The rise of repatriation: Global South refugees and forerunners of the International Organization for Migration in the long 1970s

Abstract

Contemporary international migration debates have been marked by a confrontation between the requirements of refugee and asylum law, on the one hand, and accusations they are being abused, concerns about illegal and excessive migration, and efforts to reverse migratory flows, on the other. How and when did this state of affairs arise? This article situates the ‘long 1970s’ as a decisive period, focusing on the policy cycle through which both donor state preferences and institutional agency remade the Intergovernmental Committee on European Migration (ICEM), later known as the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The organisation’s transformation from facilitating European emigration to managing refugees in and from the Global South in this period is critical for understanding how migrant repatriation arose as a permanent feature. This article demonstrates how its unique mandate and the growth of both humanitarianism and migration restrictionism led the organisation towards greater concentrations on refugees and then asylum-seeker deportations, contributing to what has become a central tool for migration management today.