Home searches, two-year detention and camps built outside Europe do not check your politics before they are poured in concrete. They become the ordinary toolkit of the state. And toolkits get reused. This is the boomerang effect and it never fails to hit those that ignored when it hit the weaker parts of society. So ask your own government one question: which of these powers would it give back if every migrant vanished tomorrow?

Europe just wrote its own version of ICE into law and it did it in the language of efficiency. Here is the official story. On the 1st of June, Parliament and Council agreed the strictest migration law the block has ever passed. And the Migration Commissioner, Magnus Bruder, sold it as control, faster, simpler, effective, he said. Now, look at what effective actually contains. The deportation centres built outside Europe, encounters a person may never have set suit. Detention before removal raised from 6 months to 2 years and longer for anyone able to secure it. The power to search someone's home. Families with children can be detained and families with children can be sent abroad. Only unaccompanied minors are spared the offshore hub, but not the detention. The small detail that gives the whole game away is this. The home search powers were described by the people who actually read the text as inspired by American ICE practice. Europe did not drift into this. It studied the model and decided to adopt it after seeing the horror. And here is the move that I want you to catch. A question about rights about who can be locked up about children, about removal to a place you do not know has been quietly re-described as a question about a percentage. Once the problem is just a number, every inhumane tool looks like simple competence, efficiency even. The far right did not need to win every election. The center took the far right sentence, appropriated them and called it administration. Bruner gets to say Europe has more control. Governments get their headlines about being tough, and the cost, lands where it always lands. All the people whose rights get harder to defend, the farther offshore you push the process. While Europeans recoiled in horror at what was happening in the US, their own institutions copied the model in the background silently, more efficient perhaps, but as cruel.