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

Executive Summary

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.

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