Outsourcing migration: paying third countries €3,000 per migrant

A €3,000 payment per migrant: the proposal that revives the debate on outsourcing immigration

Paying a third country €3,000 to take in a migrant sounds like a joke, but the arithmetic holds up: the same source estimates that each person hosted in Spain costs between €3,000 and €5,000 a month. Over a year, the outlay far exceeds the proposed one-off transfer.

The El Salvador precedent

The proposal is simple: a one-off payment of €3,000 per person transferred, and the receiving country can decide what to do with them. Its supporters point out that El Salvador has already accepted a similar arrangement to take in foreign prisoners in exchange for funds, and argue that the payback is immediate compared with the €3,000-5,000 monthly cost of reception.

The scepticism: the problem is the tap

Another camp holds that no agreement will work as long as arrivals are not stopped. On this reading, the migration debate masks an internal political dispute over who manages the flows and to what end: some see a "business" that certain political actors refuse to give up. Deeper arguments also surface, such as the claim that the country, without the ECB's lifeline, would be headed for crisis within months. Radical options, like handing over Ceuta and Melilla, are dismissed as too costly: direct payment is the preferred route.

The arithmetic runs into geopolitics

What throws everything off is that none of the calculations address how much it would actually cost to transfer the "last three generations" of migrants, or which country would accept someone else's surplus without demanding something in return. The €3,000 figure works in a spreadsheet; real geopolitics, for now, still charges in a different currency.