Irregular migration is a hot topic in European politics at the moment and often gives rise to dubious claims, the latest of which has come from Portugal.
Minister of the Presidency of Portugal António Leitão Amaro, of the ruling centre-right Social Democratic Party, recently said that the Socialist Party failed to tackle illegal immigration during its roughly eight years in government between 2015 and 2024.
He said that Portugal is “one of the countries that returns the fewest illegal immigrants”, but how do its return figures compare to those of other EU countries?
To find out, we took a look at official Eurostat statistics, which log the third country nationals returned following an order to leave each EU country every quarter.
And yes, Portugal is consistently ranked as one of the countries with the lowest return rates.
For example, the most recent dataset including every EU member is Q3 2024, which shows that Slovakia returned the fewest irregular migrants, having sent back 55 people, followed by Slovenia with 80 and then Portugal with 85.
On the other side of the spectrum was France, having returned nearly 4,000 people, followed by Germany and Spain with just over 3,000 people each.
It’s a similar story every year: in Q1 2025, France, Germany and this time Cyprus returned the most irregular immigrants, according to Eurostat, with Luxembourg, Slovenia and Slovakia bringing up the rear.
The Portuguese figures for this quarter aren’t yet available on Eurostat, but the country has generally been at the bottom end of the table every quarter since 2022.
The same is true for the number of orders to leave the EU which each member state has handed out, without necessarily having carried them out yet.
Eurostat figures show that Slovakia gave the fewest orders to leave to irregular migrants in Q3 2024 (80), followed by Portugal (120) and Estonia (135).
France was way ahead of the pack with 30,800, but Germany (13,660) and Spain (13,645) once again rounded out the top three.
Figures indicate the EU as a whole is ramping up efforts to clamp down on irregular immigration.
New figures released on Monday reveal that in the first quarter of 2025, 123,905 non-EU citizens were ordered to leave an EU country, and 28,475 people were returned to third countries following an order to leave.
Compared with Q1 2024, the number of non-EU citizens ordered to leave went up by 18.4% and the number of people returned to third countries was up by 6.4%.
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