Facilitated but unauthorised return: the role of smugglers in return migration and clandestine border crossings between Malaysia and Indonesia

ABSTRACT People smuggling is commonly associated with unidirectional movement, that is, procuring entrance from underpriviledged origin and transit countries to more desirable destinations that offer gainful employment and/or safety from human rights abuses. Yet, as we expose here, under certain circumstances migrants also make use of smugglers to return to their home countries. To examine this phenomenon more closely and explore why and under what conditions migrants seek out the services of smugglers in order to return from Malaysia to Indonesia, we have analysed 13 court verdicts and conducted eight interviews with law enforcement personnel responsible for arresting facilitators of unauthorised return migration (‘smugglers’). Our findings show that return smuggling results predominantly from the inadequacy of options for authorised return, which are costly, time-consuming and have punitive elements. Based on these findings we propose a theoretical clustering along four different modes of return. By disentangling the causes that triggered the evolution of facilitated but unauthorised returns we offer new insights into ongoing debates concerning return migration and ‘irregular’ migration. The multi-directional nature of smuggling services between Malaysia and Indonesia thus demands that we take a fresh look at the facilitation–authorisation nexus, particularly the modalities and infrastructures accessible for returning migrants.


Introduction
On 11 August 2020 judges at the Indonesian Batam District Court convicted three people for playing different roles in an operation that resulted in the 'smuggling' of 11 returning Indonesian migrant workers from Malaysia to Indonesia.The convicted 'smugglers' were the organiser, boat captain and boat crew, and they were sentenced to between five and six years in prison and each of them was fined Rp500 million (USD33,760). 1 By contrast, and in line with Law No. 6 of 2011 on Immigration, the returning migrants were treated as 'victims of people smuggling' in the criminal proceedings and were not punished for commiting the crime of entering Indonesia outside an immigration checkpoint (Law No. 6 Article 113), even though they had purchased the services from these convicted men for making the unauthorised border crossing back to Indonesia.This court case was no rarity, with judges at the Batam District Court punishing 'return' smugglers in at least 13 similar cases in the preceding five years. 2  In April 2019 we visited Batam Island and met with actors involved in law enforcement, migrant rights' activism, and with the 'smuggling' itself.The initial purpose was to get a better understanding of the different actors, networks and infrastructures that facilitate what we call 'return smuggling'unauthorised return migration facilitated by non-state actors.During fieldwork we were struck not only by the social acceptance of return smuggling by our interlocutors but also by the widespread view, held even by the police, that the clients/victims of people smuggling had no other viable choice for returning to their home country.Even some of the law enforcement officials in charge of combatting smuggling were rather critical of punishing the 'smugglers' given that the 'victims' had no easy access to legal, non-punitive and fast avenues for returning to Indonesia.According to our respondents, there is a lack of legal ways to return from Malaysia to Indonesia, which points to the main reason why demand for return smuggling exists, particularly for those Indonesian labour migrants whose residence permits and work visas have expired and for those who never held legal authorisation to work and reside in Malaysia in the first place.Given that an estimated two million Indonesian labour migrants are categorised as 'undocumented' or 'irregular' in Malaysia, the significance of having limited legal pathways for returning home is striking.Our study scrutinises the demand for 'return smuggling' from Malaysia to Indonesia and suggests that policy and scholarly attention needs to be paid to the topic in other migration corridors.
The question at the core of this paper is: Why is there a need for citizens to be 'smuggled' into their own country?The UN Smuggling Protocol defines people smuggling as criminal activity that procures entry into a country where migrants are not citizens or permanent residents.The protocol definition does not refer to either 'country of origin' or 'home country', so our example is not technically 'smuggling' according to international law.We argue, however, that the actors and networks that enable 'return smuggling' share much in common with the infrastructure that facilitates 'smuggling' as defined in the Protocol.In scholarly terms, 'smuggling' is 'understood as a transnational service industry linking service providers (human smugglers) with their clients (smuggled migrants), independent of directionality' (Bilger, Hofmann, and Jandl 2006).It is an unlawful response to the fact that legal options for border-crossings are limited.The broader smuggling literature cites many examples from various geographic contexts of how the prevalence of the crime is due partly to limited support for refugees to leave their countries of origin to seek asylum and to insufficient legal pathways for migrant workers to move to a destination country and live and work legally there (e.g.Andersson 2016;Costello 2018).In the last decade a growing body of literature has sought to refute the demonisation of smugglers (Achilli 2015 and2018;Zhang, Sanchez, and Achilli 2018;Sanchez and Zhang 2018;Missbach 2022) but has met with limited success.
