“Carrots and sticks”: Performance and compliance in the German return and residence regime

Since 2015 a well-orchestrated media campaign has accompanied the implementation of a number of legal changes intended to increase the efficiency of German return policy, the latter to be achieved mainly by enforcing migrants’ collaboration with the immigration authorities to enhance their own deportability. Similarly, various regulations on opportunities to stay have been introduced, rewarding those deemed “well-integrated.” Based on two ethnographic research projects, we detail the nature of these policy debates, legal changes, and the governmental rationales behind them. We argue a German return and residence regime based on “carrots and sticks” has arisen, one that increasingly filters, sanctions, punishes, and rewards migrants with precarious residence status based on certain performance criteria. In contrast to the public debate, which calls for a “new toughness on deportations” as former chancellor Olaf Scholz Spiegel (2023) notoriously put it, our analysis shows instead how also in Germany a more differential, neoliberal—nonetheless restrictive—disciplining migration regime has emerged, revolving around notions of “utility” and “compliance” with “the rules” and “values.”