Good morning. Today, Laura explains how EU migration rhetoric is hardening ahead of a leaders’ summit next week and our Dublin correspondent previews the Irish Taoiseach’s visit to Washington.

Closing the drawbridge

Brussels is preparing for a showdown on migration at next week’s EU summit, as member states converge on the notion that more drastic curbs are needed — though practicable solutions remain elusive, writes Laura Dubois.

Context: The EU’s reformed asylum rules won’t come into force before 2026, prompting countries to look for interim ways to reduce arrivals. In May, 15 countries asked the European Commission to find “outside the box” solutions.

Germany’s recent move to impose controls along all its borders has sent a signal to other capitals that Berlin’s previous squeamishness when it comes to harsher measures on migration has evaporated, and underlined the broader shift in thinking across the EU.

That’s also reflected in the new European parliament, where anti-immigration and immigration-sceptic parties hold a slim majority.

Germany is among those pushing for an extensive migration discussion at next week’s summit of EU leaders. The draft conclusions, seen by the Financial Times, say that “new ways to prevent and counter irregular migration should be considered, in line with international law”.

According to EU diplomats briefed on the discussions, that is code for paying third countries to take in people who are seeking to reach the EU. But how such agreements could be designed without violating EU and international law is still largely unclear.

According to the diplomats, EU capitals are interpreting the loose phrasing in different ways. Some are for instance keen to replicate Italy’s scheme to process asylum applications on Albanian soil, though Albanian premier Edi Rama has made clear it is a one-off.

Another idea is to send rejected asylum seekers to “return hubs” outside the EU to await deportation. One diplomat said that while several member states were open to this option, “you would have to find a third country which would agree to do this”.

“I think that overall there is consensus to a great extent on exploring new ways, innovative ways [to deal with migration],” another diplomat said. “If you don’t have co-operation of third parties, this thing simply doesn’t work.”

The draft conclusions, which are still subject to change, also call for “intensifying co-operation with countries of origin and countries of transit, through mutually beneficial partnerships”.

The EU already clinched partnerships with Tunisia, Mauritania and Egypt, despite concerns over their effectiveness, and human rights records in those countries. Tunisian President Kais Saied has won a landslide victory after jailing opponents, activists and journalists during his re-election campaign.

“There are limitations, you need to have a step-by-step approach,” the second EU diplomat said. “You need to see what works, what doesn’t work.”

Chart du jour: Hungry

Low taxes, temperate weather and fibre cable access made Ireland an EU pioneer of data centres. But the government’s concern about the sector’s huge energy consumption has prompted a rethink.

Biden’s other Harris

Ireland’s Taoiseach Simon Harris is meeting US President Joe Biden at the White House tomorrow as fears grow for the safety of Irish soldiers on a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, writes Jude Webber.

Context: The US was the first country to recognise Ireland — then called the Irish Free State — in 1924, and outgoing president Biden, who made an emotional trip to Ireland last year, cherishes his Irish roots. The two leaders will mark the centenary of bilateral diplomatic relations.

Historical diplomatic niceties aside, the escalating Middle Eastern conflict will dominate their agenda.

Some 30 Irish soldiers manning a UN border post in southern Lebanon, metres from an Israel Defense Forces deployment, are having to take shelter as Israel bombs Hizbollah. Irish President Michael D Higgins has raged at the threat to the troops, and said Israel’s demand for them to evacuate was “outrageous”.

Ireland and the US have different stances when it comes to the widening war in the Middle East. Ireland is neutral, while the US supplies weapons to Israel.

Dublin has condemned the Hamas attack a year ago that triggered the widening regional conflict and demanded the release of its Israeli hostages. But Harris this year also recognised Palestine as a sovereign state, and insists that “civilians’ lives are of equal value”.

For Harris, the transatlantic trip also offers a chance to burnish his image ahead of a general election widely expected next month.

He is currently favourite to lead the next government — in which case, he could be back in the White House next March for the traditional St Patrick’s Day celebrations, when Ireland flaunts its special friendship with the US.

What to watch today

1. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán holds a press conference at the European parliament in Strasbourg.

2. EU finance ministers meet in Luxembourg.

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Companies that rocketed in value by facilitating online gig work and recruitment during Covid-19 lockdowns are putting a new focus on profitability amid slowing growth, as workers migrate back to the office.

The world’s largest digital freelancing websites, Fiverr and Upwork, are both trading at less than a fifth of their pandemic peaks. Meanwhile, annual venture capital funding for digital recruitment and outsourcing companies has tumbled more than two-thirds since 2022, according to figures from PitchBook.

“When you experience incredible growth during a period of time like the pandemic . . . there’s a lapping effect,” said Micha Kaufman, chief executive of Fiverr. “If you fast-forward, then you’re going to see slower growth afterwards.”

As a result, $853mn Fiverr and $1.43bn Upwork, which offer online marketplaces for everything from ghostwriters to virtual assistants and software developers, are pushing to demonstrate profitability to investors.

“In this environment, we know that we need to continue to be laser-focused on our profitability goals,” Upwork chief executive Hayden Brown said at an investor conference in September.