For our deliberations we draw on a combination of materials and methods to explore the necessity of 'return smuggling'.Our dataset of 13 verdicts reveals that the Indonesian legal system has punished individuals involved in the 'smuggling' of return migrants from the southeast coast of Peninsular Malaysia to the Indonesian island of Batam in Riau Islands province.We conducted eight in-depth interviews with self-declared former smugglers as well as with a range of stakeholders involved in combatting 'return smuggling', including a police investigator, public prosecutor and civil society actors.In May 2022 we also surveyed online news reports of 'return smuggling' from Malaysia to Indonesia, using the official term for the migrants, 3 revealing that it occurs in at least three other provinces neighbouring Malaysia (North Sumatra, West Kalimantan and North Kalimantan).The new reports showed that relatively large numbers of returnees used the services of 'smugglers' following the closure of international borders during the COVID-19 pandemic as the need to return quickly to countries of origin grew.In our location alone there were 427 returnees in the first few months of the pandemic (Sucipto 2020).The actual number is likely to be much higher because only 'victims' whose returns were detected by authorities are counted.
The remainder of this article is in four parts.First we explain why this 'return smuggling' industry developed, by paying attention to features of the Malaysia-Indonesia corridor, which is one of the busiest in the world (Spaan and van Naerssen 2018).We chose the narrow sea border between the Indonesian island of Batam and the southwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia as the empirical site for our study of returning migrants principally because of the high prevalence of return smuggling.Second, we sketch out how return smuggling functions, using our findings from the court verdicts, and indicate the future need for empirical research to expand on the limited information on infrastructures contained in the verdict.Third, we introduce a schematic model for returns, which situates the category under scrutinity here: facilitated but unauthorised return.Fourth, the paper offers an explanation for why policy and academic literature has overlooked the phenomenon of 'return smuggling' so far, despite the high prevalence of 'return smuggling' in the Indonesian-Malaysian context.We end this paper by offering a number of suggestions for follow-up research on return smuggling, which are grounded in our aforementioned criticism and could create the basis for future comparision between outbound and return smuggling.
Our starting point is that migrants are active and cognisant people who can weigh up the costs and benefits of their potential return.The wish or the need to return arose for very different reasons; for example, when they had earned enough, when there were family emergencies or care obligations, and for special holidays, such as Idul Fitri.Like outgoing migrants, return migrants are influenced by their social networks and also restricted by spatial, socio-cultural, economic and political factors (Spaan and van Naerssen 2018).By drawing attention to unfeasible and inept aspects of the existing migration laws in the Malaysian-Indonesian context, we offer explanations for why people feel compelled to circumnavigate these rules, leading to a trend that alarmed the Indonesian government during the COVID-19 pandemic so much that they set up special taskforces that conducted health checks for those Indonesians suspected of having returned irregularly (Sucipto 2020).

Irregular labour migration between Indonesia and Malaysia
What makes contemporary labour migration from Indonesia to Malaysia special is that it is exclusively regulated by temporary contracts and premised on migrants' return to their home country, which has long been the norm in the Asian context (Castles 2004).Permanent residency for labour migrants or even their naturalisation is deemed politically undesirable in both the receiving and the sending countries.The topic of temporary labour migration is well-researched, both in regard to 'regular' and 'irregular' movement (Arifianto 2009;Ford and Lyons 2011;Jones 2000;Kaur 2005;Lindquist 2013;McNevin 2014;Spaan and van Naerssen 2018).Authors have explored the terrain with the help of micro-analytical studies and also with meso-and macro-political analyses (Killias 2018;Palmer 2016).While most of the existing literature has focused on departures of labour migrants from Indonesia, we direct the attention to what Johan Lindquist (2013, 137) calls their 'return home' through an examination of various return options, including the bilateral repatriation and deportation schemes from Malaysia to Indonesia, sometimes dubbed as counter-trafficking initiatives (Ford and Lyons 2013).To existing scholarship, we contribute an in-depth study of unauthorised but facilitated returns, which remain empirically understudied and undertheorised.Since return migration cannot be fully understood without referring to pre-occuring movements, we need to examine the earlier outbound migration from Indonesia to Malaysia.
