The stalemate: Motivational interviewing at a carceral junction

Abstract

This study explores the use of motivational interviews to make non-compliant rejected migrants (‘rejecteers’) return. The study is based on qualitative data from field visits in accommodation centres for rejecteers (‘departure centres’) and from interviews with rejecteers and with the police interviewers conducting the interviews. A thematic analysis showed that these interviews differ from similar dialogue techniques by confronting the interviewees with their situation as seen by the state, in turn eliciting negotiations of belonging and borderwork in the form of repeated rejections. The motivational interviews fail to convince rejecteers that return is viable, especially because they reduce the complicated social situation of rejecteers to a need for responsibilisation. Rather than changing the spatial imaginaries of rejecteers, these motivational interviews block dialogue and engender incomprehension, demotivation and frustration on both sides of the table. In lieu of solving the problem of return, the main function of the motivational interviews is to be spectacles of enforcement that serve to individualise responsibility and to absolve the state of the responsibility for the social problems of ‘rejecteers’.

Keywords

Rejecteers unwanted migrants return motivational interviews borderwork responsibilisation spectacle of enforcement

Introduction: Motivational interviewing at a carceral junction

Two women encounter each other in a bare, impersonal meeting room on the fringe of the dilapidated barracks repurposed into ‘Departure Centre Sjælsmark’: the police interviewer, Louise assisted by an interpreter, and Malala, an Afghan woman bringing her toddler. They are engaging in a ‘motivational interview’, a bureaucratic technique originating in the field of psychology. Louise informs Malala that her asylum application has been rejected, tells her that she has a duty to comply with her order to leave Denmark and that she may be deported if she does not. Malala explains that leaving would separate her from her husband and child. ‘Why did you have a child in Denmark, when you did not have residence?’¹ Louise asks, rhetorically. Through the interpreter, Malala explains that she was visiting her husband in Denmark and suffered a mental breakdown when she learned that several members of her close family had been killed in an attack back home. She says that she spent the following months in a mental ward and learned of her pregnancy too late for termination. The conversation stops in its tracks. Minutes later, Malala leaves with her child after refusing to sign a form stating that she will comply with her duty to return to her country of origin.

This article draws on extensive data from field visits to Denmark's two departure centres, including 20 qualitative interviews with participants in the mandatory monthly motivational interviews between police employees (7) and ‘rejecteers’ (13). In public debate, departure centre residents are often described as either criminals or rejected asylum seekers. Albeit only a minority of the residents are in fact ex-convicts, many have at some point applied for asylum. However, the term rejected asylum seeker indicates someone with no recognised protection need and only superficial ties to Denmark. Nevertheless, a not inconsiderable portion of my research participants have at some point been accorded refugees status or are individuals such as Malala whose ties to Danish society include close relatives such as children and spouses. Throughout the article, I will be referring to the residents of departure centres as ‘rejecteers’, a term I have coined to diminish misleading connotations and to underscore the agency of migrants at once rejected by the state and themselves rejecting their return order.

The article investigates the micro-level of return policies, namely how these policies are being enacted in motivational interviews conducted by the front workers responsible for motivating return, and how they are received, renegotiated or rejected by their target population. I argue that both rejecteers and police interviewers feel ‘stalemate’. In chess, a piece is stalemate when there are no legal moves available. The metaphor was used by the rejecteer Davoud to describe the nature of the stuckness experienced by rejecteers in their everyday life at the departure centres as well as during the motivational interviews. Rejecteers feel stuck because they are refused access to the place where they believe they would be able to make a life. Police interviewers feel stuck because most rejecteers continue to refuse to comply with their return orders despite the interviewers’ efforts to motivate return.

Police interviewers react by downscaling the expectations of their own professional performance, and by assigning blame ‘downwards’ to rejecteers and ‘upwards’ to policymakers and those responsible for making return agreements with the home states of rejecteers. Faced with the recalcitrance of rejecteers, the meaning ascribed to the motivational interview slides from the instrumental legitimation of inducing return to the symbolic performance of ‘borderwork’, ritual enactments of state sovereignty. By subjecting rejecteers to an individualising and responsibilising interview technique, attention is diverted from external return barriers (such as family bonds or mistakes in the assessment of protection need) to internal ones (such as lack of motivation). Thereby, the interviews immoralise the resistance of rejecteers and legitimise further sanctions by framing them as ‘unwilling’ (rather than for instance ‘unable’) to conform to desired behaviours of self-governing non-citizens.

The study is guided by an interest in policy enactment at the street level of a comprehensive welfare state, and in how people encountering each other in bureaucratic settings are being shaped into particular kinds of subjects by the structures that frame their interaction. The paper conceptualises the departure centre and the interview room as ‘carceral junctions’, places where mobile migrant bodies find themselves ‘dammed’ by barriers set up by migration policy and management. Junctions are decision points (Lynch, 1960), and the stated purpose of the motivational interview is to make the rejecteer decide to choose the path leading to their ‘home-country’. The paper explores which movements or blockages are created and recreated during the motivational interviews.

