Autonomy of migration in the light of deportation. Ethnographic and theoretical accounts of entangled appropriations of voluntary returns from Morocco
Abstract
The intricate relationship between border control and migrations is the core puzzle of this paper, which takes voluntary returns from Morocco as a case study and autonomy of migration (AoM) as a theoretical framework. More precisely, the paper examines voluntary returns from the perspective of migrants themselves to grasp border control through the lens of its disputed, distorted and sometimes subverted implementation. The paper draws on data collected during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Morocco, including ethnographic observations and interviews with staff from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), migrants and local intermediaries. It focuses on the case of sub-Saharan migrants leaving Morocco through “Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration” programmes led by IOM and confronts empirical data with the AoM theoretical framework. The paper demonstrates that migrants’ entangled appropriations of return are defined in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return. Ultimately, migrants reformulate the meaning of their involvement in voluntary return into strategic, moral, relative, and symbolic terms. However, these entangled appropriations of a deportation device simultaneously reinforce social norms and institutional regulations underlying migration dynamics and border control. Eventually, the paper draws conclusions on the political effects of migrants' entangled appropriation of a deportation device on the production of intertwined im/mobility regimes between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.
Introduction
On 24 June 2022, seventeen years after what is nowadays known as the “events of Ceuta and Melilla”, around 2000 migrants attempted to cross the fence separating Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Melilla. The images published in the media and social networks dramatically depict the long-standing brutality of border control against sub-Saharan migrants at the external borders of Europe. According to human rights and civil society organisations, more than 30 migrants died during the attempt, following the intervention of Spanish and Moroccan security forces acting on behalf of a cooperation agreement that had just been renewed some months ago. 1
At first sight, this situation seems to illustrate the sadly common spectacle of an impenetrable “Fortress Europe” against which migrants would come to die. However, it also portrays the capacity of migrants to organise collectively and resist border control. The link between borders and migrations is nevertheless less dichotomic than suggested. Rather than opposing one another, control devices and migration dynamics respectively shape and transform. Migrants do only exist in relationship to borders, and vice-versa (Schapendonk et al., 2020): “Without borders, there would neither be migration nor migrants, but only mobility and people on the move”.2 Instead of being related in a mere oppositional relationship, both entities are intertwined and interdependent. In other words, borders and migrations do not oppose, but rather coproduce one another.3 Whith this in mind, the intricate relationship between border control and migrations is the core puzzle of this paper, which takes voluntary returns from Morocco as a case study and autonomy of migration (AoM) as a theoretical framework.
Voluntary return is a peculiar deportation device in the sense that it draws, in principle, on the “voluntariness” of migrants to go back to their country of origin. They are mainly implemented by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), an intergovernmental organisation set up in 1951 and “related” to the United Nations system since 2016 (Bradley, 2021).4 In comparison with more compulsory or repressive deportation devices, voluntary returns explicitly call for the adoption of the “gaze of autonomy” (Mezzadra, 2011) allowing to grasp border control through the lens of its disputed, distorted and sometimes subverted implementation. Indeed, as limited as it may be, the peculiar role that migrants do play in the process must be considered seriously, as it substantially shapes voluntary returns. A relevant shift then consists in going beyond both the dichotomic scheme opposing “control” and “mobility”, and the assessment of the “voluntariness” of migrants, to rather examine how migrants do appropriate this deportation device within a constrained environment. Considering migrants’ interpretation and use of a control device acknowledges the necessity to recognize their legitimacy to speak on their own behalf (Spivak, 2020). However, it should not be overlooked that migrants’ narratives are also a site of power relations, and are likely to be captured and exploited by IOM (Fine and Walters, 2022). The AoM framework precisely enables to put migrants back at the heart of the analysis, while considering their practices and subjectivities, neither as external elements nor mere effects of border control, but as fully fledged driving forces of the latter. From then on, taking migrants’ perspective as a starting point allows to go beyond ideal depictions of pacified and achieved migration management, and enables to grasp the actual, precarious, and potentially contested implementation of voluntary returns. This empirical and theoretical stance offers a considerable opportunity to contribute to major debates driving border and migration studies.
This paper aims at examining voluntary returns from the perspective of migrants themselves. It argues that even within a repressive environment, migrants can appropriate returns both subjectively and practically. Here, I follow Sherry B. Ortner (Ortner, 1995) to assume a non-liberal reading of agency that differs from a reactive and oppositional capacity of action similar to that of resistance ( Scott, 1985, 1990) but rather expresses through the recoding of the use and meaning of a control device. The paper also draws on Stephan Scheel’s notion of appropriation, which goes a step further and underlines the productive and transformative effect that migrants’ practices have, both on and within means of control ( Scheel, 2013, 2017b, 2019). Stephan Scheel also highlights how appropriation practices are likely to get captured, translated, and co-opted for the development of border control. Therefore, the notion of appropriation allows to understand the complex entanglements existing between border control and migrations in the process of voluntary returns. In this paper, I ask how do migrants appropriate and transform voluntary returns? The paper draws on data collected during fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Morocco, including ethnographic observations and around 50 interviews with staff from IOM, migrants, and local intermediaries. It focuses on the case of sub-Saharan migrants leaving from Morocco through “Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration” (AVRR) programmes led by IOM and confronts empirical data with the AoM theoretical framework.