As part of growing global concern about irregular migration as a human security issue, the Malaysian government sought to regularise unauthorised migration in the early 1980s, so that the state had records of who had entered the country (Palmer 2016).The need for a formal system to regularise labour migration gave way to a highly-specialized migration industry.This, however, also raised the cost of migration and lengthened the time between recruitment and the actual uptake of employment (Chan 2018;Killias 2010 and2018;Lindquist 2010Lindquist , 2012Lindquist , 2018aLindquist and 2018b)).As intended, increasing numbers of Indonesian migrant workers crossed the Indonesia-Malaysia border using commercial transport through immigration checkpoints (Spaan 1994).That trend was further compounded when air travel became significantly cheaper as a result of competition among low-cost airlines such as AirAsia (Hirsh 2017).At the same time access to government services that enabled 'regular' international travel improved; for example, it became easier to organise Indonesian passports (Palmer 2016).By 2010 'it was nearly impossible to find brokers or migrants who were interested in sending or being sent to Malaysia without a passport' (Lindquist 2012, 72 fn 3).Between 2009 and 2011, however, the number of domestic workers entering Malaysia irregularly increased again because the government of Indonesia had imposed a unilateral ban on processing their migration requests following high-profile cases of physical abuse of Indonesian domestic workers (Meilinda 2017).
In times of economic growth, Malaysia tends to be more lenient vis-à-vis irregular labour migration and violation of its migration laws.However, in times of economic slow-down, Malaysia often seeks to quickly dispose of unwanted/unneeded labour migrants, particularly those who live and work in irregular situations.Foreign labour migrants, both 'regular' and 'irregular', are an integral part of Malaysia's labour market as that nation's economy has been transformed from one based on agriculture and manufacturing 'to a global hub for technology, property development and services' (Muniandy 2020(Muniandy , 2297)).Long-term observers have noticed that the treatment of migrants living and working in irregular situations transformed over time from a 'policy of toleration to one that considers them a security threat against Malaysian society', despite the significant economic and social benefits that they provide (e.g.Arifianto 2009, 613).As part of the swing towards treating 'irregular' migrants as a security threat, in 1997 the Malaysian government introduced corporal punishment for repeat offenders who had returned to live and work without valid paperwork, extending that punishment five years later to first-time offenders (Juliawan 2018).But, while Amnesty International (2010) criticises the punishment for being cruel and likens it to judicial torture, it should be noted that these cruel laws are not enforced with the same rigour all the time.
While this flexible approach to governing and utilising irregular migrant labour generally serves the needs of the Malaysian economy, it is not matched by any set of Malaysian policies that facilitate easy and non-punitive return of migrant workers to Indonesia.As mentioned earlier, the number of Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia is very high, chiefly because of the dearth of gainful employment for low-skilled workers in Indonesia.In 2016, a World Bank report estimated there were 2.4 million Indonesians working 'illegally' in Malaysia (World Bank 2017, 28).Moreover, 61 per cent of Indonesian women employed as domestic workers were undocumented (World Bank 2017, 32).For them, buying a cheap airplane or ferry ticket to return to Indonesia is not a feasible option, as they would immediately face arrest and punishment such as detention, fines and whipping, for breaking immigration law when they attempted to clear emigration in Malaysia.They can choose from only two authorised return options made available by the statedeportation or repatriation.We discuss these in the following paragraphs to show how they work and we highlight why they are not attractive methods for returning to Indonesia and why there is significant demand for return facilitated by 'smugglers'.
The first option is deportation.Between 1989 and 2020 the Malaysian government reported that it had deported over 2.5 million migrant workers (Low 2021, 357). 4Deportation is usually preceeded by corporal punishment and always involves arbitrary detention in government facilities.The Global Detention Project (2018) criticised official detention facilities for being overcrowded and unhygienic, regularly causing the death of detaineesa high-profile incident is documented in a recent Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs update (Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2022).During the 2020 pandemic, migrants awaiting deportation were usually held for between three and six months in immigration dentention facilites while Malaysian authorities arranged their return (Koalisi Buruh Migran Berdaulat 2022, 16).Between January 2021 and June 2022, 149 Indonesians are reported to have died in the facilities while awaiting deportation (Koalisi Buruh Migran Berdaulat 2022).In another report that focused on conditions at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, some deportees reported that waiting times were extended for up to two months as the Malaysian and Indonesian governments prioritised responding to the growing public health emergency (Koalisi Buruh Migran Berdaulat 2020).The risk of not surviving detention makes this return option very unattractive to irregular migrants.
