This article explores how contemporary European migration governance utilizes affect and emotions to govern (unwanted) migration. By juxtaposing two cases, from two very different points of the migratory trajectory, we aim to show how emotions are used to bring the border alive beyond the actual geographical border, both inside Europe and in countries of origin. Building on ethnographic fieldwork, we highlight the interlinkages but also the differences between the two cases examined, namely: an emotionally charged, IOM-led, information campaign targeting the local population in rural Senegal, and a series of motivational interviews conducted by the Danish police targeting rejected asylum seekers refusing to return to their country-of-origin. We demonstrate how particular emotions are harnessed in these interventions to evoke morally-charged spatial geographies of hope and despair that impact and direct the (im)mobility of unwanted migrant subjects. Additionally, we seek to disentangle the ambivalent, and at times contentious, encounters between the interventions and the people they target. As such, we analytically bridge cases that in the academic literature are often dealt with as separate phenomena, to tell a more nuanced story of how contemporary affective borderwork at different intensities shapes European border externalization and internalization practices.