The paper is divided into three parts. First, it puts into dialogue academic literature on voluntary returns with the AoM framework, hence calling for the examination of migrants’ entangled appropriations of IOM’s device. Second, it focuses on the case of Morocco and highlights how African migrations in the country are shaped by the intricate relationship between dynamics of border control and mobilities. Third, it explores migrants’ entangled appropriations of return and demonstrates how they are defined in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return. Ultimately, migrants reformulate the meaning of their involvement in voluntary return into strategic, moral, relative, and symbolic terms. However, these entangled appropriations of a deportation device simultaneously reinforce social norms and institutional regulations underlying migration dynamics and border control. Eventually, the paper draws conclusions on the political effects of migrants’ entangled appropriation of a deportation device on the production of intertwined im/mobility regimes between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa.
Voluntary returns and the AoM
Voluntary returns
AVRR programmes are part of a wider range of deportation devices. They are mainly funded by the European Union (EU) and its member States, and implemented both within Europe’s borders and in the so-called “transit” countries, especially in Africa. In comparison with forced returns, they are considered a softer, cheaper, and more effective way to remove undesirable migrants. In that sense, AVRR belong to a “continuum of deportation” within which converge more or less compulsory forms of return, as well as a diversity of State and non-State actors (Kalir and Wissink, 2016). While they meet the same objectives than deportations, voluntary returns do differentiate in several ways. First, they are not directly led by State authorities, but are framed and implemented worldwide by the IOM and its local partners (Maâ, 2021). Besides, the implementation of voluntary returns significantly relies on the subjectivity and agency of migrants (Cleton and Chauvin, 2019; Maâ, 2019). In that sense, they profoundly reshape the political imaginary of deportation, shifting it from one of a compulsory State-led order, to a migrant-based and well-informed decision, supposedly benefiting to both returnees and their communities (Fine and Walters, 2022). Beyond IOM’s communication and official discourse, though, voluntary returns are well known for being primarily implemented in countries where migrants experience harsh conditions of living and multiple threats from State authorities and security forces. Rather than assuming migrants as purely liberal and free subjects acting as self-entrepreneurs of a radiant future, voluntary returns then endorse a pragmatic ideal of resignation within which removal appears as the “better than nothing” or the “least bad solution” for migrants facing debilitating and sometimes deadly anti-migration policies.
In this perspective, scholars have largely questioned the “voluntariness” of IOM-led returns (Webber, 2011). They have put forward the diversity of constraints driving the decision of migrants to go back to their country of origin, whether it being an administrative refusal of protection (Scalettaris and Gubert, 2018), moral and family pressures (Mortensen, 2014), or the experience of border violence (Maâ, 2019). Authors have also stressed out the key role that intermediaries play in the production of a “voluntariness” to return (Cleton and Schweitzer, 2021; Dünnwald, 2013; Maâ, 2020, 2021; Maâ et al., 2022). From then on, academics have been reluctant in interpreting assisted returns as genuinely “voluntary”. They have then faced a semantic issue, most of them refusing to adopt a term used as a euphemism for deportation (Cassarino, 2020). Consequently, alternative terminologies have been proposed, such as “non-voluntary returns” (Blitz et al., 2005), “mandatory returns” (Dünnwald, 2013), “State-induced returns” (Koch, 2014), “soft deportations” (Leerkes et al., 2017), and even “voluntary deportations” (de Senarclens and Soysüren, 2017). As useful as they might be to question the legitimacy of voluntary returns in an anti-migration context, these studies nevertheless tend to minimise the role of migrants in this peculiar form of deportation. In this perspective, it appears relevant to mobilise the AoM theoretical framework.
Autonomy of migration
To a certain extent, border and migration studies divide between two major trends: either they investigate the increasing and changing forms of control or they explore the strategies of migrants to circulate despite constraints (De Genova, 2017b; Scheel, 2019). This analytical partition is not exclusive to the field but echoes broader debates regarding the relationship between “structure” and “agency” which fundamentally frames social theory (Bakewell, 2010). The “border paradigm” (Hess, 2017: 91) underscores the expansion, technologization and exclusionary effects of means of control. Consequently, it tends to neglect migrants’ capacity of action and to depict them as mere victims or passive objects of migration policies. The “mobility paradigm”, for its part, reveals the ability of migrants to circulate and settle, organise collective protests, or define individual strategies to divert border control (Hess, 2017; Tazzioli, 2018). It also calls for a deconstruction of State-centered categories such as “refugees” and “migrants”, in favour of alternative denominations such as “people on the move” (Pijnenburg and Rijken, 2021). While both trends contribute to grasp specific dimensions of border and migration issues, they are likely to bring about misleading interpretations (Scheel, 2013). The control perspective tends to overestimate the efficiency and achievement of restrictive policies, as shown by the largely questioned paradigm of a “Fortress Europe”. Conversely, the mobility framework often overplays the emancipatory dimension of migration, even to the point of its romanticisation (Scheel, 2013).
