Returning migrants without an authorisation to stay has become a strong policy focus in the EU’s migration policy since the ‘migration crises of 2015/2016. Over the last years, the European Commission has put forth a plethora of initiatives to make the return of unwanted migrants more ‘effective’, persuade non-EU countries to cooperate on return and position return as an integral part of EU and member states’ asylum policies. Originally part of an effort to keep close ties with cooperation partners in non-EU countries, the topic of migration control, and in particular return, have become more and more contentious over the last years, especially for countries in the Global South. This raises questions whether the EU’s approach can be considered to be more comprehensive, addressing the interests of non-EU countries or more externalising, being focused on reducing irregular migration to the EU.
While return policies and their contestation have been the focus of much research, we thus far lack an understanding of the EU’s approach to return policy. This paper aims to fill this gap by analysing, for the first time, the total of EU policy documents related to migration externalisation and return using text-as-data methods. Covering documents issued between 1972 and 2023, we use a structural topic model to uncover shifts in policy focus over time and in response to crises or major political changes at the domestic level. Our initial findings show that the topic of return has not come to dominate within the field of migration. Also, within EU documents on return, Frontex and cooperation with non-EU countries are the most important issues, whereas we can find a decline in readmission agreement-related issues.
