orders to leave increased by 11.5 percent. However, this increase did not correspond to the number of expulsions carried out: only one in four people were ‘escorted’ out of the EU after the competent authorities made the decision, so in the last three months of last year, the number of people from third countries returned to their point of origin was ‘just’ 28.630 out of 124,935 decisions produced.
The latest data published by Eurostat thus demonstrate the European states’ difficulty in translating the choices made at the administrative and legal level into practice. If one considers the whole of 2024, out of 453,840 repatriation orders, 119,155 were executed, or just 26 percent. The European Statistical Office noted that the repatriation rate is very low.
When words translate into action, repatriations mainly involved men and women from Georgia (3,351), Turkey (2,492), and Albania (1.982), while mainly Algerian (11,362), Syrian (8,674), and Moroccan (8,561) citizens. At the same time, primarily Algerian (11,362), Syrian (8,674), and Moroccan (8,561) nationals are subject to orders to leave EU territory. The figure on asylum seekers from Syria confirms the trend that views the country as now safe after the fall of Bashar al-Assad.
In the data released by Eurostat, what stands out is the nature of the returns. At the EU level, more than half of the returns (57.1 percent) to a third country involved people who left the territory voluntarily, while 42.9 percent involved forced returns. However, “the proportion of voluntary returns versus enforced returns varies significantly among the EU countries,” Eurostat notes in a statement. “In Romania and Italy, all the returns reported were enforced, while in Estonia, Latvia, Denmark, and Lithuania, more than 90% of reported returns were recorded as voluntary.”