The AoM framework precisely aims at overcoming this analytical divide, as well as going beyond the institutional perspective prevailing in the study of border control. While highlighting the intrinsically uncontrollable nature of migrations (De Genova, 2017a; Papadopoulos et al., 2008), AoM does not consider migrants as “subjects of pure agency or […] liberal individuals” exclusively acting against border control (Casas-Cortes et al., 2015: 886), but rather as driving forces pushing the latter to constantly adapt. On the other way round, it apprehends migrants' autonomy as a relational and “outward-looking” capacity (Schmoll, 2020), which is substantially defined in relationship with actors and devices encountered along the way (Schapendonk, 2018). The AoM framework thus allows to explore how migration dynamics operate in close relationship with means of control and often through their appropriation. Doing so, it offers to grasp border control from its contested, unstable, and changing margins, and in the case at hand, enables understanding the complex entanglements existing between dynamics of control and mobility in the implementation of voluntary returns from Morocco.
African migrations in Morocco between control and mobility
Control and mobility
For the last two decades, migration issues in Morocco have growingly been the object of academic scrutiny. The country's policy in the matter has largely been scrutinised through the lens of the “externalisation” approach which underlines the asymmetrical dynamics leading to the involvement of third countries in EU’s fight against irregular migration. In this perspective, authors have depicted Morocco as being “Europe’s policeman in North Africa” standing “in the eye of the European cyclone” (Belguendouz, 2005), as well as a “camp-country” for stranded migrants (Valluy, 2009). Scholars calling for decolonising border and migration studies have recently nuanced these interpretations (Berriane et al., 2015; El Qadim, 2015; Gross-Wyrtzen and Gazzotti, 2020). Opening the path for further research, Nora El Qadim has underlined Morocco’s capacity to resist and appropriate migration control to defend its own agenda (El Qadim, 2015). Following this perspective, authors have examined the role of internal (Natter, 2020) and diplomatic dynamics (Benjelloun, 2021; Cherti and Collyer, 2015; Benjelloun, 2021), and that of humanitarian (Gazzotti, 2020; Tyszler, 2021), intergovernmental (Bartels, 2017; Maâ, 2021) and community-based actors (Bachelet, 2018; Maâ, 2021; Magallanes-Gonzalez, 2021; Üstübici, 2016) in the shaping of a contested migration regime in Morocco. Simultaneously, scholars have underlined the persistence of racialised dynamics of control and exposure to death at the border, as well as the convergence of multiple relations of dominations within a continuum of violence towards migrants in Morocco (Gazzotti, 2020; Gross-Wyrtzen, 2020; Maâ, 2020, 2022; Tyszler, 2021). Similarly, non-governmental organisations have repetedly reported human rights violations, boder violence and harsh living conditions experienced by migrants.5
Despite evolutions in scholarship, the focus on the so-called “sub-Saharan” migrations in Morocco6 and their humanitarian and/or repressive management has reinforced – even non-deliberately – “Eurocentric geographical imaginaries” (Casas-Cortes, 2019) depicting the country as a temporary and contingent stage in migration trajectories towards Europe, and overlooking historical dynamics of settlement and mobility between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean. Yet, authors have demonstrated the long-standing nature of western and central African mobilities in Morocco (Fall, 2003; Goldschmidt, 2002, 2004; Lanza, 2011b). This historical grounding has particularly been outlined in regard to labour-driven mobilities (Lanza, 2011a), as well as student (Berriane, 2015) or religious ones (Berriane, 2014; Lanza, 2014). In a broader perspective, Mahamet Timera (2009) has described sub-Saharan migrations in Morocco as being driven by circulation pathways where traditional and most recent mobilities tend to overlap. Rather than exclusively resulting from a presumed achievement of border externalisation, African migrations in Morocco are then shaped by both border control and mobility dynamics. This intricate relationship also reflects in the institutionalisation and daily implementation of voluntary returns in the country.
Voluntary returns from Morocco
Morocco became a member of IOM in 1998 and signed a “Headquarters Agreement” in 2005, hence allowing the establishment of a country office in the capital city. The opening of the bureau in Rabat was only effective in 2007, but IOM implemented its first return operation from 2005, following what is nowadays known as the “Ceuta and Melilla events”. IOM’s intervention served Morocco’s claims for an equal shared responsibility with the EU with regard to border and migration control, while pacifying a tense situation at its northern borderlands through the removal of hundreds of migrants, mainly towards Mali.7 Shortly afterwards, in 2007, Morocco’s Home Office signed a “Memorandum of Understanding for the implementation of a cooperation programme on the voluntary return and reintegration in countries of origin, of migrants in an irregular administrative situation in the Kingdom”. From then on, IOM implemented return programmes despite regular episodes of suspension, notably in 2010, 2012 and 2016 (Maâ, 2019). From 2013 onwards, the announcement of a “new” migration policy more respectful of human rights8 provided a relative stability to AVRR programmes which started benefiting fundings from the EU, member States, and the Moroccan government. Between 2014 and 2019, IOM registered an average of about 1445 returns per year, before experimenting a decrease in 2020 due to the global pandemic of Covid-19, and a clear rebound in 2021, which recorded a total of 2377 returns.9 On the ground, the daily implementation of voluntary returns rests upon the participation of African embassies and consulates, humanitarian actors (Bava and Maâ, 2022), community-based intermediaries (Maâ, 2021; Maâ et al., 2022), and migrant themselves (Maâ, 2019).
