Assisted return (AR) is a widespread policy tool offering financial support and counselling to returning migrants. Policymakers present it as a durable solution vis-à-vis undocumented migrants and rejected asylum seekers. However, AR has been proven to display the concurrence of care and control typical of contested humanitarianism. This concurrence takes different shapes across nation states. Our paper looks at how Sweden, Finland, the UK, Italy, Spain, and Portugal concretely configure care and control in their AR programmes, by focusing particularly on accessibility criteria, the landscape of the actors implementing the measure and their main implementation strategies. We finally find that the care and control balance of a particular layer within the AR national system can hardly be appreciated without considering the (lack of) life opportunities available to the potential beneficiaries of the measure, both within the confines and outside of it. Therefore, our comparative research ultimately conveys that what we call the intrinsic humanitarianism of AR—or its internal care-control balance—can give insight into the durability of the measure only when associated with what we term the extrinsic humanitarianism of AR—namely its broader relationship with forced return. In order words, AR ultimately appears migration control in disguise if it is not coupled with the enlargement of dignified life chances for migrants.

The end of a long-standing autocratic regime in The Gambia renewed EUrope's geopolitical interest in the externalisation of (return) migration management to the West African country. Since 2017, EUrope has financed several programmes implemented by a combination of international and local actors. Analysing original qualitative data through the lens of the sociology of translation (SoT) offered by actor-network theory (ANT), this paper explores the incorporation of locally owned civil society organisations (CSOs) within the socio-material network of externalisation. As such, it engages with the understudied perspective of Southern implementers in the context of migration management. In our analysis, we put central two notions of SoT: interessement and enrolment. With the first, we show how the development and migrant-protection interests of locally owned CSOs are brought in alignment with the EUropean objective of curtailing irregular migration. This process of interessement is never complete, but leaves room for excess positions, which here correspond to the locally owned CSOs' criticism of EUrope's appropriation of Gambian natural resources, practical organisation of migration management and excessive immobilisation of Gambians. The notion of enrolment refers to the processes of negotiation addressing part of these excess positions. Even with enrolment being successful, locally owned CSOs keep imagining, and to some extent, performing alternative ways of dealing with migration. Such alternative thinking and practicing will overtake the EUropean only if multiple and stable connections arise around it. Our ANT-driven analysis demonstrates that local implementers endorse EUropean migration management because they broadly see it as beneficial; yet, with their criticism, requests and imagination, manage to limitedly alter it, and may, potentially, transform it.

The 'politics of voice' of awareness-raising bends returnees' stories towards moral tropes against illegalised migration. These stories are commodified, bringing awareness-raising within the migration industries. We address this commodification using data from an ethnographic study of the Migrants as Messengers (MaM) project run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in The Gambia since 2019 and through the concept that we call 'moral economy of voice'. Its constituting dimensions are outlined in our analysis of vignettes on how the clashes between IOM and the returnees over awareness-raising industry's capitalist logics are cast in moral terms. We show that the returnees orally complained at IOM's mis-categorisation, mis-compensation and appropriation of their products. When acting as members of an independent group, however, they rejected IOM's conditional support for their communication projects altogether. This all engenders an evasive paternalism whereby returnees' survival partly depends on IOM, but the latter affords them neither full vulnerability nor maturity status. As such, returnee stories' commodification mechanisms are as contentious as their discursive bending. We therefore hint at returnee groups' potential for withstanding exploitative dynamics as well as advocate for a fairer engagement of returnees in awareness-raising.