This article is not current — it was published last year — but there’s no reason to think the migrant situation in Europe has improved since then.

Can you imagine what would happen to a private corporation that cut a “deal” like the one the EU cut with Turkey? The phrase “instant bankruptcy” comes to mind.

Many thanks to Hellequin GB for translating this article from Die Welt:

€4.7 Million Per Person

Ankara took back 2,140 migrants as part of the EU-Turkey deal

Sobering results of the EU-Turkey agreement: Since 2016, Ankara has taken back just 2,140 migrants from the Greek islands. The costs amount to almost €4.7 million per migrant. In return, the EU took in more than 37,000 refugees.

According to a media report, Turkey has taken back around 2,200 migrants since 2016 as part of the refugee agreement with the European Union. Since the agreement came into force, a total of 2,140 people who had previously illegally entered the Greek islands have returned to Turkey, reported Bild according to a preliminary report, citing new figures from the EU Commission.

In purely mathematical terms, the EU paid almost €4.7 million per migrant returned, the report says. Conversely, the EU had taken in 37,397 refugees from Turkey as part of the deal by February of this year.

According to the report, the EU Commission also criticized the fact that the government in Ankara has refused to take back migrants since March 2020. Since then, there have been no more returns despite repeated requests from the Greek authorities and the EU Commission, Bild quotes from the report.

Afterword from the translator:

While looking for something else on the Wayback Machine, I stumbled over this article from last year. I don’t know about you, but for that amount of money I’ll gladly give them my German passport, but I guess they would never ever pay that amount of money to an individual — it has to go to their utterly corrupt counterparts, and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if Turkey paid them a healthy commission in return.