Return migration and development: The significance of migration cycles

International audienceThere are inescapable facts and evidence when it comes to dealing with the return of migrants and their reintegration. Defining concrete policy measures aimed at ensuring the completeness of returnees’ migration cycles will, at a certain point, be a key challenge that migration and development stakeholders in both countries of origin and destination will have to address. Admittedly, this challenge is all the more daunting when considering the consensus on which the current security-driven ‘return’ policies have been premised over the last few decades. Addressing the completeness of returnees’ migration cycles implies questioning such a consensus by rethinking the policy priorities that have been considered to date.Such a rethink would also be contingent on a basic precondition: the necessity to make a clear-cut distinction between return and expulsion or removal, for these different conditions decisively affect the likelihood (or desire) of individuals to reintegrate. It is time to recognise that the following categories cannot be mixed together under a uniform heading of ‘return’: migrants expelled or removed from abroad and migrants who return to their countries of origin. There is a substantial difference between return (viewed as a stage in the migration cycle) and expulsion that can no longer be ignored, analytically or in practical terms. As long as no distinction is made, the policy debate on the link between return, reintegration and development will remain biased by security-oriented priorities, if not spurious. As long as no distinction is made, current ‘return’ policies are not return policies