The paper will proceed as follows: In the next section, I sketch the context of the Danish asylum system and the problem of return (cf. Noll, 1999). After that, I present the paper's theoretical outset in governmentality studies (Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1977; Gill, 2009; Karlsen and Villadsen, 2008; Whyte, 2011) and inspiration from urban planning (Lynch, 1960) and carceral geography (Moran et al., 2016; Moran and Schliehe, 2017). Then, I analyse the interview experiences of police interviewers and rejecteers and discuss the effects of motivational interviews at the local and societal levels. I find that both rejecteers and the police employees responsible for conducting these interviews experience them as unable to align the spatial imaginaries of rejecteers with those of the state. Instead, the motivational interviews can be observed to generate feelings of being stuck, frustration, conflict and demotivation, both among employees and among rejecteers. At the societal level, these interviews function as spectacles of enforcement, individualising responsibility and legitimising the confinement and possible deportation of rejecteers.

Background: Rejecteer in the Danish asylum system

The motivational interviews under investigation here took place inside two accommodation centres run by the Danish Prison and Probation Service between 2016 and 2020. The police interviewers were either officers from the national police unit responsible for deportations (the NUC) or administrative temporary workers hired in for the task by this unit.

The motivational interviews are situated encounters proper to a particular kind of camp. Unlike the ordinary accommodation centres for asylum seekers (see Odgaard, 2022) and the migrant detention facility (see Lindberg, 2022), Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård departure centres were designed specifically to communicate to rejecteers that they have overstayed their welcome. Concentrating ‘aliens in exit position’ in specialized accommodation centres also facilitated a targeted use of ‘motivation enhancement measures’ intended to spur departures, such as report duty and a ban on cooking.

The departure centres are carceral in the sense of being specific spatial configurations intended – and experienced – to be detrimental to their residents (Moran et al., 2018). With regard to those rejecteers who are treated as unable to leave, several humanitarian watchdogs have criticised the location of Kærshovedgård for infringing on the lives of residents to a degree reminiscent of illegal detention because of its remote location (Den Danske Helsinki-Komité for Menneskerettigheder, 2017: 5).

The departure centre concentrates rejecteers in a space of surveillance where their movements are monitored through a report duty and through systems of biometric access control. Personal key cards which the residents operate using their fingerprints allow authorities to track their whereabouts. Rejecteers can leave the centre during the day, but must spend the night at the centre, report to the police three to five times a week and participate in monthly motivational interviews. Failing to comply with these rules is in violation of the Danish Alien's Act and – since 2019 in some cases – of the criminal code (Act 174, 27/02/2019, 143) and punishable by imprisonment.

The institution of the departure centres is grounded in the national logic that allows a state to expel and deport a non-citizen to his or her ‘proper place’ in the national order of things (Malkki, 1992) if there are no obstacles under international law to the individual's return. However, rejecteers do not always see eye to eye with the state on the issue of where they rightfully belong. Some disagree with the Danish authorities’ assessment of their protection need, others would be separated from their children if they left, or do not know how they would provide for them back ‘home’. Even migrants who are willing to comply with their return order can get stuck betwixt and between nations, e.g. if their nationality cannot be established or if their country of origin refuses to acknowledge and receive them.

The appeal of any return scheme depends on returnees’ spatial imaginaries including their sense of possible futures (regular or irregular) in Denmark and beyond (Whyte and Hirslund, 2013: 11). Reviewing the literature on return migration and return migration policies, Scalettaris and Gubert (2018) identify some of the key barriers for obtaining compliance in return migration schemes. For returnees, the decision to return often stems not from any intrinsic motivation to return but from the desire to avoid even less attractive alternatives such as forced return or indefinite detention. Indeed, returnees often face situations worse than those that originally made them decide to leave (Scalettaris and Gubert, 2018: 2; Schuster and Majidi, 2013).

Returnees’ countries of origin may in turn dispute being ‘home’ to specific individuals or groups (Black, 2002: 127), or fear detrimental effects of deportations such as a decline in remittances or an incline in internal political tensions (Lemberg-Pedersen et al., 2013). In general, the imbalances in power and interests between the rejecteer, the country of residence, the country of origin, and non-state actors involved in return engender relations fraught with mistrust (Blitz et al., 2005; Scalettaris and Gubert, 2018: 5).

Theory: Moving camps

This paper applies a governmentality approach (Dean, 2010; Foucault, 2007; Rose and Miller, 1992) to motivational interviews, enriched by selected concepts from geography and city planning. The study is guided by an interest in policy enactment at the practice level, and, specifically, in how people encountering each other at the frontline of the welfare state are shaped into particular kinds of subjects by these encounters and the structures that frame them.

Questions about power and agency are central to this kind of enquiry. For governmentality scholars, ‘government’ – or conduct-of-conduct – is any more or less calculated attempt to shape aspects of human behaviour, according to specific norms and for various ends (Dean, 2010: 18). This study conceptualises the motivational interview as a dialogue-based ‘governmental technique’, which structures the actions and reactions of interviewee and interviewer alike (see also Karlsen and Villadsen, 2008).

As in the governmental apparatuses studied by Foucault (1977), the spatial strategy of placing rejecteers in departure centres makes them available for targeted interventions attempting to shape their will, identity and future actions (cf. Malkki, 1995). The concept of the carceral junction intends to convey that refugee camps and detention centres are at once spaces of confinement and junctions that connect and enable particular forms of mobility. We assume that people are moved when encountering carceral junctions, although not necessarily in the way or direction officially intended by the policy.

