Asylum, Bulgarian-Style: How a Politics of Deterrence Turns Protection into Humiliation, Corruption and Crime
- Europe Must Act
- 15 hours ago
- 7 min read
An article by Victor Lilov.
Originally published in Bulgarian by Marginalia.bg Read the original article here.
The Bulgarian Way is not an easy report to read. Its pages are filled with testimonies of beatings, pushbacks, humiliation, filth, fear and medical neglect. But what makes it truly disturbing is not the brutality of any single account. It is the pattern. Based on ten in-depth interviews with people on the move, the report does not describe a handful of exceptions or isolated abuses. It describes a system in which asylum no longer functions as a right, but as an obstacle course—one navigated through fear, dependency and degradation. People speak of confiscated belongings, pressure to sign documents they do not understand, inedible food, degrading sanitary conditions, lack of meaningful medical care, and an atmosphere in which even asking for one’s rights may invite punishment.
That is why the central conclusion of the report matters so much. This is not merely a story of “poor management” or administrative overload. It is a regime of deterrence. People seeking protection are not treated as rights-holders but as bodies to be filtered, controlled, detained, pressured and repelled. Formally, the right to asylum still exists. In practice, access to it is systematically hollowed out. Bulgaria, in that sense, is not just a state with implementation problems. It is a laboratory for a broader European logic in which rights remain on paper while the real institutional energy is directed toward discouragement, exclusion and return.
One of the report’s most important contributions is to show that violence is not only physical. Violence is also the confiscation of food and water. It is the refusal to listen. It is being placed in overcrowded rooms with broken bathrooms, no beds, bedbugs, cockroaches, scabies and chronic insecurity. It is being denied medical attention until a condition becomes life-threatening. It is having interpreters function not as safeguards of rights, but as instruments of pressure. This is how a politics of deterrence works in everyday life: not only through open brutality, but through the systematic production of fear, exhaustion, dependency and hopelessness.
The burden falls heaviest on the most vulnerable. In principle, vulnerable applicants are supposed to receive heightened protection, confidentiality and support. In reality, they often pay the highest price in a system built on suspicion, stigma and institutional harshness. This is especially true for LGBTI applicants. For many of them, the asylum procedure is the first place where they dare to disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity. That should be the beginning of protection. Instead, such disclosures are too often treated as suspicious—as if they were merely tactical claims designed to improve the chances of success. In a reception system that AIDA says still offers little beyond accommodation, food and rudimentary medical care, without real psychological support, and where vulnerability assessments were missing in half of monitored cases in 2024, disbelief becomes more than bureaucratic callousness. It becomes a form of secondary victimisation.
The same is true for women, children, unaccompanied minors, torture survivors, people with serious illnesses and politically persecuted individuals. The report itself notes that some of these groups are underrepresented in its interviews. But that is not reassuring. It is another indication of how the most vulnerable are often also the least visible. In camps and procedures structured by fear, vulnerability does not automatically trigger protection. It can become another pressure point, another reason to stay silent, another opening for control.
From there, another conclusion follows: this system generates enormous corruption pressure. Not because every individual within it is necessarily corrupt, but because the architecture of deterrence creates nearly ideal conditions for corruption. When lawful access to procedure is uncertain, when rights do not function automatically, when arbitrariness and opacity dominate, and when access depends on interpreters, internal information, security opinions and informal intermediaries, a market inevitably emerges around the system. A market for fixing, arranging, protecting, accelerating, obtaining tolerable accommodation, accessing information, and, ultimately, surviving. In such an environment, smugglers do not disappear. They become indispensable. Vulnerability does not diminish. It is monetised.
This is not only an abstract structural risk. It is visible in the public record. In 2022, then Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev publicly said there was evidence that police officers had been involved in migrant trafficking, while the Bulgarian News Agency later reported that 14 Border Police officers were under investigation for aiding traffickers. In 2025, Bulgarian National Television reported that former Migration Directorate chief Stefan Hristov had been implicated in an illegal citizenship scheme. These cases do not prove every allegation in The Bulgarian Way. But they do confirm something essential: the overlap between migration control, abuse of office and criminal profit is not speculative. It already exists.
That is precisely what makes deterrence so corrosive. It does not eliminate illegal networks; it strengthens them. When people cannot rely on lawful access to procedures, they start looking for intermediaries. When they cannot rely on protection, they start looking for channels. And so deterrence does not produce order. It produces a grey zone between official power, discretion, fear and organised crime. One of the report’s most unsettling lessons is that smuggling networks and informal structures of control do not simply exist outside the state system. They feed on its dysfunctions, adapt to its gaps, and grow more resilient because the law has been made inaccessible.
