Politics and Realities of Return Migration in Four Transit Countries: Turkey, Morocco, Greece, and Poland

This policy brief addresses increasing tensions and contradictions within return migration management in four strategically significant countries on the fringes of the European migration regime: Poland, Turkey, Morocco, and Greece. These countries are now focal areas of containment, being increasingly obliged to implement restrictive returns in compliance with EU externalization policies, securitization, and changing domestic pressures.Drawing on extensive qualitative data from the EU’s Horizon Europe project GAPs, comprising life story interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, our analysis shows that return migration is rarely seen as a voluntary act. Migrants have to labor in a context dominated by legal insecurity, economic deprivation, and coercive control. They are constantly caught in a state of involuntary immobility in which they are barred from returning safely due to situations in their homelands, and, simultaneously, barred from moving on further due to restrictive asylum systems and enhanced border controls. While return policies are framed as humane and successful, they fail to reflect the lived reality of the very persons subject to them, who endure a state of insecurity, poverty.To address these challenges, this policy brief calls for a fundamental rethinking of return governance that is rights-based, realistic, and collectively owned by migrants and policy-makers. The structural causes of displacement should be prioritized in policy development, including serious consideration of the causative drivers of migration and human rights concerns. Return policies need to uphold the principle of voluntariness in practice by doing away with coercive pressures, increasing access to autonomous legal and psychosocial assistance, and allowing for informed choice-making, including through schemes such as exploratory return visits.