Junctions are decision points (Lynch, 1960: 57). However, carceral junctions make for restrained decisions such as those described by Dunn and Cons (2014) as ‘burdened agency’. Rejecteers make decisions and choices under complex conditions and enormous restraints. Their decisions on where to go are influenced by spatial imaginaries (Parker in Cooper and Tinning, 2019) that depict some areas as open and liveable and some as closed or even dangerous. Lynch (1960) pointed out that space can be introvert or extrovert. From the point of view of asylum authorities, the problem is that rejecteers perceive the space of the departure centre as introvert, without a clear connection to other spaces, and thereby fail to see the presumably wide-open path to their country of origin. Thus, altering the spatial imaginaries of rejecteers is an important element of motivating them to go and settle in the place where they are imagined to belong.

Framing the existence of rejecteers as a problem of will has led policymakers to subject them to mandatory motivational interviews with the police. The purpose of these interviews is to make rejecteers comply with their order to return. Thus motivational interviews in departure centres should be understood as practices of boundary drawing (Lamont and Molnár, 2002) and more specifically as instances of borderwork (Rumford, 2013). They are intended to bring about return by aligning the spatial imaginaries intrinsic to the institutional logic of the asylum system with that of the individual rejecteer by making them accept responsibility for going ‘home’ (cf. Jenkins, 2000).

These motivational interviews inscribe themselves in a trend described by Karlsen and Villadsen (2008) as the recent proliferation of appeals to ‘dialogue’ as a solution to managerial problems in a broad spectrum of welfare state settings. Although motivational police interviews in departure centres do not follow the manual of the certified method Motivational Interviewing (MI) (cf. Miller and Rollnick, 2009; Rollnick and Miller, 1995), their introduction should be understood in the light of the trend that has made MI and similar dialogue techniques among the most widely used frameworks for client-centred dialogues in Scandinavia and beyond (cf. Andersen and Pors, 2019). Using motivational interviews to get rejecteers to align the way they think about their situation with the interest of the host state, makes sense as the practice of MI strives to close ‘the potentially conflictual gap between the symbolic worlds of counsellors and clients’ (Carr, 2010: 236). However, as I will show, making uncertified administrative employees responsible for conducting motivational interviews with rejecteers, policymakers and police management created a practice that differs considerably from the ideals of MI.

Analysis: Governing rejecteers with motivational interviews

In the following four sections, I will analyse the motivational interview as a technique of power to explore how police interviewers and rejecteers in turn are being affected by these structured encounters.

Schismogenetic responsibilisation at the carceral junction

Motivational interviews have more than one purpose. They do not only serve the attempt to make rejecteers change their mind about going ‘home’. They also enable the police to document that the rejecteers have been notified of their return order and maintain their resistance to it over time. Thereby, the interviews serve to constitute rejecteers as the kind of people who are in conscious violation of their legal duties.

The interviews are structured, recurring encounters comprised of two main parts. The first part is ‘serving’ in the legal sense that is presenting the rejecteer with the ‘facts of the case’. For this highly scripted part of the encounter, police interviewers rely on a document listing the information that they are legally² obligated to deliver at the beginning of every motivational interview; this includes notifying the rejecteer of their duty to provide the information required for return and to cooperate in the procurement of necessary travel documents. Furthermore, police interviewers inform rejecteers that these duties stem from the decision of the immigration authorities to refuse residence permit, and relay that non-compliant rejecteers may be forcefully presented at their national embassy and subsequently deported.

The facts that the individual rejecteer is presented with have been produced by asylum bureaucrats during and following previous encounters between the rejecteer and the Danish asylum system (cf. Fassin, 2013; Jubany, 2011). They are the product of complex negotiations that use the self-presentation of the individual rejecteer to accord or deny him or her status as someone who has a valid claim to belong in Denmark. Therefore, the opening statements of police interviewers reiterate the contested definitions of the situation and identity of the rejecteer and warn rejecteers of possible violence to come if they remain non-compliant. Rejecteers describe their reactions to both of these messages as feeling distraught, bereft of hope and at times defiant. To Babak, an elderly man who suffers from opioid addiction and severe respiratory problems, the police interviews serve as dispiriting monthly reminders of the six-hour interview after which he lost his Danish residency 7 years before. Babak, who suffered severe withdrawal symptoms during this interview feels like he failed it because he had words with a police officer called Jeremy. When I first met Babak in 2017, he had apologised to Jeremy repeatedly and unsuccessfully, in the hope to be able to leave the asylum system and spend his last years in Denmark with his children and grandchildren.

The priority is given to presenting the facts as one would serve a sentence or a court order adheres to the legal tradition pertinent to the police context. At the level of practice, it affects the outcome of the motivational interview in two ways. First, it makes them repetitious and gives them a ritual air. Second, due to their prefatory character, the mandatory information becomes frame-setting for the entire motivational interview encounter. To understand the reaction of rejecteers, one must acknowledge that the facts of the case as presented by the police are fundamentally at odds with how many rejecteers understand their situation and status. Therefore, the demands of compliance that appear reasonable and safe given the framing of the logic of the asylum system often appear radically different to those of whom they are made.

I met Bashir in Kærshovedgård Departure Centre in December of 2018. I asked him what living there was like, and he told me that it was bad. Like most of the residents of Kærshovedgård, I have spoken to during my visits, Bashir felt bereft of his individuality and humanity and treated as a member of a criminal group of individuals in the centre. During the motivational interviews, Bashir felt that the interviewers’ indifference to his individual situation and unwillingness to listen made them overlook that he had already contacted the embassy of his country of origin to apply for travel documents:

At my latest interview with the police, they told me ‘you need to go to your embassy’. But I have already been there. I have obtained the papers and now the government of my country knows about my family (Bashir, rejecteer).