Very strikingly, migrants willing to return through AVRR programmes do refer to their registration at IOM’s office as “signing deportation”. This emic expression has been elaborated by migrants and is still currently used in English and French by the latter. For a researcher, it operates as a significant and heuristic thread to explore how dynamics of border control and mobility intertwine in migrants' interpretations of voluntary return. While the term “deportation” undoubtedly evokes the experience of coercion and violence, the idea of a “signature” refers to the active role - even though limited - that migrants do play during the process of return. Stricktly speaking, the AVRR procedure implies that migrants sign a “declaration of voluntary return” before travelling to their country of origin. In a more interpretative way, though, the notion of “signature” also signifies their ability to stand as real authors of their trajectory of return, as constrained as it might be. In this perspective, migrants express their capacity to translate the meaning of return far from that of a deportation, and to transform its use beyond antagonisms of “constraint” and “voluntariness”.
Entangled appropriations of return
Collective claims
When I started fieldwork in 2016 in Rabat, I had the opportunity to witness unexpected protestations led by migrants claiming for return (Maâ, 2019). While visiting IOM’s main office for the first time, I met around thirty young men - mainly Guinean (Conakry) and Cameroonian nationals - who had settled in front of the building for several weeks. They were waiting to enroll for return, after IOM suspended registrations, officially because of a lack of fundings. Besides, most of the migrants I met were not considered priority cases according to IOM’s criteria and indicators of vulnerability. When registrations reopened around two weeks after my first visit, newcoming migrants got prioritised to the detriment of those occupying the area. This is when the latter decided to attempt blockading IOM's office, threatening to “take IOM’s flag down” and protesting with a cardboard sign mentioning in capital letters: “IOM = ZERO. CLOSE THE IOM”. One of the protesting migrants – a cameroonian “adventurer” accustomed to life and crossing attempts at the border – explained why they decided to blockade IOM:
If they don't want to register our applications for return, they stop working. I asked them. I said: ‘If it's true that you don't have money for returns, how do you get paid for your job?’ They said their salary has nothing to do with the money for returns. But we said ‘No’! If there is no money to help us return, there will be no money for their salaries. IOM closes its doors. When there is money, they will start working again. We block IOM. If there is no money, nobody works.
The interviewee expresses a lack of trust in IOM’s internal functioning and mode of financing, which further resulted in the circulation among migrants, of rumours accusing the organisation of embezzlement. What is at stake here is the framing of the relationship between migrants and IOM. Conforming to the asymmetric rationale of humanitarian assistance (Fassin, 2012), migrants are expected to express a sense of acknowledgment, or even gratitude, towards an organisation presenting itself as acting “for the benefit of all”. On the contrary, the above interview shows that they are likely to reverse the terms of the relationship of obligation, and subject IOM’s existence to the satisfaction of their demands. Their collective claim for return also counters IOM’s categorisations and norms, thus converting AVRR programmes’ moral economy, from a privilege accorded to the most vulnerable, to a legitimate and collective “right”. In this sense, their mobilisation expresses a profound disagreement with IOM’s politics of humanitarian migration management (see also Moulin and Nyers, 2007).
As surprising as it seemed to me back then, delays and restrictions in the allocation of return assistance had previously led to settlements and collective protests in front of IOM’s office. Inken Bartels (2017) has documented similar events occurring in 2012, in a context where an increasing repression against migrants led to a significantly high number of demands. Facing IOM’s incapacity to satisfy their demand, dozens of migrants had then decided to settle and protest in front of the organisation’s office. At the time, they were supported by ‘civil society organisations and even activist groups, that had been until then rather sceptical regarding IOM’s presence and services in Morocco’ (Bartels, 2017: 9). These ‘unexpected alliances’ provided AVRR programmes with an unprecedented humanitarian legitimacy, ultimately serving IOM’s quest for international fundings and local implementing partners (Maâ, 2021). In comparison with more oppositional forms of protestations, mobilisations for voluntary return are then particularly ambivalent. While they tend to legitimise both AVRR programmes and IOM’s predominant role in the field of return, they also reveal migrants’ propensity to reframe collectively the meaning of a deportation device.
