This paper is composed of three main parts. First, a reflection on the evolution and state-of-the-art of the practice and discourse of return migration management. Despite attempting to recast this practice and discourse in a more favourable light – by, for instance, assimilating critiques and advancing a contested form of humanitarianism – EUropean policy-makers maintain the same racialised, immobilisation objectives, undermining any concrete prospect of reform. A return migration management cast in development and humanitarian terms is better posed to enrol locally-embedded non-state actors in its externalisation. However, I show how, in the case of The Gambia, once the enrolment is complete, these actors promptly notice and react to a difference in the morals and values animating the fight against irregular migration - or the backway, as the Gambians call it - from the point of view of the donors and the big international organisations related to them. In the last section, I suggest that research could add to the burgeoning literature on the bottom-up instrumentalisation of and criticism to externalised return migration management by raising the question of whether Northern countries also re-make the fight against the backway of the grassroots by super-imposing their objectives and schemes over it.