To Bashir, the fact that the police ritually repeated the instruction to contact his embassy without acknowledging or even noticing that he already did, contrasts starkly with his own feeling of having exposed himself and his family to danger by doing so.

Bashir's words demonstrate how differing spatial imaginaries contain different definitions of the rejecteers’ situation and relation to their country of origin. If his government is indeed malicious, alerting the embassy's attention to the fact that Bashir has applied for asylum in Denmark would put him and his family at risk. Conversely, if the Danish authorities are right in assessing that Bashir does not have a protection need, going to the embassy is likely to be safe. To assume that it is, demands a level of trust in both governments that Bashir does not possess. This divide in the spatial imaginaries of the parties tends to make the motivational interviews schismogenetic (Bateson, 1935) in the sense that they deepen the schism between the rejecteers and police interviewers, rather than forming an alliance between them for the purpose of enhancing readiness for change by helping rejecteers explore and resolve ambivalence (Hettema et al., 2005).

Fostering motivation, negotiating belonging

During the second part of the motivational interview, the encounter switches gear from the formalised and legalistic exchange described above to a more open and fluid conversation, which is supposed to foster motivation. Ultimately, police interviewers are to induce return by making rejecteers see and accept that they are people who belong in a specific place in the national order of things. Thus, the task of the interviewer is to activate rejecteers’ true nationality and make them assume responsibility for aligning their spatial behaviour to it.

Police interviewers are largely left to their own devices regarding how to foster motivation for return. Most of my interviewees had no therapeutic training to speak of and none were certified in MI. One of the temporary workers who had some knowledge of motivational dialogue techniques from previous training told me that ‘what we are doing here has nothing to do with that’. She explained that a therapist who wants to nurture motivation for change must ‘find the seed inside the client’ and build on that rather than confronting the client with an extrinsic demand for change. In her experience, in the case of rejecteers, this intrinsic motivation was simply nowhere to be found.

In the absence of intrinsic motivation, police interviewers attempt to make rejecteers comply with their obligation to return by presenting them with moral imaginaries of belonging intended to responsibilise them, e.g. by asking ‘who is going to take care of your elderly parents if you are not there?’ By this, they attempt to translate return into a problem of duty to family, something which police perceive rejecteers as susceptible to because of their perceived collectivistic cultural origin. Paradoxically, rejecteers often desire to succeed in their migratory project precisely because this will enable them to succeed in the eyes of their families back home, not to mention repay their debts and provide for them through remittances.

Police interviewers engage in liberal borderwork in the sense that they enact a border in the hope that the rejecteer will respect it. They attempt to govern the rejecteers’ sense of belonging in Denmark at-a-distance by presenting them for spatial imaginaries depicting Denmark as closed off to them while presenting their ‘home-countries’ as places where they will be able to build a life. For instance, one police interviewer described attempting to ‘prime’ rejecteers by evoking the prospect of a ‘normal life’: making your own money, starting a family, studying and socialising with friends. By this, some police interviewers seek to translate return into a problem of self-care. Other police interviewers limit themselves to refusing responsibility for the rejecteers’ situation by confronting them with their personal responsibility and the need to make a decision.

Whether the police interviewer chooses the former tactic of seeking to direct rejecteers’ aspirations towards the ‘home-country’ or that of re-enacting the border, the spatial movement they seek to engender relies on the willingness of rejecteers to accept this narrative's inbuilt claims about their own safety, identity and belonging. Either way, the spatial imaginary presented by police interviewers is one where the only open road leading out of the carceral junction leads to the ‘home-country’ and thereby to a restored national order of things (cf. Malkki, 1995). However, as Bashir's example illustrated, this view on them and their situations is largely contested by the rejecteers themselves. Hence, most refuse to sign the compliance form and engage in other acts of resistance such as refusing to partake in the dialogue or attempting to renegotiate their status and claim to belong in Denmark.

The interview with Malala described in the introduction to this paper, exemplifies the tendency of the motivational interviews to call forth accounts of belonging, while simultaneously rendering them irrelevant. By presenting herself as someone who is married to and has a child with a Danish resident but who applied for asylum because of tragic and violent events in her country of origin, Malala projects a front that entails negotiating a claim of belonging in Denmark based on family ties as well as protection needs. The police interviewer Louise reacts to this status claim by attempting to make Malala assume responsibility for having chosen to have a child in a country where she had no legal claim to stay, and for the consequences of this choice for her family life. This makes their exchange exemplary of the attempt to mould rejecteers into agents who are responsible for their own situation, thereby absolving the Danish state and its street-level representative of responsibility for splitting their family. At the carceral junction, Malala is faced with a choice between two flawed options. Whether she leaves her child behind or brings it with her to an uncertain future in Afghanistan, she will be blameworthy.

The encounter also highlights some of the defining features of the motivational interviews. They rely on the spatial imaginary of a ‘national order’, which has the effect of pathologising and criminalising refugees (Arendt cited in Malkki, 1992: 502) and other mobile populations. Violating this order has opened Malala to attacks from the borderworkers entrusted with its maintenance. In this respect, the motivational interviews become legible as a bureaucratic ritual that renders rejecteers visible as people who are legally and morally obliged to go ‘home where they belong’, yet do not want to for illegitimate reasons. Unlike the moral demands traditionally made of the poor to control the size of their family, the critique of Malala's choice not to terminate her pregnancy is grounded in the illegality of her binational family and not in her financial inability to support a child. By asking ‘why did you have a child in Denmark, when you did not have residency?’ the interviewer Louise ritually assigns the responsibility for violating her family's unity to Malala herself.

