The Limits of Control : Transnational Migration Trajectories of Clandestine Tunisian Migrants and Assisted Return Between Governed Voluntariness and Repression

The Limits of Control takes Switzerland’s programme for assisted voluntary return migration (AVR) as an example to study the emerging contradictions of the sovereign liberal nation state in the governance of transnational mobility. The aim to remove the “undesirable alien” from the commonwealth governed by the state bureaucracy produces a fundamental problem for the liberal nation state as it questions the bureaucracy’s universal promise of equality and fairness. The ethnographic case study focuses on Switzerland’s AVR programme for Tunisian asylum seekers after the 2011 uprising against the Ben Ali regime and shows how the migration bureaucracy produces, shapes, and governs migrants’ “voluntariness.” It is based on ethnographic fieldwork among return migrants and return migration bureaucrats in Tunisia and Switzerland in 2013 and 2014. The paradoxical notion of governed voluntariness serves as the analytical lens to explore the efforts of the migration bureaucracy to reconcile the attempts to anticipate and enforce negative asylum decisions with the bureaucratic selfunderstanding of a governance by mutual consent. Therefore, The Limits of Control tells the story of the failing attempt to uphold the illusion of governing transnational migration by mutual consent creating a so-called win-win-win situation for the country of origin, the country of destination, and the migrant as well. Adopting the thesis of the autonomy of migration AoM as an analytical proposition, the ethnography confronts the experiences and expectations of mobility and return of six Tunisian migrants of different age and origin with the attempts of Switzerland’s migration bureaucracy to regulate migrants’ mobility through AVR programs. Therefore, this study exemplarily shows how these contested controls at the margins of the state (of undocumented migration) contradict the modern liberal nation state’s self-understanding of a governance by mutual consent