Then there is the policy of zero integration, which turns even recognised protection into something close to fiction. Bulgaria’s problem is not only what happens before status is granted, but what happens afterwards. Formally, refugees and subsidiary protection holders have the right to work, to healthcare, to social support, to family reunification and to participation in public life. In practice, AIDA records that 2025 was the twelfth consecutive year of Bulgaria’s national “zero integration policy.” Only 8 beneficiaries received support through local integration agreements in 2024, while 43 recognised refugees and subsidiary protection holders were still living in reception centres at the end of the year simply because they had nowhere else to go.
That means the Bulgarian state does not merely obstruct access to protection. It also empties protection of its practical meaning. A person may receive status in law and yet remain without a home, without language support, without real access to work, without a credible path to reunite with family, and without any serious social infrastructure for beginning a life. Integration is thus shifted onto NGOs (see below: Europe Must Act by...), improvised local initiatives and private survival networks. This is not an integration policy. It is institutional abandonment. And when even recognised protection does not lead to actual inclusion, the system generates a second wave of marginalisation: poverty, dependency and renewed vulnerability to exploitation.
There is also no economic logic in any of this. For years, the European Union has refused to acknowledge the obvious: not every movement toward Europe is a refugee movement, just as not every person on the move is an economic migrant. Instead of building a lawful and rational framework for labour migration that reflects real labour shortages and Europe’s demographic needs, the EU has narrowed or shut down alternative legal routes and redirected pressure toward the asylum channel. The result is perverse. A protection system designed for people fleeing war, persecution and torture is overloaded with functions it was never meant to perform, while those who genuinely need protection are pushed into an even more suspicious, restrictive and hostile environment.
In Bulgaria, the absurdity is particularly stark. People refused asylum often remain trapped in a legal vacuum: not protected, not removed, not able to regularise their stay. They become ideal raw material for the black labour market, labour exploitation, organised crime and trafficking networks. The state claims to be fighting “illegality,” yet it produces it, methodically and administratively. The contradiction is even sharper because, at the same time, Bulgarian employers complain of severe labour shortages and increasingly resort to cumbersome and expensive procedures to bring in workers from Uzbekistan, Nepal and the Philippines. Reporting in 2024 and 2025 documented both the sharp increase in foreign workers and the bureaucracy and cost surrounding these schemes. Instead of building a transparent and economically rational migration framework, Bulgaria helps maintain a regime that suffocates access to protection, manufactures irregularity and feeds the intermediary, exploitative and criminal networks precisely it claims to oppose.
So the system does not stop abuse. It organises it. It does not close the channels. It makes them more necessary, more profitable and more durable. And the more the Bulgarian state and the EU cling to the populist fantasy of “Fortress Europe,” the more the real result will be the opposite of control: the growth of adaptive, well-organised and deeply resilient trafficking networks that profit precisely from closed legal routes and institutionally produced vulnerability. That is the deepest paradox of deterrence. The more Europe invests in it, the more it undermines its own ability to govern migration rationally. As lawful options shrink, irregular routes become more complex, more expensive, more dangerous and more lucrative. This is not an accidental side effect. It is the logical consequence of the policy itself.
The end result will not be “managed migration.” It will be a trafficking infrastructure that is organised, durable, resistant to repression and largely beyond meaningful control. And those who most need protection will continue to pay the highest price.
That is why The Bulgarian Way should be read not only as a report about Bulgaria, but as a warning to Europe. It shows what happens when the right to asylum is replaced by a logic of punishment and expulsion, when vulnerability is treated as weakness rather than as a ground for protection, and when institutional arbitrariness begins to generate its own economy of fear, dependency and crime. The most dangerous thing in this picture is not only the violence itself. It is that the violence begins to look normal, like a routine method of governance.
And that is no longer simply the failure of one asylum system. It is the failure of the very idea of Europe as a space of rights, dignity and protection.
Read The Bulgarian Way in Bulgarian or English in full here.
Europe Must Act by...
Supporting refugee rights intitiatives in Bulgaria, such as:
Providing social support, healthcare consultation, psychological help, legal aid, translations, and humanitarian aid to vulnerable mothers and children.
Working to support and monitor national refugee integration policies, and counter discrimination, racism and hate speech.
Working against racism, border violence, deportations and forced detention.
Want more updates from Europe Must Act? Sign up to our newsletter
Comments