Stabilisation, non-removability, and the possible role of community fora in European migration governance
Migration and mobility in Europe: the complexities of people on the move.
Framing the Problem
What does a rules-based system do when removal is lawful in principle but impossible in practice? Across Europe, a quietly persistent category has taken root: people who cannot be returned, because of legal bars, diplomatic impasses, documentation gaps, medical constraints, statelessness, or simple non-cooperation from origin states. They are neither on a clear path to status nor on a path out. They wait.
This is sometimes treated as an administrative anomaly. It is not. Non-removability sits at the junction of immigration law, municipal governance, labour markets, public order, and social policy. For the individuals concerned it means prolonged uncertainty, heightened exposure to exploitation, and a narrowing of life chances. For authorities it strains case-management systems, erodes confidence in decision-making, and complicates planning for housing, health, education, and policing. For communities it can fuel misunderstanding and, at times, tension, especially where informal economies grow in the shadows of formal rules.
The issue is not new, but it is increasingly visible. European states have invested heavily in border management, casework modernisation, and return cooperation. Yet there remains a cohort for whom removal does not occur, sometimes for years. In those circumstances, the narrow lens of compliance and enforcement misses a wider question: how do we maintain social cohesion, uphold the credibility of lawful processes, and protect human dignity when finality is elusive?
A stabilisation lens is helpful here. Stabilisation is not solely a post-conflict endeavour; it is a way of sustaining normality under pressure. Applied domestically, it asks how institutions and communities can keep everyday life predictable and legitimate while legal and diplomatic processes run their course. That, in essence, is the challenge posed by non-removability, and the point of departure for the analysis that follows.
Emerging Scholarship and Analytical Framing
The very recent volume When Deportation Fails: Non-removable Migrants in the European Union (Oxford Studies in European Law, 2025), from what can be gleaned through the abstract and summary material currently available, appears to provide long-needed conceptual clarity to a field too often addressed in fragments. Diego Gins Martín seems able to demonstrate that non-removability is not a marginal defect in the architecture of European migration law, but a structural by-product of how law, politics, and administration interact.
Through comparative case studies, the book shows how divergent national practices, ranging from toleration statuses and “Duldung”-type permits (so called “toleration permits”, as in Germany’s Duldung system) to prolonged detention or de facto irregular stay, mask a common reality: the inability of EU states to close cases where deportation is legally foreseen but factually blocked. Legal safeguards (non-refoulement, medical grounds, rights of the child), combined with the political reluctance of origin countries to re-admit, and the administrative incapacity to procure or verify identity documents, create an enduring impasse.
The value of this work is not only in cataloguing national responses, but in tracing their systemic consequences: erosion of the principle of finality in migration decisions, a weakening of the credibility of removal policies, and a hidden but significant impact on integration policies and local service provision. In doing so, it provides a timely platform to revisit earlier debates on EU external action in migration management, including those explored in my own 2012 research on the Union’s preventive strategies in third countries, and to reassess how internal and external dimensions of migration governance now converge around the unresolved figure of the “non-removable” migrant.
Revisiting Earlier Research: EU External Action and its Limits
In 2012, I conducted a research project entitled The External Dimension of European Migration Policy: A Preventive Approach, which explored the Union’s strategies for reducing irregular flows through engagement with third countries. The work was never formally published, but it reflected a strand of thinking at the time: that investment in border management abroad, coupled with cooperation on return and readmission, could address the operational gaps that made removals difficult.
This strategy rested on three interlinked assumptions:
1. Capacity transfer: that investment in third-country administrative and technical capacity (from border control to civil registries) would gradually close the operational gaps preventing effective return.
2. Political convergence: that readmission agreements, dialogue frameworks, and financial incentives would align the interests of EU and partner states.
3. Preventive stabilisation: that by promoting development, resilience, and security-sector reform, irregular outflows would diminish, and returns would be more feasible.
A decade later, many of these assumptions appear only partially fulfilled. Despite vast financial allocations under instruments such as the Trust Fund for Africa and the NDICI-Global Europe, the structural impediments identified in 2012 remain largely intact. Identity verification continues to be fraught with technical, political, and even diplomatic obstacles. Return and readmission agreements are either absent, selectively implemented, or politically contested. And while development cooperation has had measurable impacts in some areas, it has not neutralised the fundamental drivers of irregular migration.
The persistence of non-removable migrants within the EU, as documented in When Deportation Fails (2025), underscores these limits. Where the external dimension was meant to create functional pathways for return, the result is instead a growing population of individuals trapped between legal rights to remain (due to non-refoulement and human rights law) and the absence of durable status. This tension illustrates not merely a failure of policy design, but a deeper mismatch between external preventive action and internal legal constraints.
Community Fora as Functional Responses
If EU external action has not fully achieved its intended objectives, attention must shift to internal mechanisms capable of addressing the lived realities of non-removability. Here, the role of community fora, structured platforms bringing together migrants, local authorities, civil society organisations, and legal experts, emerges as both underexplored and potentially significant.
From a practical perspective, such fora could facilitate identity verification where state-to-state cooperation falters, strengthen rights awareness for those in precarious legal situations, and promote constructive forms of integration for individuals whose residence has become de facto long-term despite official intentions. They can also help prepare pathways for eventual resolution, whether through voluntary return, regularisation, or alternative forms of protection, by connecting individuals to legal aid and administrative processes.
From a normative perspective, the existence of fora also provides the Union and its Member States with a functional instrument to mitigate the humanitarian consequences of failed deportation. This resonates with the analysis advanced in When Deportation Fails, where prolonged limbo is shown to corrode both the credibility of state institutions and the dignity of individuals. By contrast, fora represent a modest but practical means of reasserting governance without perpetuating exclusion.
In this sense, community fora do not replace external cooperation or high-level policy reforms; rather, they complement them. They translate broad strategies into localised, human-centred practices that can be implemented even in the absence of consensus at intergovernmental level.
Conclusion
The persistence of non-removability within the European Union underscores a central paradox of migration governance: states continue to affirm the principle of return, yet the practical, legal, and diplomatic constraints identified both in my 2012 research and in the recently published When Deportation Fails reveal the limits of this approach. The result is a durable condition of limbo, producing negative consequences for migrants, host societies, and the credibility of institutions alike.
What this double lens (the retrospective insights of early EU external action and the prospective framing of current scholarship) makes clear is that no single policy instrument can resolve the problem. External cooperation agreements, however ambitious, remain vulnerable to geopolitical shifts; internal enforcement mechanisms are constrained by law and human rights standards; and political consensus across Member States is elusive.
Against this backdrop, community fora stand out not as a panacea but as a functional, adaptable, and normatively sound tool. By fostering identity management, rights awareness, and constructive integration, they provide tangible governance capacity where grand strategies falter. Crucially, they help prevent the erosion of dignity and social cohesion that accompanies prolonged non-removability.
In practice, fora can operate at multiple levels: locally, by engaging municipalities, migrant communities, and service providers in pragmatic dialogue; nationally, by informing policymakers of ground-level realities; and transnationally, by linking with fora in countries of origin, where feasible, to support dignified return and reintegration.
As the Union and its Member States grapple with recurring migration challenges, the recognition of fora as legitimate instruments of resilience, integration, and crisis preparedness may represent not only a pragmatic response but also a step towards a more coherent and humane European migration governance.