Se procede a resolver la controversia debatida en el presente recurso en los términos siguientes:

Sonia has lived as a ‘sans papier’ for a decade (from 2000 to 2010) in Europe, moving between the Netherlands, France, Portugal and Luxembourg. She is in her late thirties and, like Alexandrino, she is originally from Ponta do Sol (Santo Antão). I met her for the first time on the neighbouring island of São Vicente during my first fieldwork stay. She was at her cousin’s house in Mindelo, close to where I was hosted. My host knew her cousin well and introduced me to her. Sonia’s father had migrated to Portugal even before the Independence of Cape Verde but he afterwards moved to the Netherlands. Thus, at the age of 22, Sonia left Santo Antão to join him there; however, she ended up spending most of her migration time in France (seven years). Before going to France, she had come to Luxembourg and worked in a hotel for one year, but the hotel closed and she went back to the Netherlands, from where she later left to France.

During her time of migration, Sonia mostly worked in the tourism sector. She mentioned that her best year in Europe was the one she spent in Luxembourg. In France she managed to find work babysitting and doing some cleaning. In between, she went to Portugal (where she spent eight months) to see if she could obtain a residence permit. She worked in a café bar without a formal work contract and earned low wages (€ 360 per month). Her goal was to legalise her stay, but she felt tired of her boss’ unfulfilled promises to give her a work contract, so she returned to France, where unfortunately she had a similar experience: She worked for a woman (patroa) who hired her to do housework but never gave her a formal contract. She left to the Netherlands again, and after her father’s death there, she finally decided to return to Cape Verde.

In Sonia’s case, the reluctance of EU authorities to give her the right papers (work permit or residence permit) subjected her to repeated exploitation and reinforced her vulnerability.

After comings and goings between those European countries, with the constant fear and anxiety of being caught and exploitation at work, Sonia consulted her family and decided to return to her mother’s house in Santo Antão. However, she later came to regret that decision. In an interview she told me:

N ben N atxá un Kab Verd...di koza difisil, si mi N táva imajinava N ne tava ben, N ne tinha ipotizi di ben. N tomá nha desizon, N ben. N txomá nha mai, N txomá nha familia, N dize tava ta ben y dispos nha pai tinha morid, N tinha kes tenpu sen koza. mi N pensá, na spasu di un mes N konprá nha bilheti N ben pa Kab Verd. Talvez si N tava pensá un bokadinh mais mi ne táva ben, N ta fiká.

I came I found Cape Verde … of difficult things, if I had imagined I wouldn’t have come, no way. I took my decision I came. I phoned my mother, I phoned my family, I said that I was coming and furthermore my father had died, I had all that time without a thing a job.

I reflected, within one-month time I bought my ticket I came to Cape Verde. Maybe if I had thought a bit more, I wouldn’t have come, I would have stayed.

Note that Sonia repeatedly uses conditional tense (si mi N tava imajinava … si N tava pensá un bokadinh if I had imagined… if I had thought a bit more) and markers of uncertainty (talvez

maybe). This shows that she lacked information about her possibilities in Cape Verde before her return. The decision to return was not well considered by her. She clearly lacked what Fischer et al. (1997) called- ‘location-specific assets,’ such as a house, well established networks, relevant qualifications and so on. And when she returned it was with ‘empty hands’

(cf. Carling, 2004).

Leaving Europe to minimize her difficulties put her back into similar societal challenges in her alleged community of origin. She recollected:

bo ta pasá kel txeu tempu fora, bo ta ben bo ta atxá tudu koza diferent, mesmu amigs, bu ta, tudu jenti, abo ne n atxá bos amig prop, purk mi grinha sin N ben pa fiká, agora N ten konhesids pur izemplu, mi nhas amigs tud ba uns sai fora otus, dispos ki N voltá, uhn N logu na prinsipiu pesoal pesoas ta fiká ta koza es ta pensá ki bo ben diportod txeu vez, ta pergunto-b: “ah polisia panho-b el po-b na Kabu Verd,” un data di koza, es fiká ta oio-b sempri, bo ta notá… es ta dizé, ten otu kes a be kritiká: “o ke ki bu ben fazé ai?…bo tava na un lugar mas”… bu ta sabé ki na prinsipiu txeu.

you spend a long time abroad, you return you find everything different, even friends, you, everybody, you don’t find your friends even, because now I came to stay, now I have people I know for example, my friends all, some went out others, since I returned, uhn I in the very beginning people were, doing, many times they think that you got deported, they ask you: “ah police caught you they put you in Cape Verde,” many things, they keep watching you always, you feel it…they say it, there are others they criticise: “what did you come to do here? … you were in a better place” … you know them many in the beginning.

