Recent findings from the MORE project indicate that policymakers primarily assess returns and readmissions through the lens of "effectiveness." In this context, effectiveness is understood in a predominantly quantitative manner, focusing on the seemingly low number of returns, compared to the total deportation orders of individuals living with irregular administrative status. This approach not only has led to severe human rights violations, without making any meaningful progress in addressing the phenomenon of irregularity, but also has failed to account for the number of deportations as it overlooks critical data on regularisation and international protection. Still, the notion of ineffectiveness persists as predominant, leading return policies while ultimately prioritising a higher expulsion rate at all costs. This, in turn, has led the EU Member States to view the legal grounds for freezing or suspending expulsions as obstacles or as optional measures to use under their discretion.
In this line, MORE preliminary findings also expose a prevalence of fragmented and often punitive approaches towards irregularised third-country nationals who cannot be expelled, leading to precarity, insecurity and further victimisation. Similarly, in the framework of enforcement mechanisms, there has been a process of institutionalisation of preexisting bureaucratic and policing practices such as detention, without due assessment backing their adequacy. In this regard, the research demonstrates that, where they exist, alternative enforcement mechanisms are underutilised. While these mechanisms are less punitive than detention, they still undermine rights by reinforcing a return-focused approach.
MORE empirical findings also point towards an opposition from frontline implementing agents to overarching return policies and specifically towards expulsion as a wide-reaching measure. This is mainly due to inherent conflicts between different norms, rights, and regulations that challenge a wide-reaching implementation of returns. Similarly, agents that are responsible to implement return and readmission measures on the ground consider the protection of certain rights a priority above the enforcement of deportation. Instead, they call to adjust the scope of deportation enforceability.
Findings also unravel that these implementing agents tend to make hierarchical distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, construed around expectations of normative behaviour, and ‘civic behaviour’. This categorisation often serves as grounds to argue the need for deportation to those perceived as ‘bad migrants’.
Finally, results point at implementing agents making an instrumental use of expulsion to address repeated minor offences, triggering deportation processes rather than judicial responses. Thus, expulsions and deportation mechanisms are used as a further punitive instrument.
