New anti-asylum laws are likely to be rubber-stamped by the European Parliament amid further alarm over the far-right influence on migration.

The Strasbourg assembly on Tuesday (10 February) will most likely adopt two new laws that will make it legally easier to deport asylum-seeker hopefuls to countries outside Europe.

Although both laws hinge on the cooperation of foreign states, the so-called “safe” concepts marks a pivotal shift towards a tougher European stance on asylum.

“This is good news. It looks like Europe is changing its immigration policy,” Alonso de Mendoza Asensi, the spokesperson from the far-right Patriots for Europe (PfE), told reporters last week.

The measures to be voted cover “safe countries of origin” and “safe third countries” concepts.

Under the EU’s “safe third country” rule, authorities can dismiss an asylum application and transfer the applicant to another state — potentially in the Western Balkans or Africa.

This can happen even if he or she has never been there, had simply transited through or if the country is deemed capable of offering vaguely defined “effective protection.”

The EU “safe countries of origin” list, meanwhile, allows governments to rapidly deny and return asylum seekers from countries such as Bangladesh, Colombia, Egypt, India, Kosovo, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Smoothing path for Meloni’s Albania deal

Crucially, the origin provision also smooths the way for Italy’s controversial migration agreement with Albania, overcoming legal obstacles that had previously stood in its path.

Both concepts were provisionally agreed on International Migrants Day among the co-legislators last December following a single negotiation, suggesting the two were closely aligned.

But Tuesday’s vote by MEPs is likely to see them adopted and soon become law, ahead of the June deadline when member states implement a whole host of other new EU-wide asylum and migration rules.

Daniel Köster, spokesperson from the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), echoed the far-right on both ‘safe’ concepts.

“If you come from a safe country or have been traveling through a safe country, then it’s not asylum,” he said.

Voting patterns

The centre and far-right narrative merger was also reflected in the voting patterns in the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee last month.

The EPP, PfE, the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) and the Europe of Sovereign Nations Group (ESN) joined forces to push through both safe country concepts at the committee level.

Mélissa Camara, a French Green MEP, in a press statement, said the vote showed that the EPP “has no shame about forming majorities with the three far-right groups on issues as sensitive as migration policy, causing what little remained of the ‘cordon sanitaire’ to give way.”

And while the progressive and left-leaning forces rejected both concepts at the committee, the liberal Renew Europe had largely abstained on one of the votes.

The plenary in Strasbourg on Tuesday is likely to reflect a similar standing of voting alliances between centre and far-right political forces.

Iskra Kirova, an advocacy director at Human Rights Watch in Brussels, described the concepts as a blow to the right to asylum in the EU.

“It’s an offshoring of asylum processing by the European Union of people who may have the right to actually seek asylum,” she said, earlier this month in an interview.