Vulnerability as resource
Generally, though, migrants are more likely to define discrete and individual tactics to access limited resources (Scheel, 2017a). During the AVRR procedure, the assessment of migrants’ vulnerability – and thus their prioritisation – is conducted on a case-by-case basis, during mandatory interviews led by IOM staff. Originally defined by the organisation as a mean of categorisation, resource attribution management, and control against potential “frauds”, these face-to-face interactions are also used by migrants willing to fast-track their application. An IOM staff member relates:
I remember a guy who came one day. I saw right away that he was bluffing. The guy entered the office doing: ‘bvrr bvrr bvrr’ (mimes someone shivering with cold). He was trembling, he was shivering, he was doing his act! I understood right away that he was pretending to be sick. When he arrived, I had to go to another office to make a photocopy and come back. So, when I came out of the interview room, he stopped acting. And when I came back, as he did not notice my presence, he was normal! When he saw me, he tried to pretend shivering again, but he understood he was toast. So, we did the interview as normal. He stopped trembling. He didn't say anything more. But at the beginning, he was saying: ‘Please help me because I'm soooo sick!’. In fact, everyone is eager to go home. So, all means are good to try to get prioritised. And it's just human. It's the survival instinct.
Therefore, migrants can exercise power through the performance of their vulnerability in front of IOM staff (see also Ticktin, 2006). Similarly, they can put themselves in an actual situation of dependence with the aim of getting prioritised. An Ivorian national operating as an informal intermediary explains how he advises migrants applying for return:
One of my friends in Casa [Casablanca] told me that she knows someone who wants to return, but who has gone to register with IOM and has been waiting for three months. So, I said: ‘If he has done three months? It really depends on what he said to IOM’. I said: ‘If you get up today, you leave Casa, you come to Rabat with your suitcase, you sit down in front of IOM, you say that you have nowhere to sleep because you’ve been thrown out of your house? IOM will find you a temporary accommodation, and then, you’ll just have to wait for a week or two, and you will be scheduled for travelling home. […] But if you talk quietly with IOM, quietly, without any problem? They will say that your case is not too vulnerable. They have many demands for return, so they assess priority on a case-by-case basis. And when you don’t have a place to sleep, you become a priority. That's how it works here. So, I told him to go directly and sit in front of IOM.
These strategic uses of vulnerability invite to reconsider this very notion, as it is generally understood in opposition with the exercise of power. In the case at hand, however, vulnerability appears both as an institutional category, as well as a resource invested by migrants willing to defend their own priorities. Migrants are thus prone to appropriate IOM’s rules and categories to get prioritised in the access to return assistance. Doing so, they demonstrate to what extent their agency results from an intricate interaction with migration control, and takes shape in seemingly conformity with the norms and regulations of the latter. As stated by Stephen Scheel:
Rather than openly contesting […] requirements or refusing their fulfilment, the successful appropriation of mobility hinges on a convincing performance of compliance with these regulations. Practices of appropriation transgress the parameters of the border regime, but they do so clandestinely. (2013: 281)
As transgressive as it might be, this strategic performance however reproduces the moral economy presenting voluntary returns as a privileged assistance reserved for the most vulnerable. Most importantly, it reinforces IOM’s suspicion regarding potential inaccuracy in migrants’ testimonies, strenghens its attempt to control fraudulous uses of vulnerability, and might further restrict access to return assistance.
Uncertainty
However, outside IOM's scrutiny, migrants are quite inclined to subvert more radically constitutive norms of voluntary return. Indeed, while they do express collectively and individually their “voluntariness” in front of IOM to face the limited access assistance, migrants simultaneously evaluate the opportunity to actually return, according to constraints and opportunities they meet during the procedure. In other words, migrants do not define their project of return in absolute terms, but rather in a relative and fundamentally conditional way. Even more explicitly, they often sign up for voluntary return without having any immediate intention to go back to their country of origin, but rather in anticipation of a potential degradation of their living conditions in Morocco. Led to cope with the uncertainty characterizing their migration trajectory, many migrants do register with IOM, while simultaneously pursuing attempts to cross borders towards Europe or to obtain a residence permit in the country (Maâ, 2019). This practice is even more encouraged as migrants are aware of the waiting times for return assistance, which can last from two weeks to several months depending on the case. This use of AVRR programmes creates a considerable gap between the number of applicants registered, and that of effective returns. An IOM staff member acknowledges:
There are a lot of migrants interviewed that you’re not going to see anymore. A lot! This year for example, we realised over 3000 interviews, 3400–3500. And we only returned 1700 people. That’s a half yeah. Because some people come thinking: ‘I sign up for voluntary return and when I’m really tired, I come back [to IOM] and travel’. There are also a lot of people who come, disappear, and reappear afterwards. They come to register, but once it is done, they go back to [borderlands]. And ultimately, there are people that we do not manage to reach, or those who disappear.