There is additional waiting time in Indonesia, where the government arranges the onward travel for deported labour migrants to their cities/provinces of origin.Indonesian officials often allege that their Malaysian counterparts do not sufficiently forewarn them of impending deportations so they can coordinate the safe return of their citizens (Palmer 2016).The Malaysian government disputes this.In an event referred to as the Nunukan Tragedy in 2002, almost 70 deportees died in makeshift government facilities in Nunukan in northern Kalimantan, while waiting for the Indonesian government to move them to their final destinations on other Indonesian islands after Malaysia deported over 400,000 irregular migrant workers (Tirtosudarmo 2004).In our fieldwork location the Indonesian government leased the building of a licensed recruitment company to accommodate deportees before transporting them on governmentowned sea vessels to their places of origin on other islands (McNevin 2014;Palmer 2016).Living conditions in the transit shelters have improved since the Ministry of Welfare replaced the 'temporary' facilities with shelters that offered collective sleeping, showering, and cooking facilities. 5But, even so, deportees are usually detained for up to two weeks if, as in our location, onward travel on a government-owned ferry is delayed by rough seas. 6 Once migrant workers have been deported, it becomes more difficult for them to return to Malaysia as 'regular' migrant workers, as a blacklist maintained by Malaysian authorities should prevent the re-entry of deportees for five years.This is a major disincentive for those Indonesian labour migrants who want to return temporarily and depend on generatiing an income back in Malaysia in the future.Returning is not impossible, however, as corruption and bribery undermine enforcement of migration law and border control in both Indonesia and Malaysia (Franck 2019;Ford and Lyons 2011).For example, some streetwise deportees managed to evade re-entry bans by obtaining new travel documents from Indonesia or by hiring smugglers to help them circumvent Malaysian immigration control and/or to cross borders clandestinely. 7At times the Malaysian government has also made exceptions to blacklisting in response to public requests by their Indonesian counterparts.At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the Indonesian Minister for Manpower promised to pay for the return of 6,800 Indonesian migrant workers awaiting deportation in Malaysian immigration detention centres.In response, the Malaysian Minister for Internal Affairs promised: 'If the Indonesian migrant workers have gone home to Indonesia, but want to return to work in Malaysia, they have to follow legal procedure.I will not blacklist them, no.The most important thing is that they enter legally' (Tempo.co2020).
The other option for state-facilitated return is through one of the Malaysian government's amnesties, whereby irregular migrant workers will not be imprisoned if they voluntarily surrender to the immigration authorities and leave (Arifianto 2009;Kaur 2005).Yet these amnesties are not always available.Between 1989 and 2019, the Malaysian government offered 13 regularisation programmes (Low 2021, 357).'Back for Good' was open for five months, ending on New Year's Eve of 2020, just over two months before the Malaysian government introduced border-crossing restrictions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.The previous amnesty operated for 49 months and facilitated the return of 840,000 migrants (Low 2021, 357).According to a public statement regarding 'Back for Good', more than 180,000 irregular migrant workers were able to leave Malaysia and return to their home countries without being detained or caned for breaking immigration law (Malaysiakini 2019).What may appear as an impressive achievement in terms of time and numbers, 'logistics prove[d] a nightmare', as alleged in news reports (Alhadjri 2019), with intending returnees waiting several days just to register (Malaysiakini 2019).An academic study of the programme claims that demand would have been greater if the Malaysian government had not required intending returnees to pay a RM700 (USD170) registration fee, which represented a large proportion of their wages (usually below the minimum monthly wage in Malaysia of RM1,100 (USD247)) (Low 2021).
Even though these amnesties and repatriation schemes are more humane, as they do not involve arrest, detention or corporal punishment, civil society organisations are opposed to them because they do little to address 'the root causes of irregularity'.In their eyes, the programmes are only a 'cosmetic solution' as that do not reduce the demand for irregular migrant labour in the Malaysian economy (Low 2021, 341).Instead, the programmes present a practical problem, as the migrants can only make use of them if they present a return ticket and valid travel document.In a 2019 case of return smuggling, one of the 155 returnees testified to the Indonesian police that he: and his younger biological brother called Muhammad Riko went to the Indonesian embassy to apply for a travel document, but once he was done he was told to come back to the embassy on Thursday.But at that time, the Indonesian embassy said that they no longer issued the travel document without giving a clear reason why.So the witness [ Another factor that makes irregular migrants disinclined to avail themselves of this amnesty programme is the fact that the re-entry ban was indefinite (Low 2021).Previous amnesties initially blacklisted returning migrants for five years.Nevertheless, the Malaysian Immigration Department is known to shorten the re-entry ban on a case by case basis (Lawyerment 2017).It has been reported that irregular migrants with five year re-entry bans were allowed to enter again within two to three years.Of course, a reentry ban matters little if irregular migrants plan to return to Indonesia permanently, but the fact that re-entry bans prevent re-migration would ostensibly dissuade irregular migrants from availing themselves of the return option, especially if they are unsure about whether or not they will have to find gainful employment in Malaysia.From these observations it is safe to conclude that the sporadic amnesties are not attractive to labour migrants who are in need of quick and flexible pathways back and forth between Indonesia and Malaysia.This is one of the factors that have paved the way for non-state facilitators to become active in the return migration industry.

