Abstract While return occupies a central position in European migration policy discourse, it remains a loudly announced, weakly implemented, and strongly contested aspect of migration governance. The enduring “return gap,” the divergence between policy commitments and actual removals, underscores the limitations of a control-oriented framework. Drawing on a comparative study of 11 EU+ countries, the article develops an ideal-typical categorization of state responses to non-return, here termed “alternatives to return” to denote the full spectrum of formal and informal responses implemented when return does not occur, a governance reality that inevitably follows non-return. Organized across three axes, inclusive/exclusionary, explicit/implicit, and active/passive, these six governance forms reveal the coexistence of coercive and accommodating logics, challenging the assumption that return constitutes the normative endpoint of irregular migration control in Europe.
Ambrosini et al. (Wed,) studied this question.