Non-policy Drivers of Enforced Return

Despite sustained political pressure to increase migrant returns, European Union (EU) countries enforce only around 20% of return orders, raising key questions about what drives return enforcement. While institutional and legal explanations dominate existing research, enforcement outcomes vary widely even among countries with similar policy frameworks. To explain such variation, we develop a theoretical framework that bridges rationalist approaches emphasizing external incentives with constructivist approaches focusing on socialization and alignment. Our comprehensive cross-national analysis focuses on enforced returns from 28 EU countries to non-EU states (2009-2024), based on nearly 50,000 dyadic observations and Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood models. We additionally analyze 20,000 observations distinguishing between forced and voluntary/incentivized returns (2014-2023) to uncover modality-specific patters. We assess the influence of administrative capacity, interstate relations, historical ties, and domestic political-economic conditions on return outcomes. We find that embassy presence, government effectiveness, colonial ties, and Schengen visa waivers are robust predictors of higher return rates. In contrast, formal readmission agreements and leverage tools such as aid and trade show limited effects. Some of these factors operate differently across return modalities: destination-country’s government effectiveness predicts more forced returns while origin-country effectiveness predicts more voluntary/incentivized returns. Visa waivers are associated with more voluntary/incentivized returns. These findings challenge dominant policy assumptions and underscore the role of long-term bilateral relationships and sociocultural embeddedness in shaping return enforcement across the EU.