Performing freedom in the Dutch deportation regime: bureaucratic persuasion and the enforcement of ‘voluntary return'

How do states relate to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers once they have been formally rejected? A growing amount of research has been devoted to the role of government and NGO workers in executing soft-deportation policy through ‘voluntary return’ programmes. Many of these studies convincingly argue that voluntary return most often is anything but voluntary. However, less effort has been spent answering the question of why, then, departure is still constructed as voluntary and how this construction is realised in practice. This paper explores the work of street-level bureaucrats in c... Mehr ...