Rejecteer at the carceral junction

The rejecteers whom I have met during my field visits to Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård departure centres have actively attempted to leave these carceral junctions, albeit in most cases not for the place intended by return policies. Some, such as Babak, Tesfay, and Adil, fought legally – and successfully – to be able to stay in Denmark. Others such as Bashir, Karim, Dhakiya, Peros, and Davoud left or planned to leave for another country in the Global North, mostly but not always without success. After a detour to Germany, Adnan eventually gave up and went to his country of origin, because he feared being Dublin transferred to a closed camp in the Czech Republic. Ekaterina and her family of four also intended to return to the former Soviet Union member state from whence they came to avoid deportation and a 10-year ban on EU re-entry. Both Ekaterina and Adnan were planning to go to a different city than the one they came from to lie low and return to the EU at the earliest opportunity. Finally, rejecteers like Jamilla were in too much physical or emotional pain to be able to move at all.

The fact that rejecteers are free to leave the departure centre anytime they want allows them to go anywhere as long as they are not stopped at the border and have the money to pay their way. This strategic permeability of the camp made Davoud conclude that the departure centre is more effective than it is made out to be:

I see it is effective. I see many people try to leave here. They leave to go underground. It is a solution. No, it is a painkiller, not a solution (Davoud, rejecteer, Kærshovedgård).

Besides their common perception of being unable to go home, rejecteers can be stuck in place for a number of reasons. Some of those who refuse other destinations than Denmark do so because they – like Malala – are bound by the love of family members whom they would be leaving behind. Others have no idea of how they would make it in the country they left many years ago. That is the case for Jamilla who is the mother of two children. She arrived in Denmark over a decade ago, when her eldest child was two years old. After 12 years in the Danish asylum system, the family has been placed in the Sjælsmark departure centre. Jamilla has been hospitalised on several occasions on account of mental problems and suicide attempts, and the municipality is concerned about the situation of their children. I asked Jamilla if she saw a way out of her situation:

I do not know Iraq after 15 years in Denmark. But I do know it is not a safe country. A lot of people from Sjælsmark go to other countries, such as Germany, but I think they are being sent back (Jamilla, rejecteer, Sjælsmark).

In Jamilla's description, the space of the departure centre appears introvert (cf. Lynch, 1960). Her experience of being stuck in a place with no visible way out was shared by many rejecteers. At best, they harboured a feeble hope that their latest exit strategy would work out, at worst despair led rejecteers such as Jamilla to attempt suicide and her 9-year-old daughter Noor to threaten the same.

Every rejecteer had their own story and their own reasons to stick to Denmark or to attempt to travel on. Some, such as Peros and Dhakiya, never intended Denmark to be their destination in the first place. They had been caught in transit and had their fingerprint taken by the Danish police, effectively preventing them from seeking asylum in the countries where members of their family already resided:

Why stop me only to place me here in Kærshovedgård? All I wanted was to go to [neighbouring country] (Peros, rejecteer, Kærshovedgård).

One day Peros was frustrated after being on the phone with his lawyer who told him off for calling too often and left Kærshovedgård. He made it to the neighbouring country where his family lived and applied for asylum there. When that country decided to send him back to Denmark, Peros went underground, but was eventually intercepted by the traffic police and returned to Kærshovedgård.

Likewise, several of my interlocutors had tried to make it to the United Kingdom. Some had returned because they lost momentum faced with the hardships of getting there, others had been apprehended and returned by authorities of other European states enforcing the Dublin III regulation. Unlike most of the young men I met who had tried and given up, Dhakiya, was able to reach the UK because she had the resources to pay her way via a less fatiguing and dangerous route.

Some rejecteers, such as Davoud whom I met during my first visit to Kærshovedgård Departure Centre, felt that the motivational interviews were adding insult to injury. Like most of my interlocutors, Davoud was actively trying to leave Denmark, albeit in a legal way. He framed moving on as a matter of moral duty, and underscored his right to decide for himself:

If I stay here, I will not be doing my duty in life. So, I send my documents to apply for a green card in Sweden. Denmark has had my documents for two years, but Sweden approved them after three months. They say I can come and take a language exam. No problem for me. It is no problem for me, I am experienced in my field. Denmark told me my papers needed to be send to the US for approval. Now the problem is that I have no travel documents so I cannot go to Sweden. What is it called in Chess, when you are being locked in a position because you are unable to move anywhere? […]

I apply for asylum and you say ‘go to your country’. So indirectly, you say I am a liar. It is your right: You decide for your country. But this is my right: I decide for my life (Davoud, rejecteer, Kærshovedgård).

I look it up afterwards and the word Davoud was looking for is stalemate.

Not everyone wanted to leave, though. Adil, for his part, had managed to learn Danish and establish an extensive and supportive social network of Danish people. He also had a lawyer who appealed the rejection of his asylum application with careful optimism. In combination, the hope of success in the appeals process and his reluctance to start over the strenuous integration process in a new country made him stay put.

