Counselling and reintegration programmes serve meaningful but indirect role in migrants’ return decisions, new research finds
BRUSSELS — Counselling and reintegration assistance plays a modest but meaningful role in helping migrants decide whether to accept assisted return to their country of origin after receiving a departure order, according to new research that examines how policy and practice shape those decisions. With just a small fraction of third-country nationals who receive an order to depart complying, governments across the European Union are in search of ways to increase return rates, considering enforcement of these decisions essential to maintaining the effectiveness and integrity of their asylum and migration management systems, upholding public trust and advancing longstanding European migration policy objectives.
As EU and national policymakers increasingly turn their attention to investments in counselling and reintegration programmes to boost assisted return rates, a new Migration Policy Institute Europe study highlights that while such support rarely is the determinative factor in whether migrants leave, it can strengthen informed decision-making, provide logistical support pre-departure, enhance perceptions of procedural fairness and meet urgent needs after return.
The report draws on analysis of nearly 118,000 case files from the Dutch government’s Repatriation and Departure Service (DTenV) and interviews with dozens of experts as well as Iraqi and Nigerian migrants who left the Netherlands after receiving a return order. The research, which benefited from access to DTenV administrative case files as well as government officials and facilities, was supported through a grant from the Research and Data Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security.
The longer migrants in the Netherlands stayed without legal status, the less likely they were to depart via assisted return. A statistical model developed by the MPI Europe analysts suggests that one could expect 19 percent of migrants with one return procedure to opt for assisted return, compared to just 9 percent for those with three procedures and 2 percent among those with six procedures.
The report finds that migrants’ return decisions are shaped far more by family relationships, community expectations and conditions in their home countries than by the assistance available. Yet, counselling, in particular if provided by trusted non-government counsellors, and reintegration support can serve as critical tools that help migrants navigate complex personal and legal choices.
The research points to practical steps to improve these programmes, including better timing and personalisation of counseling, stronger coordination among service providers, increased monitoring and evaluation of programmes and their results, and closer collaboration with trusted actors in migrants’ countries of origin.
As return and reintegration policies and programmes evolve quickly across Europe, the study underscores that their effectiveness depends on complex, interlinked factors—ranging from national legal systems to migrants’ personal agency—and that the greatest value of such assistance may lie less in increasing return numbers and more in supporting migrants as they navigate this complex process, increasing the efficiency and perceived fairness of those processes, and providing practical support upon return.
‘These are by themselves important and desirable outcomes from the viewpoint of destination countries such as the Netherlands, both from an ethical and a pragmatic perspective as they can help increase the legitimacy of returns and gain or maintain support from migrants’ origin countries,’ authors Ravenna Sohst, Camille Le Coz and Hanne Beirens write.
Read the report, To Leave or Stay? Examining the role of counselling and reintegration assistance in the return decision-making of migrants ordered to leave the Netherlands, here: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/return-decision-making-netherlands.
For a version in Dutch, click here.