Unauthorised return infrastructure
Returnees' reliance on return smuggling services arises from the dilemma that they are prevented from using legal methods for border-crossing that are cheaper and non-punitive.Studying verdicts from the Batam District Court offers some glimpses into the experience of unsanctioned returnees (also referred to as 'victims of people smuggling') to Indonesia.The number of returnees in each return operation ranged from nine to 155.All of the court cases included testimonies from arresting police officers.In order for a case to be prosecuted it had to meet the legal requirement of two pieces of evidence, which can be a combination of testimonies and physical objects, such as the boats used to make the trips.
According to the verdicts, returnees made two payments.First they paid RM1,000-2,600 (USD225-584) for the boat trip to Batam and onward domestic transport to their final destination.Second, the returnees paid Rp400,000-700,000 (USD27-47) as rent to the owner of the landing site in Batam and for transport by car to their accommodation if they had to wait for their onward travel.By contrast, the cost of the Back for Good amnesty programme, which only ran for five months, was RM700 (USD170); a ferry ticket from Johor to Batam was only RM78 (USD18); and a budget airline ticket from many cities in Malaysia to many destinations in Indonesia started at Rp99,000 (USD7).This shows that facilitated but unauthorised return is not a cheap option, but it comes with other advantages and with risks.
With regard to risk, unauthorised return offers inconsistent physical safety standards.In all the cases we studied, returnees were moved around by unknown actors to temporary accommodation and to the departure site in Malaysia.On board the boats the returnees were sometimes provided with lifejackets to reduce the risk of drowning if their boat sinks or they are required to jump overboard to avoid being arrested at sea.Not all boats dock at a pier in Indonesia, and returnees are required regularly to alight from their boat 50-300 metres from dry land.Their landing sites are often in shallow water, where it is possible for adults to wade to shore, but small children and babies need to be carried.Logistically it is diffcult to return carrying luggage, which needs to be lifted to prevent it from getting wet.The most frightening scenario for returnees is when their boat runs out of fuel close to Batam and they are required to swim to shore, as occurred in one of the cases we studied. 8Nevertheless, return smuggling by boat is relatively safe and reports of boats sinking en route to Indonesia are rare.The journey is quite short, the distance from the southernmost tip of Peninsular Malaysia and Batam being about 26 km and, unless there are sudden storms, the waters are relatively calm.
The higher cost and occasional risks for facilitated but unauthorised returns nonetheless beg the question: why are they still attractive to return migrants?In all of the cases we studied, even though unauthorised return is costly and poses risks to the physical safety of passengers, it was relatively fast.If migrants suddenly wanted or needed to return to Indonesia, they can hire a smuggler within a few days.While deporation and repatriation depend on whether the government is logistically prepared and prioritises speedy return, the unauthorised option is usually executed immediately after they arrive at their departure site in Malaysia.The transfer from Peninsular Malaysia's southern tip to Indonesia only takes a few hours, if it proceeds without interference.Furthermore, there is no need to remain in transit in Indonesia (on Batam) before proceeding to the final destination within Indonesia.Once returnees are in Indonesia, they depend on the availablity of onward travel that, more often than not, is pre-arranged by the 'smugglers' before they leave Malaysia.It is in everyone's best interests if the onward travel occurs immediately or soon after the returnees' arrival in Batam in order not to arouse the suspicion of local residents who might alert the authorities.

Modes of returning: a systematic approach
The existing body of literature on return migration identifies multiple levels of typologies that 'give insight into [its] diversity' (King and Kuschminder 2022, 4).These typologies organise return journeys according to: development level of countries involved (low, middle or high income) and skill level of migrants to reveal, for example, that 'lowskilled migrants moving from poor to richer countries do so either as a survival strategy to support family members at home' (King and Kuschminder 2022, 4); temporal and geographical criteria, which show that return migration is more common when 'countries are close by', and that long-distance migration 'and long-term residence abroad make return less likely' (King and Kuschminder 2022, 4); motivations and circumstances, which consist of a range of typologies that organise returns according to 'family, lifestage, (un)employment, business/investment opportunities, nostalgia, expulsion etc.' (King and Kuschminder 2022, 4).These typologies enable the examination of different aspects for return migration, such as pre-conditions, motivations and potential outcomes.
