Governing through non-removability: Return policy, legal liminality and the politics of exclusion in Greece

This article examines the implementation and lived effects of return and readmission (RR) policies in Greece, situating them within the broader European shift toward deterrence and accelerated removal under the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Greece in 2025 – including semi-structured interviews with state officials, non-governmental organization workers, legal practitioners, and migrants, alongside systematic policy document analysis – the analysis reveals that Greece’s RR framework operates as a fragmented and punitive “non-regime.” Despite intensified enforcement rhetoric since early 2025, actual returns remain limited and procedurally inconsistent, producing prolonged legal liminality, socio-economic marginalization and administrative invisibility for non-removable migrants. Rather than passively enduring this condition, migrants seek to navigate it strategically: irregularity and onward movement emerge as rational responses to stalled regularization, institutional opacity, and the absence of integration pathways. Situating these findings within scholarship on non-removability and the “migration fix,” the article argues that enforcement-centered return governance fails to resolve the structural contradictions it is designed to address, and that the persistent gap between enforcement ambitions and implementation realities produces social harms that extend far beyond the narrow logic of “return effectiveness.”