Contrary to linear representations of return, both regarding the choice and procedure, migrants do not systematically go back to their country of origin, even when registred with IOM. The process of return hence remains highly contingent, as demonstrated by the case of Aya, an Ivorian woman I met during fieldwork (Maâ, 2020). At that time, she was twenty-eight years old and had recently signed up for return, for herself and her new-born child named Prince. Despite IOM’s acknowledgment of Aya’s priority due to vulnerability, her return was suspended because the Embassy of Ivory Coast refused to recognize citizenship to her child born in Morocco, as well as to deliver the laissez-passer that would allow his travel to Abidjan. After several weeks of depleting negotiations with both Ivorian and Moroccan administrations, Aya was finally provided the document. This is precisely when she began to have doubts about her decision to return. She explained:
At first, I was just talking about going home. But then I sat down and started to think … I want to go back to Abidjan, but if I go back right now, how am I going to do? You know, you can take a decision today, and tomorrow you can sit down and change your mind. So, I'm in a hurry and I'm not in a hurry. First, if I go home today, what am I going to eat? I'm ready [to go]! But what am I going to live with? Besides, I'm not alone, I have a baby in my arms. But I have nothing, no money on me. All I've got right now is 150 dirhams [approximately 15 euros]. And no one sends me money, neither to him [pointing to her son]. So, can I really come back to my country like that? What am I going to explain? At least, if you have some money with you, even if you didn't get where you wanted to go [namely Europe] … If you have some money with you when you return, that's OK. But you cannot ask those who stayed behind to help you.
The decision of return thus depends to a large extent on the conditions of its achievement, because unlike migrants who get deported, voluntary returnees must “justify their choice to end migration [while] distancing themselves from the suspicion of failure” (Maitilasso, 2014: 6). The fact that returnees take part in the decision operates as an additional constraint, in the sense that it subjects them more explicitly to social obligations of success which can lead to relegation and stigma when unfulfilled (Bredeloup, 2008; De Latour, 2003; Kleist, 2017). Thus, migrants have to accommodate and satisfy the expectations of their left behind relatives, in particular members of enlarged family who can exercise considerable pressure on issues of return (Mortensen, 2014). In this perspective, communities of origin do not exclusively act as supporting actors but can also make migrants' return more complicated.
Imaginaries
For migrants who often experience precarious living conditions in Morocco, meeting the expectations of their relatives can be difficult to achieve. They can nevertheless manage to invest imaginaries of success in order to return as seemingly “heroes” of migration (De Latour, 2003). Going back to the case of Aya is interesting in this regard. We have seen previously that she had shown doubts regarding her decision of return. While according to IOM's official communication, migrants always have the possibility of withdrawing with their choice, the limited character of return assistance nevertheless discourage them to openly backtrack, for fear of losing any chance of being assisted in the future. Led to postpone her departure to Abidjan, Aya thus set up an avoidance strategy : she turned her mobile phone off for a couple of days and intentionally missed her appointment with IOM. A staff member of IOM then expressed his surprise:
I felt that she really wanted to leave, she was eager to return. So, I didn't really understand when she didn't come [to her appointment with IOM]. I was surprised! Because I felt she was eager to leave, and vulnerable … But [migrants] have their own reasons. I told you that I met her later in her neighbourhood having a manicure. So, I guess it was important for her not to go back home looking like … I don't know … She had to have her hair done, her nails and everything. She's a woman. She didn't want people to speak badly of her. I imagine that psychologically, the fact that she didn't succeed in her migration project … When you return, you will have to face the community. So, if you come back more damaged … It’s just my interpretation! But I think this could explain why she decided not to leave.
Indeed, Aya considered her appearance as a great issue in the prospect of her forthcoming return. She had to erase the stains and scars that her migration journey had left on her body before she could face the gaze of her relatives back home (see also Pian, 2010: 10). She explained back then:
It's not pretty … My whole body is rotten, what am I going to say? Same for my clothes. And my hair! It's rotten! I wasn't like that when I came in Morocco. When I came here, I was all dressed up and well prepared. But now I look like a crazy woman. When I look at myself, it hurts. All that because of trying to go to Europe … When I arrive at Abidjan airport, people must know that I am coming from Morocco [which benefits an image of wealth and modernity in Ivory Coast], isn’t it? So, even if I’m not doing well, I must get ready before going home! We must at least get dressed up! Then people's gaze won't be on us too much.
Practices of self-care before returning home are widespread among migrants. They demonstrate their capacity to mitigate most visible signs of harsh living conditions and to heal multiple wounds left by “debilitating” policies (see also Puar, 2017). Nevertheless, they also illustrate the persistence and disciplining power of imaginaries of success, which are even more supposed to be embodied by women subjected to gendered norms of beauty and femininity. While dressing up for relatives back home, migrants thus epitomise the imperative of “straightening up” involved when crossing the border (Luibheid, 2002). In this constraining environment, IOM’s device can nevertheless offer resources for migrants to symbolically repurpose and alternatively imagine their trajectory of return (see also Metcalfe, 2022). Before travelling home, future returnees meet at IOM’s office to fix some last details and be collectively driven to Casablanca airport. In this context, both IOM’s country office and the airport become “places of passage” (Green, 1999) where migrants do symbolically express the meaning of their impending return. For instance, they abundantly take pictures while posing either in the wealthy atmosphere of IOM’s neighbourhood or in the modern environment of the airport. Besides, while the organisation of returns on ordinary flights results from economic and security rationales, migrants take advantage of this scenery of “freedom of movement” to immortalise their symbolic access to the privileged form of mobility they are precisely excluded from. In other words, they use the “deportation infrastructure” of voluntary returns (Walters, 2018) to perform imaginaries of migration success and mobility.
