Policy Beyond Law: Persuasive Bureaucracies and Return Migration Enforcement

How states deal with undocumented immigrants and rejected asylum seekers has been a major point of contention in European countries and beyond. Although a growing amount of research has been devoted to the role of government- and NGO workers in executing return policy, less attention has been paid to the specific case of “voluntary departure”. This paper explores the work of government employees in charge of expelling undocumented immigrants in the Netherlands and of NGO personnel assisting them. It analyses their strategies to obtain the departure of migrants who are subject to state removal but whose forcible removal cannot materially be enforced or is legally ruled out by international treaties. In those cases, expulsion cannot stem from law alone and government and NGO workers deploy extra-legal strategies to carry out exclusionary policy goals. In particular, they use soft skills such as building trust relationships with migrants and collaboratively discussing their plans for the future to eventually persuade their clients to “return voluntarily”. By examining the construction of “voluntariness” in these asymmetrical interactions, the article brings attention to an under-theorized condition of the conduct of conduct in the era of governmentality: that modern bureaucratic power, however exclusionary, does not stop at regulating conduct but must also increasingly ensure the interpretation of conduct as voluntary.