In order to capture the full range of modes for returning and reduce the complexity of return migration, we introduce a facilitation and authorisation typology and propose four systematic categories (see Figure 1).On the Y-axis we draw attention to fact that return migration is either facilitated, arranged by a third party, including the state, authorised travel agent or 'smuggler', or self-organised (unfacilitated).Along the X-axis, return migration is either authorised by the state or not.
Our typology categorises all types of return into four quadrants.The bottom two quadrants (B and D) are for return migration that is outside the remit of this article, which focuses exclusively on return migration arranged by a third party.Those journeys that fall below the X axis are unfaciliated, which means that return migrants either organise their own trips, booking their own travel and using a real passport (quadrant B) or they organise their own travel but carry a fake passport (quadrant D).Of interest to us here are the returns that are organised by a third party, which may include removal, deportation, repatriation and assisted voluntary return programmes (quadrant A). 9 Our case study of the return journeys of Indonesian migrant workers from Malaysia to Indonesia with assistance from a range of 'smugglers' investigates the final return type: facilitated but unauthorised return (quadrant C).In the next section, we explain why this type of return has received scant treatment in the academic literature, especially in people-smuggling studies that assume the activity can only be uni-directional (from origin/transit country to destination) rather than in the other direction as well.The other purpose for drawing attention to this type of return migration is to provide the necessary conceptualisation to better understand the infrastructure, as defined by Xiang and Lindquist (2014), of what we call facilitated but unauthorised return and to encourage more focused empirical research into this phenomenon in the future and also to encourage more rigorous theoretical scrutiny.Seeing return as an evolving process in its own right rather than as a 'simple "event"' (King and Kuschminder 2022, 7) has led to a scholarly focus on two aspects of return migration: what happens during forced returns and what happens after returning to the country of origin.The economic sociology of return, which assumes that return is mostly voluntary, investigates how time living and working abroad affects returnees' labour market opportunities and the resulting implications for economic development (Cassarino 2016;Hammond 2015;Åkesson 2011).Meanwhile, the political sociology of return seeks to unveil and critique the growing role of both emigration and immigration states in controlling and managing migration (D'Amato and Schwenken 2018;De Genova and Peutz 2010;Collyer 2012;Hadj Abdou and Rosenberger 2019;Kalir 2017).In particular, scholars of this latter school of thought examine how state actors and their non-state collaborators, as well as international organisations, instigate and shape the return experiences of deportees, rejected asylum seekers, and migrants forced to return their country of origin, a place from which they may hail but which they no longer consider a desirable place for long-term residence.The existing scholarship on return migration, including with both economic and political sociological foci, tends to be state-centric.In order to come to grips with the phenomenon of return migration, the state and its migration infrastructuresdefined as systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobilityplay the most crucial role.Hence it is not surprising that most scholars of return migration focus on return infrastructures that operate in authorised spaces, such as deportation and voluntary assisted return.Our typology contributes to this body of theory by drawing attention to the infrastructures that enable other types of return journeys, including return smuggling, which is a facilitated but unauthorised activity.

Theoretical blindspots
Although the example quoted at the start of this article, together with our elaborations on the need for facilitated but unauthorised return migration, have pointed to the need for this phenomenon to occur, the wider relevant literature has so far refrained from engaging with it.We postulate that this is mainly due to two specifc shortcomings of the existing people-smuggling literature, as well as of the wider body of work on return migration.First of all, we seek to address the widespread assumption that people smuggling is a unidirectional phenomenon, in which facilitators only transport migrants and refugees in one direction, that is from a poor and/or dangerous place to safer and more affluent ones.Second, we put forward the question of why return migration scholars have so far concentrated solely on the role of the state in deporting or repatriating migrants and refugees, thereby ignoring the roles played by non-state facilitators in offering return services.Our intervention is meant as a constructive reflection; by critically engaging with these two theoretical blindspots we hope to spur new research interests and provoke a reconceptualisation of the wider understanding of people smuggling.