Reversibility
Returning, however, often appears as a considerable challenge for migrants who are generally offered inadequate or very limited “reintegration” projects back home (Ruben et al., 2009). In addition to previously described strategies, migrants can thus consider re-emigrating after going back to their country of origin. More broadly, return projects – especially to west and central Africa – are often defined in the prospect of future circulations, rather than of a permanent settlement (Boyer and Néya, 2015). In this context, returnees are likely to transform into “mobile transmigrants or unsettled returnees” whose permanent reintegration is continually postponed in favour of temporary returns and multiple “back and forth” circulations (Sinatti, 2011). In fact, a significant part of migrants return through IOM’s assistance while simultaneously considering future migration. For these returnees, an important condition for agreeing to “sign deportation” is to keep the possibility to re-emigrate afterwards. This concern can give rise to rumours circulating among migrants, about an “IOM stamp” which would impede their circulation once imprinted on their passports. Consequently, migrants are likely either not to use their travel documents or to return under an assumed identity, to ensure the possibility of a later migration. An Ivorian intermediary explains how migrants manage to use the identity of their relatives with the intention of re-applying for IOM’s assistance in the future:
Some migrants give false identities to their embassies. It is not complicated! Let's imagine. If I want to go home, I will ask one of my friends in Abidjan to send me his birth certificate. Just his birth certificate, okay? I take the certificate and I give it to IOM and to my embassy. I go to the embassy, I introduce myself: “My name is Kouakou Kouakou Jean”. They'll say: “We need a paper proving that you are Kouakou Kouakou Jean”. Hehe! I already have my friend’s birth certificate! That's the paper that proves I'm Kouakou Kouakou Jean! And there is no photo on it. So, I will receive a laissez-passer thanks to this certificate and return to my country with my friend’s identity. And then, if I come back to Morocco, the second time I want to travel with IOM, I will simply use my real document to travel. IOM cannot recognize people, there are too many people passing by. So, a lot of people travel with false identities!
The way in which migrants have repurposed the use of IOM’s service eventually supports their circulation strategies between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. While IOM’s mission in Rabat fears to convert into “a free travel agency for migrants” (fieldwork notes, 2017), its beneficiaries indeed seem to have made of a presumed deportation device, a resource to access mobility in a constrained environment. As if it needed to be clearer, the same intermediary asserts explicitly:
Everybody knows it's business. In Morocco, you will never see a Black man paying his own ticket to return home. Unless he really has enough money and he has very precise things to do, on precise dates. But someone who says: ‘Well, I'm going to spend two months in Abidjan, just to go back home a bit and get some rest’? This person will return with IOM. That’s how it works.
Conclusion
This paper deals with debates in border and migration studies by confronting ethnographic empirical data on voluntary returns from Morocco with the autonomy of migration theoretical framework (AoM). It examines this peculiar form of deportation device from the perspective of migrants themselves, and underlines to what extent its daily implementation rests upon an intricate relationship between border control and migration dynamics. Ultimately, the paper argues that migrants’ entangled appropriations of IOM’s device simultaneously strengthen and contest social norms and institutional regulations.
First, migrants perform as well as they negotiate the regulations and moral economy underlying voluntary returns. They do so in close relationship with a wide range of actors intervening during the process of return, namely their fellow migrants, IOM staff, local intermediaries, and their relatives in the country of origin. Facing restrictive and competitive rules of assistance allocation, migrants are likely to perform their vulnerability and/or to protest collectively in order to be fast-tracked in the access of return assistance. However, their commitment to actually returning home highly depends on their ability to satisfy the expectations of their left behind relatives regarding social success. In this context, migrants demonstrate their capacity to use IOM's device in order to cope with contradictory but simultaneous injunctions of vulnerability and success. Finally, migrants are likely to plan further circulations after their forthcoming return, hence demonstrating that going back home is no synonym for the end of the migration trajectory.
In sum, migrants translate their “voluntariness” to return all at once as a strategical performance of vulnerability aiming at accessing IOM’s assistance, a collective claim for unconditional right to return, a contingent orientation of their migration trajectory, as well as a symbolic display of migration success. Despite the demonstration of creativity and adaptability these forms of appropriation illustrate, they also reveal the conflicting and contradictory expectations and categorisations migrants are subjected to. Vulnerable, broken, and dependent in front of IOM staff to be promptly scheduled on a return flight, migrants must simultaneously appear as successful heroes and masters of their own destiny in the eyes of their left behind relatives. Procedural and social norms that migrants are meant to satisfy then collide and oblige them to adapt in seemingly contradictory ways. Migrants thus come to perform compliance with the moral economy of humanitarian migration management, while subverting its deportation infrastructure to embody imaginaries of success and mobility.
