Deportation of irregular migrants and rejected asylum seekers is widely known to pit host states against these migrants, but deportation also pits host states against these migrants’ origin states. Liberal European host states cannot unilaterally send migrants back to the origin state they come from. They depend on the origin state’s political willingness to readmit these migrants, and they depend on its practical assistance with identification and travel documents. Without this kind of cooperation with origin states, immigration law may not be enforceable. Yet origin states have political, economic and cultural reasons not to collaborate. This partly explains why relatively few—less than half—of Europe’s unauthorised migrants are deported. Conceptualising this as a conflict of interests, legal scholars and political scientists have focused on the incentives and coercion used by the host state to elicit the rational compliance of the origin state. NORMS takes a path less trodden and trail-blazes an exploration of social norms in this field. We look at how state agents from host and origin states alike seek to legitimise or de-legitimise deportation, promoting competing norms in a contested policy field. We take a practice-oriented and cross-country comparative approach to these norm dynamics. The comparative design includes two host states with different approaches to return (Norway and Sweden), as well as four unconsolidated states of origin (Iraq, Ethiopia, and two countries yet to be identified). Moreover, NORMS also aims to examine norm dynamics at the supranational level, as narrated by Norwegian and Swedish police officers who have participated in return operations carried out by the EU agency Frontex. The project identifies the norms that determine (non-)deportability and theorises the scoping conditions under which they are promoted and contested.
During 2021 and 2022 we have established dialogue and contact with the key public sector stakeholders in Norway (Ministry of Justice and Public Sector Security, Directorate for Immigration, National Immigration Police Service, Police Directorate, and National ID Centre. We have establihsed contact information for informants and have begun recruiting interviewees for data gathering. We have been invited to present the project at the Ministry of Justice and Public Sector Security, at the National Immigration Police Service, and at two consecutive Embassy Seminars organised jointly by the Directorate for Immigration and the UN agency for migration management, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), in 2021 and 2022. All these departments and agencies view the project with interest, as relevant. For instance, the project coordinator has been commissioned by the Directorate of Immigration to develop research based recommendations for Norway's new multiyear strategy on return, granting access to classified strategy documents. The project coordinator has also been invited to co-organise and moderate a seminar in the expert group on return policy in the European Migration Network (EMN REG). Based on the work we do in NORMS he has also been invited to present tentative findings and research based policy recommendations for national return policy to state secretaries from the Ministry of Justice and Public Sector Security as well as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is also invited to an EU conference in 2023 to be organised by the EU's border control agency Frontex. Thus, NORMS so far has an above-average policy impact, nationally and at the EU level.
Deportation of irregular migrants and rejected asylum seekers is widely known to pit host states against these migrants, but deportation also pits host states against these migrants’ origin states. Liberal European host states cannot unilaterally send migrants back to the origin state they come from. They depend on the origin state’s political willingness to readmit these migrants, and they depend on its practical assistance with identification and travel documents. Without this kind of cooperation with origin states, immigration law may not be enforceable. Yet origin states have political, economic and cultural reasons not to collaborate. This partly explains why relatively few—less than half—of Europe’s unauthorised migrants are deported. Conceptualising this as a conflict of interests, legal scholars and political scientists have focused on the incentives and coercion used by the host state to elicit the rational compliance of the origin state. NORMS takes a path less trodden and trail-blazes an exploration of social norms in this field. We look at how state agents from host and origin states alike seek to legitimise or de-legitimise deportation, promoting competing norms in a contested policy field. We take a practice-oriented and cross-country comparative approach to these norm dynamics. The comparative design includes one host state with high deportation rates (Norway) and one with low deportation rates (Sweden), as well as four unconsolidated states of origin (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Ethiopia). Moreover, NORMS also examines norm dynamics at the supranational level, as narrated by Norwegian and Swedish police officers who have participated in return operations carried out by the EU agency Frontex. The project identifies the norms that determine (non-)deportability and theorises the scoping conditions under which they are promoted and contested.