Amir and his family of five also refused to go anywhere. He found me via social media where he was campaigning for residence for his family and invited me to visit. Amir had had asylum in Denmark, but lost it after remigration to his country of origin. When he returned with his family years later and applied for asylum anew, they were rejected. I revisited the family in Sjælsmark Departure Centre a year after our first meeting. Amir and his wife Sohaila picked me up at the gate on their way to their motivational interview and left me in their room to play Ludo with 5-year-old Malek. After less than half an hour, Amir and Sohaila came back. I asked Amir what happened at the interview, and he summarised it as follows:

The police said, ‘You have rejection, you must go home’. I said, ‘I have lots of problems’. The police said, ‘they are not my problems. If you do not leave you will be deported by force’

Our neighbours Zoran and Jamilla were picked up two days ago. At 5.24 in the morning, two cars arrived with police and a translator. Today, at the interview the police said, ‘this is my home, leave, you are guests’. I said ‘No, this is my country. It is our place too’. (Amir, rejecteer, Kærshovedgård)

Amir's insistence on belonging in Denmark seems bolstered by the fact that he has previously been afforded refugee status by Denmark. He contests the conclusion drawn by Danish authorities that his year-long repatriation indicates that he does not have a protection need. According to Amir, he was under the protection of a general who has now been killed.

Two of my other rejecteer interlocutors, Babak and Tesfay, shared Amir's experience of obtaining asylum in Denmark and losing it. Babak had built a life in Denmark but lost his residence permit after returning to his country of origin to care for his dying mother. Tesfay, a recent refugee from Eritrea had been involved in some kind of bar brawl and had been sent to Kærshovedgård because he received a deportation sentence on top of a criminal sentence. Both Babak and Tesfay eventually reobtained their Danish residence permit, Babak because of his medical needs and Tesfay because the crime of which he had been convicted was eventually deemed too minor to be proportional with deportation. Among my interlocutors were also more women such as Malala who either lost their residence permit or never had one. For them, as for the elderly Babak, leaving Denmark would mean separation from their children.

Whether they tried to move on or not, the odds were stacked against the rejecteers. To get out of the carceral junction they needed not only resources but also luck, and the strength to continue to carry on in the face of adversity. For most, the best they could hope for was for Denmark to reconsider their case or for their prints to be lost affording them another chance of asylum would come about.

While police interviewers were often hyper-aware of the emptiness of the threats of deportation and perceived most rejecteers as unmoved by the interviews, their powerlessness was less obvious to the rejecteers, who often described being angered, saddened or stressed out by the motivational interviews. I arranged to visit Karim on the day of his interview to talk about how it affected his family:

My wife did not sleep last night for worry. […] They want us to sign the papers but I told them that we already applied with an organization to go somewhere else through their sponsorship. The police interviews are so bad, so stressful. For the past seven days I have felt ‘this is my last second being with my family’ I am not a robot I am a human being. […] Our neighbor is a woman with two children. They took her husband to Ellebæk detention centre three weeks ago. He went to a routine interview and they imprisoned him. Because he did not fulfill his report duty one time. It is a new law, they say (Karim, rejecteer, Sjælsmark)

Indeed fathers from Sjælsmark had been detained in order to put pressure on their families to leave. Like Davoud, Karim was working on alternative migration strategies, such as applying for green cards or offshore refugee status in far-away states. In general, the interviews dispirited and demotivated rejecteers regarding their future in Denmark, but they did not in general open their eyes to new possibilities at ‘home’.

Police interviewer at the carceral junction

According to police interviewers, rejecteers in general do not respond well to motivational interviews. In their experience, only a few rejecteers sign the voluntary return form and those who do rarely end up leaving. Of the police interviewers with more than one year of experience, Hannah reports getting a record total of between 8 and 10 rejecteers to sign the consent form. Most of her colleagues report receiving very few signatures and express great frustration with barriers inhibiting return, most of which are outside of their own control.

Police interviewers describe several ways the motivational interviews malfunction. One is the ‘ultra-short’ interview, where the rejecteer refuses to engage in dialogue by offering brief answers to the questions before they are even posed – ‘yes–yes–no-I know-can I go now?’ – and leaves after five minutes. Second, the ‘angry’ interviews during which the rejecteer gets upset, abuses the employee verbally, sometimes throws furniture and storms out. This happens more frequently when the interview is conducted via videolink to Kærshovedgård. Interviewers sometimes interpret such violent reactions as caused by blockages that are out of their own immediate control such as substance abuse or rejecteers’ general frustration with their situation. Finally, as described above, interview dialogue may take a wrong turn because the rejecteer rejects the institutional narrative and renews their claim to belong in Denmark, either stating that they fear persecution at ‘home’ or that they want to remain close to their family in Denmark.

Police interviewers are moved in their own way by the repetitious and largely unfruitful attempts at obtaining the compliance of rejecteers in their own return. Most find the interviews where children are present discomforting. Melanie describes how she copes with these encounters:

I can be pretty detached, even though, emotionally, inside, I think: ‘Shut up! I feel sorry for those little kids!’ Yes, I do. But it is your parents who are making this choice for you (Melanie, Police Interviewer).

Most significantly, a feeling of being ‘stuck’ and unable to move the rejecteers to ‘travel home’ in the prescribed manner is ubiquitous in my interviews with police interviewers. Nell describes her professional development as a motivational interviewer as a process of demotivation:

[at first] we were really up to the mark, because we really thought that we were going to nail this [laughs]. So we tried everything, but funnily enough, you just get stuck. Yourself, at some point, because there is not really more you can do, there are no more angles, you have kind of gone through them all: parents, education, work, money, children [despairingly] (Nell, police interviewer).