These platforms have sought, in particular, to increase their “take rates” — the amount of money they make on every transaction — in order to offset an overall decline in the amount of individual services being bought and sold.

Both sites have increasingly promoted subscription-based services and premium listing placements, leading Fiverr to report a record “take rate” of 33 per cent in the three months to June. Upwork’s rate was 18 per cent, also a record for the company.

“These were growth-at-all-costs companies during the pandemic,” said Bernie McTernan, an analyst at Needham & Company. “Now, as growth has pulled back, they have really focused on driving margins.”

They have also pushed for higher-end clients and larger projects, with new features aimed at fostering long-term relationships with business clients.

Fiverr in July launched a new hourly-pay option, in addition to its previous task-based payment system, in order to enable vendors with a premium subscription “to tackle bigger, long-term, and ongoing projects”. The company said its new features were part of a transition from a “services-based marketplace into a hiring platform”.

Brown said Upwork was pushing to promote new “value-added services” and subscription programmes, including access to its artificial intelligence chatbot, with a goal of reaching a profit margin of 35 per cent by 2029.

But despite last year reporting their first net profits since going public, shares in both Fiverr and Upwork remain down.

“Those vendors were in such dramatic growth — and they got so much attention in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic — that anything less feels like a shock to them, and to their investors,” said Rania Stewart, an analyst at Gartner.

Private companies are facing a similar battle to prove the sustainability of their business models post-pandemic.

VC funding for digital recruitment and outsourcing companies more than tripled between 2020 and 2021, according to PitchBook, before tumbling back below pre-pandemic levels in 2023.

The rise of AI has also spooked some investors, who believe that tools such as ChatGPT could take jobs from freelancers and hit revenues at platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, according to McTernan.

Both Brown and Kaufman insisted that AI, at least for now, was helping to expand their businesses. Brown said Upwork was receiving an influx of demands for freelancers to add “the human layer” on top of AI-generated outputs that are “not yet ready for primetime”. Kaufman argued AI was, as yet, only replacing “small and cheap work”.

But the biggest challenge might be less technically advanced.

Online gig-work platforms are still competing with traditional staffing companies and office workers, and Fiverr’s Kaufman acknowledged that the pandemic-era working habits that propelled his company’s growth in 2020 and 2021 had not been as durable as he hoped.

“It’s hard to change people’s minds,” he said. “Work is just one of these very old systems that are hard to change.”

Days before final bids were due for the Telegraph Media Group, frontrunner Dovid Efune interviewed former US presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr live on stage on subjects from why disaffected Democrats should vote for Donald Trump to the conflict in Israel.

Staff at the UK newspaper say the event helped cement views gleaned from Efune’s activity on social media that he was likely to be a much more outspoken — and potentially divisive — owner than the media-shy Barclay family.

The British-born media executive is poised to enter a roughly six-week exclusivity period to acquire the storied conservative title, the Financial Times reported on Sunday — long enough for him and his wealthy, mainly US-based backers to scrutinise its books after two decades of Barclay ownership and to secure funding for the deal.

Efune is the publisher of The New York Sun, which he revived in 2021 as an online publication 13 years after it closed, promising journalism that would be “values-based, principled and constitutionalist”. He was previously editor-in-chief of US conservative Jewish community paper The Algemeiner Journal, overseeing its switch from Yiddish to English.

But the much larger Telegraph would mark a considerable step up in ambitions for Efune, whose low profile in the UK has left executives and staff scrutinising his frequent tweets and editorials for clues on the newspaper’s future direction.

Efune has become known for his fierce support for Israel and Jewish causes, interviewing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and writing columns as far back as 2011 advocating for a second Jewish state and for the arming of rabbis to deter violence against Jewish communities.

Last week he said on X that he expected the Iranian “ayatollah himself would be in the crosshairs” when “Israel turns its full fury directly on the Iranian regime” — a moment when “the Jewish state will have secured a better future for Iranians and the region, and a safer world for all our children”.

Efune, who is yet to speak publicly about his bid or intentions for The Telegraph, did not respond to requests for comment.

The newspaper’s roots go deep into the conservative heartlands of Britain, where readers will be suspicious of any owner who moves sharply from a 169-year diet of British politics and society interlaced with English sports such as cricket and football.

The strategy sketched out for The Telegraph by many potential owners has been based on growth in the US — where some see the chance to expand its franchise as a counterpoint to the left-leaning New York Times.

However, media analyst Claire Enders said the chances of establishing the Telegraph as a dominant media brand in the US appeared remote and that the strength of its brand was in England, where it still wielded considerable influence.

Efune has strong links to Britain. His grandfather was Peter Kalms, a businessman and philanthropist who was on the board of Dixons, the UK electrical goods retailer run by his cousin and former Conservative party treasurer Lord Kalms.

Efune, who has said he had “no formal secular education beyond the age of 11”, now lives with his artist wife Mushka in New York, where alongside his media roles he has previously acted as publicist for Israeli boxer Yuri Foreman.

He wrote in 2021 of the antisemitism his family faced walking around near his neighbourhood on the Upper West Side, saying: “Growing up in England, encounters along these lines weren’t all that rare, but I didn’t expect to find them in the United States.”

