The Return Rate Is Not an Enforcement Rate: Orders to Leave, Effective Removals, and the North African Margin in European Union Migration Statistics

Öz

The share of return decisions that result in removal, reported as the European Union’s “return rate”, has become the central evidentiary claim of European return policy reform. This article shows that the indicator is not identified. Because both counts are produced by the same authority and the denominator is chosen rather than observed, it recovers only the product of removal capacity and the selectivity of the ordered pool. An accounting model bounds each component and shows that removals are invariant to how many non-removable persons are also ordered. The article therefore contrasts the headline return rate, returns over orders to leave, with an effective removal rate, returns over persons found illegally present, which inherits the detection margin but not the order-issuing margin and is less exposed. The argument is examined using Eurostat enforcement statistics for the six North African citizenships of the former Ottoman space, namely Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Sudan, over 2016–2025. They account for 22.3 per cent of the Union’s orders to leave in 2025 but 9.3 per cent of its removals. The order-issuing margin varies by a factor of up to four and a half within a citizenship and of three across them; under margins the Union operated in other years, the same 2025 removals would have yielded a headline rate between 0.238 and 0.492. Rankings of member states by the two indicators are weakly related, and rounding leaves nearly half of the state-by-citizenship cells undetermined to within ten percentage points.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Return Policy
• Incentives and Performance Measurements
• Partial Identification
• Migration Statistics
• Evolutionary Game Theory
• Administrative Measurement

Kaynakça

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