How do states relate to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers once they have been formally rejected? A growing amount of research has been devoted to the role of government and NGO workers in executing soft-deportation policy through 'voluntary return' programmes. Many of these studies convincingly argue that voluntary return most often is anything but voluntary. However, less effort has been spent answering the question of why, then, departure is still constructed as voluntary and how this construction is realised in practice. This paper explores the work of street-level bureaucrats in charge of expelling unauthorised immigrants from the Netherlands in case expulsion cannot stem from the law alone and deportation workers deploy extra-legal strategies to carry out exclusionary policy goals. In these cases, we show that, in addition to building trust relationships with migrants, government and NGO workers ostensibly emphasise their clients' self-determination and agency. By examining the performative construction of 'voluntariness' in highly asymmetrical interview rituals, this article brings attention to an under-theorised condition of the conduct of conduct in the era of governmentality: if modern bureaucratic power, however punitive, must govern primarily by addressing the freedom of free agents, then it must ensure the interpretation of conduct as voluntary.
European governments widely celebrate and extensively fund 'assisted voluntary return' (AVR) programmes and assume that return counsellors play an important role for their implementation. At the same time, relevant legislation only vaguely defines this role and reduces it to a passive and neutral provision of 'objective information'. In this article, we therefore ask how much and what kind of agency individual counsellors exercise and how this affects the aim and nature of AVR. We argue that counsellors fulfil a highly ambiguous function within a system that overall aims to bring unwanted migrants' decisionmaking in line with restrictive immigration law. This function requires considerable autonomy to choose and use the various kinds of information they provide. We conceptualise their work as 'aspirations management' that mediates the 'asymmetrical negotiation' between precarious status migrants and the governments seeking to deport them. Based on original qualitative data from Austria and the Netherlands, we analytically distinguish three fundamentally different counselling strategies: facilitating migrants' existing return aspirations, obtaining their compliance without aspirations, and/or inducing aspirations for return. This framework not only helps us to conceptualise AVR counsellors' specific agency, but will also be useful for analysing how other actors manage the aspirations of unwanted non-citizens.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, the detention and deportation of illegalised migrant families with underage children has recently caused public controversy, resulting in the eruption of antideportation protests. This controversy is rooted in the unresolved tension for liberal states to protect children's rights on the one hand, while limiting 'unwanted migration' on the other. Previous literature documents protest reactions to efforts to deport families with underage children, as well as general state tactics to legitimize such coercion. This paper instead centres the state's legitimation work in response to societal protest and draws on publicly available material on two recent controversies: the Belgian debate on family detention and the determination of the child pardon in the Netherlands. For Belgium we highlight that the government frames detention as the 'ultimate measure', used only when less restrictive measures 'failed'. For the Netherlands we show how the government reallocates political responsibility from elected officials to bureaucrats. Both strategies transform what is essentially a moral-political debate into a web of administrative procedures and discussions on legal conditions. The Belgian and Dutch governments thus invisibilize moral conflict by drawing it outside the realm of democratic politics, to the backstage of bureaucratic administration.
This article analyzes the ways in which the Belgian and Dutch governments legitimize the deportation of unaccompanied minors, by focusing on the interplay of intersectional boundary work and bordering practices. Building on the work of postcolonial feminists and scholars studying the role of identity and cultural values in migration policy, the article highlights that deportation relies on and reifies gendered, racialized, and classed representations of the family, child-rearing practices, and the roles attributed to children. A paternalistic attitude that spurs the moral necessity to protect children mediates the exclusionary potential of such boundaries for deporting states.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.