The incongruence between the institutional narrative of the asylum system, which she has internalised and the defiant response of rejecteers leaves Nell feeling that the decisions of rejecteers are incomprehensible: ‘I am simply unable to grasp why they can be bothered to sit here and waste their lives’. She describes the response of rejecteers as ‘stagnated’ and interprets it as wilful:

They can come and go at will, and if they slipped through that many countries coming here, they can do it on their way back too. So, I do not know what makes them so demotivated. They are just dead, indolent, and despondent and […] it is hard to have a conversation with them where they say ‘shut up, that is what I am going to do’ (laughs) […] sometimes you come to a standstill […] and you cannot think of a way to go, but then you need to talk to someone, or google, or read some books, do something to get started with the mindset that you want to have, because you are stuck and think ‘God, what on earth am I supposed to do?’ (Nell, police interviewer)

Nell's statement exemplifies how some police interviewers cope with the challenges of their task by shifting responsibility for the situation downwards to the individual rejecteer. This responsibilisation is weaved into the fabric of the individualising interview technique and approaches the presence of rejecteers as a problem of inadequate or misguided self-governance, while wholly ignoring the myriad reasons why life in a Danish departure centre may seem more appealing to rejecteers than return. Nell's description of rejecteers as incomprehensibly ‘indolent’ and despondent’ echoes accounts of the native Other by colonists who, according to Sartre ‘did not understand that the famous “laziness of the native” is a form of sabotage or passive resistance’ (Sartre, 1964: 162).

Another coping strategy of police interviewers consists in shifting responsibility upwards to policymakers and bureaucrats responsible for making agreements with non-compliant ‘home-countries’ such as Iran and Iraq, which refuse to receive involuntary returnees. According to Kirsten such return agreements are not only blocked by a lack of effort from the responsible agencies but also by rival political concerns such as the political self-branding of the then minister of integration, Inger Støjberg:

I would appreciate it if the politicians tried a bit harder to improve the cooperation with the countries … For instance, not displaying the Mohammad-cartoons on your iPad when negotiating with Iran … that is just boneheaded (Kirsten, police interviewer).

Several police interviewers call for expanded coercive powers due to the lack of desired response of rejecteers to the motivational interviews. Melanie argues that the legislation is too soft on the rejecteers:

It is like with children. If you tell them ten times: ‘You are not allowed to do that’, and there are no consequences, nothing happens. […] a lot of people are upset that they are sitting in Kærshovedgård and find it terrible, but I have to say that the motivation lies in tightening those rules. I do not believe that motivational interviews can make a great difference (Melanie, police interviewer).

The main point I would like to make is that the many barriers experienced by police interviewers as preventing the motivational interviews from reaching their stated objective of inducing return, make the interviews slide from the realm of practical rationality to the realm of bureaucratic ritual. Instead of bringing about return, the interviews are carried out to hold rejecteers accountable for not returning and to enable the police to demonstrate that they have tried. This has a negative impact on the motivation of the interviewers. Kirsten has come to see the task as futile:

… the interviews are conducted for the sake of statistics rather than for their own sake. To conduct a monthly interview for people who absolutely do not want to go home – [the interview] is … somehow inconsequential. If you do not get anywhere – and with most people you obviously do not … – but of course you conduct the interview, because you have to … they should find another method for motivating people, because I feel that these interviews are very politically motivated. (Kirsten, police interviewer)

Kirsten's colleague, Molly agrees that police interviewers are stuck and points out that the way the work is organised and the amount of time allocated to each case impede the investigation of the origin and whereabouts of rejecteers that might actually bring about returns.

Faced with the recalcitrance of rejecteers, police officers tend to limit their expectations to a realistic level. For example, Hannah defines a successful interview as one where ‘I got to say what I had to say, got a dialogue going and maybe even got through to them in some way’ (Hannah, police interviewer). The task is simplified by downscaling the criterion of success from making rejecteers ‘go home’ to completing the interview and moving the interviewee to assume responsibility for his or her situation at the moment (cf. Lipsky, 2010) ‘At the personal level, a good interview is one where no one got up and left the room’ (Lisa, police interviewer).

The stuckness of the police creates unanticipated movements as police interviewers and management deal with the sense of being stuck in various ways. It seemed to me that the fact that I was allowed to interview the staff in January 2019, hinged on the desire of the department head to document the futility of the motivational interviews. One of my interviewees decided to retire early because she was fed up with the task; others resigned or sought transfer to other tasks within the police. Only a couple of my interviewees were still active when I revisited their quarters seven months later. The following month, it was decided that the interviews were to be the responsibility of a newly founded ‘Return Agency’ under the Ministry of Integration and Immigration from the summer of 2020.

Discussion: Spectacles of enforcement in the age of responsibilisation

The proliferating detention centres for migrants have attracted increased scholarly attention in recent years (Szczepanikova, 2013). Scholars have argued that this development should be understood as exemplary of larger trends of carcerality and ‘crimmigration’ (Moran et al., 2016: 1; Stumpf, 2006). Besides embodying the desire of states to induce the return of unwanted migrants, departure centres also contribute to the ‘spectacle of enforcement’, which serves to project an image of the state's monopoly of power over its frontiers and non-citizen populations (Mainwaring and Silverman, 2017: 28; Mountz, 2015). Moving non-compliant and often undeportable rejecteers to departure centres enables policymakers to signal control at a time of perceived crisis and to project an image of state law and order, at the cost of increased illegality and precarity (cf. Mainwaring and Silverman, 2017: 30).

