Departament de Dret i Ciències Polítiques

European governments widely celebrate and extensively fund ‘assisted voluntary return’ (AVR) programmes and assume that return counsellors play an important role for their implementation. At the same time, relevant legislation only vaguely defines this role and reduces it to a passive and neutral provision of ‘objective information’. In this article, we therefore ask how much and what kind of agency individual counsellors exercise and how this affects the aim and nature of AVR. We argue that counsellors fulfil a highly ambiguous function within a system that overall aims to bring unwanted migrants’ decision-making in line with restrictive immigration law. This function requires considerable autonomy to choose and use the various kinds of information they provide. We conceptualise their work as ‘aspirations management’ that mediates the ‘asymmetrical negotiation’ between precarious status migrants and the governments seeking to deport them. Based on original qualitative data from Austria and the Netherlands, we analytically distinguish three fundamentally different counselling strategies: facilitating migrants’ existing return aspirations, obtaining their compliance without aspirations, and/or inducing aspirations for return. This framework not only helps us to conceptualise AVR counsellors’ specific agency, but will also be useful for analysing how other actors manage the aspirations of unwanted non-citizens.

This article looks at the implementation of so-called “assisted voluntary return” policies in Austria and Britain, where state agencies have recently replaced nongovernmental organizations as providers of return counseling. To better understand how such a shift affects the in/voluntariness of return, I identify three dimensions along which the “quality” of voluntariness can be assessed and relate them to concrete aspects of return counseling practice: absence of coercion; availability of acceptable alternatives; and access to adequate and trusted information. Based on original qualitative data, I show that even within an overall restrictive and oppressive regime, return counselors can make room for voluntariness by upholding ethical and procedural standards—if they retain substantial independence from the government.