Return and Readmission: A Normative Approach

Abstract

Deportation is widely known to pit host states against unauthorised migrants, but it also pits host states against origin states. European host states cannot unilaterally send back rejected asylum seekers to their origin states. Host states depend on origin states’ political willingness to readmit these migrants and to assist with their identification and travel documents. Without origin state cooperation, immigration law cannot be enforced. Yet origin states have political, economic and cultural reasons not to readmit. This partly explains why relatively few are returned. The European Auditing Office estimates that less than 20 per cent of unauthorised migrants with order to leave were returned to countries outside the European continent during the period 2015-2019, and to a considerable extent attributes this to ‘uncollaborative’ origin states. The discrepancy of interests between host and origin states in the field of return and readmission has led legal scholars and political scientists to study host states’ use of incentives and coercion vis-à-vis origin states. The conceptualisation of such inter-state interaction as a rationalist game of asymmetric costs and benefits has coincided with a limited theoretical interest in more constructivist approaches. In order to understand why origin state actors and others are ‘uncollaborative’ or otherwise obstruct enforced return, it may be useful to draw analytically on March and Olsen’s (2004) ‘logic of appropriateness’ as complementary and interactive with the rationalist ‘logic of consequences’. In the former, rules are followed because they are seen as ‘natural, rightful, expected and legitimate’. In the latter, rules reflect interests and hard power. This workshop aims to problematize and go beyond the rationalist bias of the literature on return and readmission to explore the ‘logic of appropriateness’ and how it operates in the field. This involves shifting focus away from hard power only, and formal policies, such as readmission agreements, to include more normative perspectives on return and readmission as an international practice. Taking a practice-oriented approach allows us to explore the underresearched theme of implementation in return and readmission, and to identify the formal and informal norms that regulate return as international practice. Practice-oriented approaches to operational aspects of return and readmission includes, for instance, identification, escorting, transportation, guidelines and codes of conduct. In such practical settings, norms are contested and promoted to legitimise and de-legitimise return. Such operationalized aspects of return and readmission may be more consequential for the effectiveness of return, we argue, than formal readmission agreements. At the same time, diplomatic efforts to negotiate return and readmission diplomatically draws on and overlaps with practical policy implementation in interesting ways to shape the normative discourse on ‘the duty to readmit’.

Title	Details
Between coercion and persuasion: Explaining alternations in the EU readmission policy	View Paper Details
Bottom-up relational dynamics in European deportation norms: the relationship between forced return monitors and deportation escort officers	View Paper Details
EU return cooperation with (non-)democratic states: What is the impact of the informalisation trend?	View Paper Details
Competing norms and differential positioning: return and readmission to Albania from Germany and the UK	View Paper Details
Contested conditionality in return and readmission: EU policy and the case of an EU+ state	View Paper Details