The movements spurred by the motivational interviews with rejecteers tend to be affective rather than spatial. As I have shown, neither party experiences the interviews as effective in achieving the aim of making rejecteers decide to comply with their order to travel home. Frequently, the dialogue either carried out in a routinised, non-invested manner or breaks down because the rejecteer refuses to engage or engages in an unintended way.

As a result of this, rejecteers and police interviewers feel stuck, frustrated with each other and most can see no viable way out of the deadlock. In response to this seeming malfunction, the employee insists on the personal responsibility of the rejecteer, while emphasising their own role as messengers rather than decision-makers. Furthermore, the lack of success of the indirect, liberal power technique of the motivational interview lead employees to call for increased coercive powers. They dream of being able to force rejecteers to leave by making return agreements with their countries of origin, thereby effectively abandoning the ideal of voluntary return. Thus, the dysfunctional motivational interviews move police interviewers in a way that is at once a process of demotivation and of hardening themselves to rejecteers.

Some police interviewers distance themselves from the borderwork they have to perform (‘I am just offering them advise, not making the decisions’), others embrace it by arguing in favour of putting up a border, because there are ‘too many of them’, and ‘they’ lack education and would be too expensive and difficult to integrate. These dual movements of demotivation and distancing should be understood as a product of a system for migration management that sets the parties up for failure by asking employees to affect a change in the will of rejecteers by use of an instrument that is neither particularly diligently applied, nor able to respond to the complex social situations of rejecteers.

The question remains why resources are allocated to attempting to manage return migration through the use of motivational interviews, despite their generally assumed inefficiency and the adverse effects on employees and rejecteers documented in this article? Why have police interviewers carry out motivational interviews that do not seem to induce return?

Part of the answer lies in the ability of these interviews to satisfy bureaucratic needs of documenting the will to symbolically enforce the border on one hand and the continued non-compliance of rejecteers on the other hand. The motivational interviews should be understood as recurrent ritual allocation of responsibility that hail rejecteers as individuals responsible for their treatment (recall Louise's question to Malala ‘why did you have a child in Denmark, when you did not have a residence permit?’). The lack of responsiveness to the rejecteer perspective is evident from the fact that even rejecteers who want to leave but cannot prove their nationality are held responsible for their situation during the monthly motivational interview.

The seeming political indifference to the lack of success of the motivational interviews in restoring the national order of things concludes that the main function of the motivational interviews is to be spectacles of migration control. They serve to obscure the complex, individual social situations and global injustices that make the option of ‘going home’ seem less attractive to the individual rejecteer than living in limbo without access to fundamental rights.

What makes the case of the motivational interviews at the Danish departure centres interesting from a governmentality perspective and vice-versa is that it illustrates important aspects of today's (il)liberal government of developing country migrants in the Global North. First, they are practices aiming to (and failing at) change the individual rejecteer by targeting their will. Their failure to do so is accepted because they serve to individualise the problem of return and to legitimise the treatment of people whose main transgression was to have their application for protection rejected by the state. They are spectacles of border control and migration management rather than mere therapeutic devices, although they draw on the figure of the motivational interview that has become a widely used technique in the borderland between technologies of power and technologies of the self.

The refusal of the police and immigration authorities to understand and acknowledge the perspective and complex social situations of rejecteers blocks the interviewers and rejecteers from forging the kind of therapeutic alliance that might allow the exploration of ambivalence and possible change of problem behaviour to which more traditional forms of MI aspire. Rather, as an add-on to the deportation regime, the technique of MI affects both rejecteers and police interviewers, at once demotivating them and pitting them against each other in their mutual attempts at exerting moral pressure on each other.

The differing views of police interviewers on rejecteers and the variety of reactions of police employees and managers to the experience of being stuck show that the state that attempts to assert its position by pressuring rejecteers to leave is not a uniform entity exerting power over migrants. It is comprised of a number of actors with differing interests and viewpoints, who are subjected to different pressures due to the positions they are assigned and who exert their agency within a restricted space of action (Gill, 2009, 2010). Finally, the case of motivational interviews with rejecteers in Danish departure centres provides an example of how the failure of power techniques such as incarceration or deportation continue to be tolerated because they serve other purposes, such as legitimising the illiberal treatment of individuals deemed unfit for a life in freedom (cf. Foucault, 1977).

Conclusion

I have argued that the motivational interviews with rejecteers in departure centres largely fall short of their purpose of inducing return. They do, on the other hand, tend to produce a feeling of being in stalemate that fuels frustration and conflicts between rejecteers and police interviewers. The main practical and symbolical function of the motivational interviews is to constitute police and policymakers as border enforcers while constituting rejecteers as responsible individuals who are able but unwilling to return. Thus, the success of the motivational interviews lies in their ability to legitimise the treatment of rejecteers through recurrent rituals of responsibilisation and rejection. When rejecteers do leave the Danish asylum system they tend to take advantage of the strategic permeability of the open departure centres and travel to other European states where they often apply for asylum anew. While this movement satisfies the desire of Danish authorities to get rid of unwanted migrants, it fails to restore the national order of things (Malkki, 1995), all the while increasing asylum bureaucracy, as well as migrant precarity and illegality.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the study participants and the other contributors to the Carceral Junctions special issue as well as the editors and the anonymous reviewers of Incarceration.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark as part of the Carceral Mobilities Project (CAMP).

ORCID iD

Katrine Syppli Kohl

Notes

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