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Taxpayers pay close to €1 billion a year to deport migrants and asylum seekers
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Methodological notes
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Despite studies on the cost of the asylum policies in Europe, no study had been made on the cost of deportations from Europe. We gathered all available data on the topic for countries party to the Dublin Regulation, mostly from Parliamentary reports, and found out that the cost of a deportation was relatively stable across time and across borders (see "Cost of a deportee"). Based on the number of deportations, we then estimated the cost of deportations per year and per country.
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A deportation is a *forced* operation, whereby the legitimate authorities (police, border guards or army) physically deport a person deemed not priviledged to reside in a country to a third, non-EU country. These operations are, by far, the most expensive ones. However, almost no data exist on these forced removals. We therefore used the single common data point we could find for all members of the Dublin system, i.e "returns following an order to leave", which encompass deportations as well as voluntary returns.
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In order to reduce the influence of outliers in the estimates, especially a 2008 French parliamentary report that put the price tag of a single deportation over 20,000€, we used the median of the cost of a deportation for each country. We then did an arithmetic average of the median values to estimate the cost of a deportation in Europe.
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These estimates represent the lowest bound of the total cost:
* The so-called Dublin deporations are not taken into account.
* The number of deportations from some countries is missing for some years.
* The cost of overhead (e.g the salaries of the prosecutors, the supporting staff etc.) is never taken into account in any estimate.
* The loss of business of European companies, especially airlines, but also shops that cater to immigrants or companies that employ them, is never taken into account.
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These estimates are the best available, but remain of poor quality:
* In some countries, we found up to four concurrent, official numbers for the number of deportations in a given year.
* Nothing in our extensive research has shown that a country could dramatically reduce the cost of deporting people, but it might be the case.
* The cost of a deportation depends on the country a person is deported to (approx. 50% of the cost is transport). Nothing in our research showed that some countries deported people to closer or farther countries in a given year, but it might be the case that some countries incurred lower of higher transportation costs, on average.
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Make sure to read the full Methodology as well.
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