Legal and operational infrastructures of Exit regimes targeting irregular migrants in the European Union

The aim of this deliverable is to map, compare and analyze different Exit regimes in EU Member States in order to gain insight into the degree to which Exit is efficient and harmonized across the European Union. Special attention is paid to the degree to which current Exit policies and practices ensure legal safeguards to returnees. Based on our findings, we call on the European Commission to exercise extreme prudence before investing more budgets and committing more personnel to the enhancement of existing measures, like pre-removal detention, that are assumed but not proven to increase the effectiveness of Exit policies. We also recommend the construction of an indicator for evaluating the otherwise vague notion of what constitutes proportional and necessary measures in legislating and implementing Exit regimes. Without such indicator, we risk the withering away of legal safeguards in return and detention procedures in light of evermore restrictive policies that are increasingly punitive in their implications and whose effectiveness is not grounded in empirical evidence.