Samenvatting

European governments widely celebrate and extensively fund ‘voluntary return’ programmes and assume that return counsellors play a key role for their implementation. At the same time, these programmes rely on the cooperation of illegalized immigrants involved, whereas the latter are often reluctant to do so. In this article, the author therefore questions how much and what kind of agency individual counsellors exercise to overcome this fundamental conflict of interest. Based on research conducted in the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria, the author conceptualizes counsellors’ work as ‘aspirations management’ that mediates the desires, hopes and interest of precarious status migrants with the goals of governments seeking to return them. The author analytically distinguishes three fundamentally different counselling strategies: facilitating migrants’ existing return aspirations, obtaining their compliance without inducing aspirations, and/or inducing aspirations for return. The author ends this article with critical reflections on the legitimacy and ethics of such aspirations management.