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Kabul’s fall in August 2021 was a slow-motion tragedy. EU Member States opened their doors, then bureaucracy slammed them shut. Across the EU, highly-skilled Afghanistanis – especially many Afghanistani women – are unable to work or practice their professions: a former minister becomes a pizza delivery man, a former army officer is found squatting next to official EU buildings.
These aren’t just individual tragedies. They’re symptoms of a systemic failure that’s quietly sabotaging people’s lives – and Europe’s future.
New proposals, reflecting the latest revisions to the ‘safe third country’ provisions under the Asylum Procedure Regulation (APR), make it easier to dismiss asylum claims. Countries like Germany and Austria claim Afghanistan is now ‘secure enough’ to deport people to.
Instability in Afghanistan has driven one of the world’s largest refugee crisis, displacing over six million people. Despite the ongoing chaos in Kabul, EU Member States have continued to issue thousands of deportation orders to Afghanistani nationals, including 23 515 in 2023 alone.
The bitter irony is that while the European Commission champions legal pathways and seeks to attract skilled workers from third countries, those already here are stuck. Rather than allowing Afghanistanis to contribute their skills, the bureaucratic merry-go-round consigns them to a state of Kafkaesque limbo.
In short, blanket restrictions and drawn‐out procedures strand them in perpetual uncertainty: children remain shut out of school, families scramble for stable housing and would-be workers are barred from the labour market. Many end up languishing for years in overcrowded reception centres and pushed into a life with limited dignity or rights.
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