We report on a novel approach for inducing passive mode-locking of lasers without using any saturable absorber but exploiting the polarization degree of freedom of light. In our scheme, passive mode-locking is achieved by crossed-polarization gain modulation caused by the reinjection of a polarization-rotated replica of the laser output after a time delay. In this situation, the laser amplifier plays a twofold role, i.e., to provide amplification and the nonlinearities for pulse shortening. It is shown that the reinjection time delay defines resonance tongues that correspond to mode-locking operation. Numerical continuation reveals that the cw solution is destabilized through a Hopf bifurcation that defines the onset of multimode operation which evolves sharply into a mode-locked solution. The method is general and can be applied to a large variety of laser systems. For vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, in the frame work of a generic model, we demonstrate stable mode-locked pulses at repetition rates in the GHz range and pulsewidths of few tens of picoseconds. We also show that VCSELs specific features like anisotropies and spin-flip processes do not affect significantly the mode locking regime.