Unlike migration scholars, who tend to see temporary or permanent return as part of the migration cycle, 10 the academic assumption in the subfield of people smuggling is that unauthorised movement across borders is uni-directional only.The starting point is to define smuggling as procuring entrance from origin and transit countries to desirable destinations that offer gainful employment and/or safety from human rights abuse and persecution, but with no return anticipated.As people-smuggling studies currently stand, it is impossible to conceive the country of origin as the desired destination.This, however, ignores some noteworthy political realities, in which, for example, disappointed Iraqi asylum seekers in Germany have employed smugglers in order to return to Iraq (Nasr 2016), or disillusioned North Korean refugees trying to return from South Korea have engaged smugglers (Haas 2018;Handley 2020;McCurry 2014).While our case study does not focus on refugees, it does highlight the necessity that, without authorisation and obedience to timeframes set by others, returning to the country of origin can become a difficult challenge for those who wish to return that may be overcome with the help of smugglers.Our findings also have implications for how we conceive migration and categorise migrants.Usually, migrants are seen as people who do not have citizenship rights in the destination country they wish to reach.However, we show that smuggled migrants can also be citizens returning to the country in which they hold citizenship.Future research should, therefore, give special attention to this phenomenon in other contexts, such as the USA-Mexico and the Turkey-Syria corridors, where large numbers of potential returnees may seek temporary return to their home countries, without jeopardising their options of employment and residence in their host country.
Even though scholars of people smuggling have focused generally on uni-directional movements, their insights into the modalities of unauthorised border crossings are still helpful in order to refine knowledge of facilitation and facilitators in return smuggling networks.Crucially, they have shown that, when it comes to the actual facilitation of irregular cross-border movements, it is essential to understand that smuggling practices are often grounded in community-based notions of cooperation and support (Achilli 2018;Sanchez 2016;Vogt 2016).Furthermore, people-smuggling networks tend to be loose networks with many individual members, who do not necessarily only work for one network at a time (Missbach 2022).Frequently they are 'chain(s) of trust' (Liempt 2007, 171) based on shared ethnic or national ties between smugglers and their clients, which function as a social guarantee to minimise risks and exploitation.Yet, there is also a profit-seeking element that has little to do with altruism.But as Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh (2012) have shown, profit, on the one hand, and trust, on the other hand, are deeply intertwined and separating one from the other is impossible in practice.Taking these insights into consideration, while being open to a bi-/multi-directional conception of people-smuggling trajectories, is deemed the way forward when scrutinising the specific infrastructures of return smuggling.
While accepting the bi-/multi-directional nature of people smuggling may only be a minor corrective, our second intervention may be more significant.The current literature on return migration is state-centric and focuses only on facilitated and authorised returns, such as deportation and orderly return programmes that include repatriation schemes.Following this logic, state-organised return migration is increasingly seen as a development-related initiative, with varying economic and political consequences (Zanker and Altrogge 2019).States are seen as the most important actor that sponsors returns and reintegration programmes: they sign readmission agreements with other state parties; they organise deportations; they often employ non-state actors or outsource the dirty work to them to help with the implementation of their return agenda. 11The bulk of the current studies on return migration concentrate on the questions of why those returns take place and what happens to returnees after their arrival in the countries they were returned to.Very little is actually written about the detail of how those returns proceed.We consider rectifying this gap in research to be desirable, because in studying return, as we observed in the Malaysia-Indonesia cases, ignoring the actual return operation leads to a failure to ask why some facilitated but unauthorised return operations are tolerated and allowed to proceed, while others are met with strict law enforcement, including arrest, trials and imprisonment.
Nevertheless, learning from the general body of return migration literature can bear fruit for the study of return smuggling.Three factors in particular have received special attention in relation to the decisions migrants make about whether, how and when to return to their country of origin and in relation to whether their return is understood as a positive or negative outcome of their migration endeavours.The first factor is the migration status of the potential returnees in their host country, which usually determines whether they risk punishment if they do not have the legal right to work.The second factor is access to opportunities, including economic, educational and social services offered by the current host country or the country to which they return.The third factorperhaps the defining oneconcerns whether the returnees have a say in how and when they return.Do they return of their own free will because they have met their migration goals and long to be reunited with friends and family who stayed home?Or, do state institutions force them to return through expulsion or deportation, despite the fact that they would have preferred to stay put in their host country?Current debate amongst return migration scholars pays little to no attention to nonstate entities that migrants themselves may select and hire to fulfil their wish to return to their home country via pathways that are outside of the limited legal one availble to them.Paying attention to the agentic decision-making processes of migrants expands narrow views of return migration that focus on forced returns and thus neglect the requests and desires of those who no longer wish to remain in a host country.