Efune has brought Jewish values to the forefront of his editorship of The New York Sun, saying when he announced its revival that rather than cynicism, “we prefer the teaching of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, that darkness is best countered with light, falsehood with truth”.

The newspaper has a strong pedigree in culture and arts coverage, and features right-wing columnists such as Larry Kudlow and Conrad Black, who sold The Telegraph to the Barclay family in 2004.

But the Telegraph dwarfs the US title in terms of online readership.

The UK newspaper had about 90mn average monthly page views between July and September with 33mn unique viewers, according to data analytics firm SimilarWeb, against roughly 860,000 and 510,000 for The New York Sun.

Efune has been active on social media supporting conservative-leaning politicians and commentators. On a recent podcast he appeared to endorse Donald Trump as president, saying a second Trump administration “would be very supportive of Israel’s efforts now to re-establish security on its borders”, while a “Kamala Harris administration would wildly meddle”.

Responding to the UK government’s 2009 decision to ban rightwing US radio host Michael Savage from entering the country for fear he would incite hatred, Efune said in a tweet: “Michael Savage being banned from the UK, epitomises intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice!!”

Efune has also strongly advocated for the power of the press. In a “letter from the publisher” in The New York Sun this year, he decried newspapers that “have come to serve . . . masters” other than readers such as advertisers, while arguing that some had been “acquired as status symbols by billionaires and deployed as ideological playthings”.

In a swipe at RedBird IMI, the Abu Dhabi-backed group that is selling the Telegraph after the British government blocked overseas state ownership of such media assets, he said some titles had “been designed or repurposed as government organs . . . the Telegraph in Britain, a fine newspaper, is now at risk of being swallowed up by the United Arab Emirates”.

During the period of exclusivity, Efune will be under pressure to reveal more about his plans for the title as well as the identity of his wealthy backers.

In the meantime, staff at the Telegraph will continue to sweat over their future. “No one knows if they will be needing to write different things by the end of the year,” said one person close to the staff’s thinking. “It is completely freaking them out.”

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One of the UK’s largest asset managers has called on the government to allow savers to access their pension early if the money is used for a deposit on a home. 

Schroders and the Pensions Management Institute, an industry group, have proposed a “national lifetime savings plan”, enabling early access to retirement savings for first-time buyers as part of an overhaul of the way people build and use their wealth. 

The move comes as the new Labour government launched a review into pensions adequacy, with plans to explore ways to improve retirement outcomes. 

“Even when you take pensions freedoms into account, the UK’s long-term savings system is unusually inflexible,” said Schroders in a report published on Tuesday. The report pointed to Singapore, the US and Australia as examples of countries which allowed early access to pensions for housing and financial hardship.

In the US, 40 per cent of members of 401(k)s, the popular workplace pension plans, typically take out a loan against their pensions at some point, according to Schroders’ research. Meanwhile, in Australia, members can take up to $15,000 out of the First Home Super Saver scheme each year up to a lifetime limit of $50,000.

Currently, savers with defined contribution pension pots must wait until age 55 to access their savings, with this threshold rising to 57 from April 2028. Pension cash taken before the normal access age faces punitive tax charges.

The UK offers a Lifetime Isa to help savers aged between 18 and 40 with home deposits. But Lisa contributions are limited to £4,000 per year. The government applies a 25 per cent bonus instead of tax relief and the funds must be used for a property worth up to £450,000 or a 25 per cent withdrawal charge applies.

Schroders’ report argues that while long-term savings should be encouraged, allowing people to access some of their pension early if it goes towards a house deposit or pays off bad debt can make them better off in the longer term.

“The number of people renting in retirement will triple over the next 20 years . . . the financial impact is enormous,” said James Barham, executive chair at Schroders Solutions.  

For a renter to achieve the same standard of living in retirement as a homeowner, the Pensions Management Institute estimates that they would need to save an extra 9 per cent per year into their pensions over their working life.

“If you have all your savings in a pension but don’t buy a house, you have no hope of a good retirement,” said Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister who is now a partner at actuarial adviser Lane, Clark & Peacock. 

Schroders’ proposal for early pensions access for housing and to pay off bad debt comes as part of a wider plan for savings, which includes calling on employers to provide a facility for employees to contribute to a “rainy day” savings product, perhaps within an individual savings account, if the employee agrees.

Experts said that if people knew they could access their pensions for money to pay for a home deposit, they might be more comfortable increasing their pension contributions.

“This proposal accelerates and evolves the use of the UK’s automatic enrolment [pension] framework to meet the needs of modern society whilst also addressing the lifetime savings challenge,” said Ruston Smith, chair of the Pensions Management Institute.

Schroders’ intervention comes as the UK continues to face a pension saving crisis.

According to research from Phoenix Group, a pension provider, 17mn adults in the UK aren’t saving enough for the retirement they expect.

Against this backdrop, some experts believe allowing pensions to be accessed early for home deposits could muddy the waters. “Pensions are designed to provide a retirement fund first and foremost and there are other schemes designed to help you buy a house,” said Jason Hollands, managing director at wealth manager Evelyn Partners.