The EU Return Regulation of March 26, 2026: Irregular Migration Control Without an Integration Framework — Why “ReImmigration” Matters

The European Union’s approval of the new Return Regulation on March 26, 2026 marks another step toward strengthening enforcement mechanisms against irregular migration. From a U.S. perspective, this may appear familiar: a legal framework designed to ensure that individuals without lawful status are effectively removed, reinforcing the credibility of the immigration system.

However, the European approach reveals a structural limitation that is often overlooked in transatlantic comparisons. The regulation operates almost exclusively within the binary distinction between lawful and unlawful presence. It enhances return procedures, coordination among Member States, and enforcement capacity. Yet, it does not address a deeper issue: what happens when migrants are formally lawful, but not meaningfully integrated into the host society.

This distinction is crucial.

In the United States, debates on immigration increasingly intersect with questions of assimilation, civic participation, and long-term social cohesion. While U.S. law does not formally condition lawful presence on “integration” in a strict legal sense, the broader political and institutional discourse acknowledges that legality alone does not resolve the challenges of immigration governance.

By contrast, the EU system—confirmed once again by this new regulation—continues to treat lawful stay as sufficient in itself, without embedding integration as a structural legal requirement. This creates a gap: individuals may remain legally present, yet disconnected from the social, economic, and cultural framework of the host country.

Within this landscape, an important legal tool emerges in European practice: what can be described as complementary protection. This is not a U.S. concept in the same form, but it can be understood as a legal mechanism that allows courts and authorities to assess whether removing a person would violate fundamental rights—particularly under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects private and family life.

Through this mechanism, European courts increasingly evaluate factors such as employment, social ties, family relationships, and overall integration. In other words, integration becomes legally relevant—but only indirectly, and only in defensive contexts, such as preventing removal.

This is where the limitation of the new EU regulation becomes evident. While it strengthens the system’s ability to remove those who are unlawfully present, it does not create any parallel mechanism to assess or respond to the lack of integration among those who are lawfully present. The system can expel the irregular, but it has no structured response to the non-integrated regular.

This gap is precisely what the paradigm of “Integration or ReImmigration” seeks to address.

Unlike more radical proposals circulating in parts of Europe—often referred to as “remigration”—this framework does not advocate for indiscriminate removal. Instead, it proposes a legally structured model in which integration becomes a central criterion for remaining in the country over time. The idea is straightforward: lawful presence should not be a static condition, but a dynamic one, linked to measurable integration outcomes.

From a U.S. perspective, this approach may resonate with longstanding discussions about the balance between enforcement and assimilation. The difference lies in its legal formalization. The European system already contains the seeds of such an approach—particularly in complementary protection—but has not yet developed it into a general principle of immigration governance.

The new EU Return Regulation, therefore, represents both progress and limitation. It improves enforcement against irregular migration, but leaves untouched the more complex question of how to govern legal migration in a way that ensures long-term integration.

Until that gap is addressed, the system will remain incomplete.

Avv. Fabio Loscerbo
Lobbyist – EU Transparency Register n. 280782895721-36
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-7030-0428

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