Conclusion
While policy and scholarly analysis assumes that 'smuggling' can only ever be uni-directional (from country of origin (or transit) to destination country), we found that people smuggling can also proceed bi-directionally.This in itself is an interesting finding, not least because it shows that nowadays even the borders in the global South are becoming harder to cross.Stricter enforcement of immigration control and border surveillance make self-organised (unfacilitated) crossings, including return migration, more difficult to realise.While the example from the Indonesia-Malaysia context might appear rather unique at first gaze, there are indeed three overarching conclusions to be drawn from this scenario, which not only necessitate additional research but may also be applied to other regional contexts: 1) The fact that the official UN Smuggling Protocol discounts the possibility of people using smugglers to return to their countries of origin shows the underlying movement bias that has shaped our views of migration.According to this existing bias, countries are differentiated according to their desirability for migrants.It is anticipated that migrants primarily want to move to a country that is deemed better than the one they are coming from.Such a simplistic view of human migration does not concur with the lived realities and needs to be adjusted.2) Acknowledging the bi-/multi-directionality of people smuggling requires a re-investigation of the organisational set-up of return smuggling operations.For example, do the same actors and networks that enable movement in one direction also facilitate return passages?Do networks catering for the need for outbound and inbound passages operate in parallel?Do the prices charged by facilitators vary depending on whether passages are outbound or inbound? 3) In our broader scrutiny of the return migration literature, we found that the role of 'smugglers' and other unauthorised non-state actors in the facilitation of returns is generally ignored.This has fostered the impression that states alone (with their authorised representatives and collaborating institutions) are in charge of organising return migration.Such a perspective collides with our findings.In reality, the demands of undocumented labour migrants wishing to go home involve the use of unauthorised border crossings.This is mostly the case when migrants are prevented from returning on their own legally, or when state services for return are considered detrimental to migrants' own priorities.As our study has shown, returning is often logistically as difficult as the initial emigration, especially for migrants who are not used to interpreting the law.When states habitually fail to deliver affordable, nonpunitive and fast legal return options, including for 'irregular' return migrants, irregular but practical alternatives start to materialise, such as return smuggling.Future research should not only scrutinise the infrastructure associated with return smuggling, but should particularly explore the consistency with which return smuggling is prioritised within migration law enforcement, along with the urgency or leniency it that may evoke at different times.similar cases.Forty-six 'smugglers' were mentioned in the verdicts, the others being either actors on the most-wanted list (daftar pencarian orang) or not identified as perpetrators.3. The government referred to the migrants as PMI ilegal dari Malaysia (illegal Indonesian migrant workers from Malaysia) in a live-streamed press conference from the Agency for Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers (Agency for Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers (BP2MI) 2021).The Ministry of Manpower also refers to them this way in an internal report summarizing mass media reports (Ministry of Manpower 2021, 37). 4.This figure is derived from the addition of 'irregular' migrants granted amnesty after breaking immigration law so that they were able to leave Malaysia without first being punished and/or were 'voluntarily repatriated'.5. Wayne Palmer inspected the old facility again in Batam, our fieldwork location, as part of a research consultancy for the International Organization for Migration in April 2015.He visited the new facility in June 2016, which was also in Batam, finding that living conditions had improved.6. Wayne Palmer observed this common delay during fieldwork in June 2016.
7. In 2016 a scandal erupted in Malaysia when it was revealed that smugglers had been sabotaging immigration computer systems since 2010, deliberately crashing them to allow people to bypass computerised checks, including facial recognition technology, and enter the country.Amongst those arrested were also two immigration officers (Corsi 2016).8. Legal Decision No. 464/Pid.Sus/2020/PN.Btm with defendants Arzani alias Kuyuk and M. Imran alias Kakok 2020; Legal Decision No. 465/Pid.Sus/2020/PN.Btm with defendant Asep Nurjaman alias Jaman 2020.9.These terms may differ substantively in their philosophical and policy meanings (for an indepth discussion of voluntariness and assisted voluntary return, see Erdal and Oeppen 2022).10.Broadly speaking, return migration is neither a new phenomenon nor an entirely unexpected movement; rather it is understood to be part of the migration cycle, which can be complete, incomplete or interrupted, depending heavily on the preceding conditions and reasons for migration in the first place (Xiang 2013;Oxfeld and Long 2004;Cassarino 2016;Battistella 2018).11.For example, some EU-member states, such as Spain, particularly in times of economic downturn, are known to have run 'voluntary' return programmes for legal labour migrants with work permits.Such programmes incentivise labour migrants to leave their host country permanently (Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo 2018; Kalir 2017).