Examining migrants’ perspective thus raises major issues regarding the political critique of this mean of control, especially as it demonstrates to what extent their practices both strengthen and contest the latter. Accordingly, migrants manage to convert IOM’s device into a resource to migrate between the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. They hence redefine and revive historical spaces of circulation, depriving in this sense voluntary returns from their objective of sedentarisation. But, migrants only subvert control to a certain extent. First, their practices only give access to fragmented and limited forms of mobility within Africa, and not beyond. While intra-African mobilities are embedded in historical and endogenous dynamics, the time and spaces of mobility that migrants manage to access using control devices remain largely confiscated. Besides, migrants’ capacity to re-emigrate after return is not systematic and depends on their ability to find further resources, including sometimes by converting reintegration projects into means of circulation. Furthermore, migrants’ practices remain likely to be captured and serve the expansion of both IOM and return programmes. Indeed, the strategic use migrants make of voluntary returns increases delays before accessing assistance, and comforts - or even reinforces - IOM’s prioritisation system on vulnerability criteria. Finally, migrants' mobilisations for return support IOM’s continuous quest for fundings and development, as well as it strengthens the legitimacy of this device within the deportation continuum.
In this perspective, voluntary returns appear as a highly flexible device whose strength precisely resides in its “capturability”, that’s to mean its capacity to be translated and appropriated by all parties involved. While the EU and its member States tend to recognise return policies as an efficient mean to fight undesirable migrations – especially when implemented outside their own borders – IOM promotes its programmes as being a pragmatic and humanitarian way to protect migrants facing normalised debilitating policies, and migrants themselves use returns to manage accessing mobility and avoiding the stigma of deportation in an increasingly constrained environment. The equivocal meaning of voluntary returns, their adaptative nature, as well as their seemingly paradoxical implementation are thus nothing accidental, but rather constitutive of this liberal form of deportation whose persistence ultimately rests upon unequal access to mobility at a global scale.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the two anonymous peer-reviewers for their insightful and generous comments which have helped improving the theoretical scope of this paper. She also thanks the guest editors of this Special Issue, Nora El Qadim and Beste Isleyen, for their suggestions and proofreading on previous versions of this paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This paper draws on research conducted in the framework of a PhD thesis which was supported by the Fund for Scientific Research – FNRS (F.R.S.–FNRS) under the grant of Research Fellow (ASP – Aspirant FNRS).
ORCID iD
Anissa Maâ https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2286-9212
Footnotes
2 Stephan Scheel quoting Nicholas De Genova keynote conference held at University of Oxford in April 2013 (Scheel, 2013: 285).
3 This statement is inspired by the relational conception of power developed in several works of Michel Foucault, for example, Foucault (1994 [1976]).
4 As a “related” organisation, IOM is strenghening its relationship with the United Nations (UN) system, while not being subjected to the respect of international law, in particular the UN charter of 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
5 MIGREUROP, “Guerre aux migrants. Le livre noir de Ceuta et Melilla”, 2006: http://migreurop.org/IMG/pdf/livre_noir_ceuta_et_melilla.pdf; Médecins Sans Frontières, “Violences, vulnérabilité et migration: bloqués aux portes de l'Europe. Un rapport sur les migrants subsahariens en situation irrégulière au Maroc, 2013: https://www.msf.fr/sites/default/files/informemarruecos2013_fr_0.pdf; GADEM, “Coûts et blessures. Rapports sur les opérations des forces de l'ordre menées dans le nord du Maroc entre juillet et septembre 2018”, 2018: https://www.gadem-asso.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20180927_GADEM_Cou_ts_et_blessures-1.pdf
6 This generic term is used in Morocco to refer to Black African migration. Despite the risks of homogenisation that it entails, it is adopted in the article as, on the one hand, it remains a frame of reference mobilised both by migrants and by actors involved in the “management” of migrations and, on the other hand, migration control in the country – and, consequently, the migration experience emerging from the latter – are largely racialised.
7 OIM, “Piégés au Maroc: des migrants en détresse reçoivent l'assistance de l'OIM”, Revue Migrations, 2005, 28: https://www.fh2mre.ma/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Revue-832-531.pdf
8 Stratégie Nationale d’Immigration et d’Asile, Royaume du Maroc, Ministère chargé des Marocains Résidant à l’Étranger et des Affaires de la Migration, 2018: https://marocainsdumonde.gov.ma/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Strate%CC%81gie-Nationale-dimmigration-et-dAsile-ilovepdf-compressed.pdf
9 OIM, Assistance au retour volontaire et à la réintégration au Maroc, Rapport Annuel 2021, p.4: https://morocco.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl936/files/documents/fr_rapport_annuel_avrr.pdf
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Biographies
Anissa Maâ holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ULB and an Affiliated Research Fellow at Oxford Department of International Development (University of Oxford). Her research locates at the crossroads of international politics and socio-anthropology of migrations. It explores dynamics of appropriation and intermediation in border and migration control, drawing on ethnographic fieldworks conducted in North and West Africa (Morocco, Mali). Anissa Maâ has published several articles in international peer-reviewed journals (see her ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2286-9212). She is also the author of an academic book based on her PhD thesis, to be published in 2023 at Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles (“Signer la deportation”. Migrations africaines et retours volontaires depuis le Maroc).
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