Spending a decade abroad had left her ‘estranged’ and reproached by others she encountered back in Cape Verde, where most of her friends had left. Those experiences made her feel almost like a migrant in her country of origin. Sonia had to re-adapt and cope with the societal expectations and suspicion of having being deported. The traditional Cape Verdean construction of migration as a project to obtain a high standard of life after return, and the fact that many Cape Verdeans manage to live illegally for decades and make a living in the global North, contributed to making her case unexpected and almost unbelievable, since she was a young returnee. In the ‘eyes’ of Cape Verdean society, when the returned is not a retired person, i.e. not a ‘classic returnee’ (cf. Carling, 2004), and, even more, when she is a young woman, a category of migrant that is rarely deported in the Cape Verdean context (cf. Instituto das Comunidades, 2009; OIM, 2010, p. 54), one can be considered a ‘big’ looser. The idea of voluntarily giving up life abroad without or before the expected return does not make much sense in the collective imagination. The societal perception of Sonia resonates with what Carling (2004, p. 121) termed an ‘empty-hand returnee’, someone who has come ‘back being no better off financially than when she left’ (Carling, 2004, p. 121). This could be a humiliation for Sonia because she could not fulfil the assumed most basic objectives of migration, i.e. having one’s own house and to secure a pension for retirement. Sonia was thus socially evaluated back ‘home’ and othered in her community of origin.

When asked about the benefits of her trajectories within these European countries, she highlighted learning French. That still remained a modest gain due to the high societal expectation on someone’s return. However, she highlighted the opportunity she had to develop it as an added value, which helped her at some work in hotels back on Santo Antão Island:

benefisius k N prendé ma aperfeisuá nha Franses… e un grand koza, nha Franses ki N prendé foi bom.

Uhun N ten vontadi di abrí un lugar pa turismu prop

… grihna sin na dia dia e mutu inportant bo sabé pelu menus un duas linguas…kuand N ben N trabalhá na hotel y la el juda-m bastant na Sant Anton.

benefit is that I learned to improve my French … it is a great thing, my French that I learned was good.

Uhun I have even a will to open a place for tourism…now day by day it is very important to learn at least two languages … when I came back I worked in a hotel and there it helped me enough in Santo Antão.

Her French and her work experience in hotels made her aspire to open a house for tourists in Santo Antão and have her own business. Her ability to speak French helped her to keep that faith. She associated this with the political discourses of tourism development in Cape Verde,

which kept her hoping of a vida midjor better life. However, her plan was not realistic or feasible, at least not in the short term, since she had been unemployed for a long time and returned empty-handed with no financial support to start that business (cf. Åkesson, 2016).

Furthermore, continuing to share the positive gains of her life experiences in Europe beyond her improvement of French, she put it in abstract terms and stressed: ‘benifisius N ben ku mas maturidad N ben mas ahh mas konfiant … diferent, N oiá, la bo bo ta ben mas abert, … bo ben k mentalidadi mas… ta pensá totalment diferent benefits are that I came with more maturity, I came more ahh more confident … different, I saw, you come more open … you more open minded … think totally different.’ Sonia still lives with her mother, sisters, nephews and nieces, and is financially dependent on that co-habitation to survive. However, the fact of having experienced life in those European countries makes her feel some pride in herself, and this, to a certain extent, has helped her cope with her regrets of return: “si mi N tava imajinava N ne tava ben, N ne tinha ipotiz di ben if I had imagined I wouldn’t have come, no way.”

Here, she felt that migration changed her and made her ‘other’ herself, too. For her, migration made her a more confident person, but contradictorily she pointed out that migration is important when the migrant goes and manages to become a documented migrant, which she did not manage in the ‘end’.

However, during my third fieldwork stay, Sonia was more optimistic and it seemed that she had found another mode of regaining mobility to Europe, with no visa needs. The reviving of her return to Europe was then envisaged through old colonial ties and ancestral family links to Portugal. Sonia’s younger sister obtained a special visa to come to Lisbon to solve her son’s health problem, and there she found out that she had the right to ask for Portuguese citizenship, because their father had migrated to Portugal before the Independence of Cape Verde and held Portuguese citizenship, so all his children were entitled to it as well. Thus, Sonia was happier about that and had already asked for the required documents to submit her application for the citizenship at the Embassy of Portugal in Cape Verde. However, that was not a straightforward process. She would have to pay a certain amount of money for bureaucracy and her peripheral location might also delay the process since all the documents had to be sent to the Embassy in Praia, the capital city.

Malmberg (1997, p. 30) points out that ‘migration decision is neither an exclusively individual affair nor a completely voluntary act, but often a collective and strongly conditioned or constrained decision’. Sonia’s decision to return was not deliberately decided. Her return cannot be viewed as a voluntary act, for the circumstances of her clandestinity forced her back

to Cape Verde. Her decision was influenced by the interplay between the longing struggle to be a documented migrant, explorations, and emotions caused by the loss of her father, one of her strongest (emotional) support in Europe. Thus, Sonia cannot be considered ‘self-deported,’

i.e. that she decided ‘to leave the country voluntarily when detention and deportation loom’

(Drotbohm, 2011, p. 386), because she had not had any eminent moment of deportation. Her return cannot be viewed as a simple voluntary act, because it was the circumstances of her clandestinity that forced her back to Cape Verde. In Sonia’s case, the word forced could come along with the word decision, while in Marku’s and Carlos’ context the word forced took over the word decision, as shown above. Given the scenario of those rejected by the Schengen regime, let us turn to the case of a current Cape Verdean migrant in Luxembourg.