Challenging Return Orthodoxy: GAPs Research Brings Migrant Voices to the Fore at Polish Seminar
Mateusz Krępa presenting trajectory types.
On April 23, 2025, a significant intervention in Europe's ongoing return migration debate took place in Warsaw. During a seminar titled "The New EU Return Regulation in the Light of Empirical Research Results," Mateusz Krępa of the GAPs team at the University of Warsaw reported findings that pierce legal abstraction to put the returnees' lived experiences front and center.
Organized by some of Poland's leading migration research centers—the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Centre of Migration Research—the seminar brought together academics, legal experts, and policymakers to assess the European Commission's latest attempt to tighten return procedures. While much of the discussion had focused on procedural effectiveness and compliance with the law, Krępa's paper shifted the paradigm.
Building on evidence from Horizon Europe-funded GAPs project (WP7), Krępa presented a subtle "matrix of return trajectories" in Poland, uncovering how return is far from a linear, bureaucratic affair. His work highlighted the salience of stigma, diaspora dynamics, and individual fears—demonstrating how migrants are frequently trapped between institutional pressures to return and deeply rooted social barriers that render return unimaginable. Above all, Krępa dispelled myths regarding migrant agency. Rather than viewing return decisions as either entirely coerced or entirely voluntary, he highlighted how agency is both shaped by structural conditions—e.g., legal ambiguity or social risk—and highly individualized notions of constraint and choice.
This empirical scrutiny starkly diverged from the EU's technocratic framing of returns as a technical matter of enforcement and quantification. As Krępa's research highlighted, raising "return rates" without knowing the individuals behind the numbers risks replicating policy mistakes—and further entrenching the mobility challenges that EU policy attempts to address.
The other legal experts at the conference, including Izabella Majcher and Prof. Witold Klaus, discussed the human rights risks and legal loopholes in the draft regulation. Together, their contributions painted a picture of a regime of return on the brink of prioritizing efficiency over ethics.
With pressure mounting to implement the new EU regulation, the GAPs research serves as a timely reminder: return policy will never be successful—or equitable—unless it understands the people it is supposed to govern.
This research was conducted as part of two projects funded by the EU Horizon Europe (HE) programme: ‘Findings Agreements in Return (FAiR)’ and ‘Decentring the Study of Migrant Returns and Readmission Policies in Europe and Beyond (GAPs)’.
Other presenters focused on the legal aspects of the new EU return regulation. Izabella Majcher, an independent expert in human rights, migration and asylum, elaborated on the problem of alleged compliance with human rights and questionable effectiveness of the draft European Commission regulation on returns. In turn, Witold Klaus, professor at the Institute of Legal Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences and a member of the Committee on Migration Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, spoke about monitoring return processes. In his presentation, he mainly focused on how to ensure compliance with human rights during returns.
The recording of the webinar in Polish is available here.
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