In The Road Home, the reader can accompany the fictive character of Lev, an Eastern European migrant heading to the UK to find a job and support his family back home. Having just left his home country, he is already thinking about his return. English novelist Rose Tremain tells a story, typical of the migration patterns within Europe since the mid-2000s. The Eastern enlargement of the EU and the creation of a common European labour market induced significant migration flows from the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to high-income countries, mainly in Western and Northern Europe. Consequently, many regions throughout CEE have been experiencing large-scale emigration of labour, whereas many regions in the ‘old’ Europe have benefited from the arrival of skilled labour. This imbalance in labour migration has raised new concerns about social, economic and territorial cohesion throughout the EU.And then later, when they finally arrived in London, they would probably separate with barely a word or a look, walk out into a rainy morning, each alone and beginning a new life. And Lev thought how all of this was odd but necessary and already told him things about the world he was travelling to, a world in which he would break his back working—if only that work could be found. He would hold himself apart from other people, find corners and shadows in which to sit and smoke, demonstrate that he didn’t need to belong, that his heart remained in his own country.From The Road Home by Rose Tremain 2008, pp. 1–2
These concerns were the starting point for the project ‘Re-Turn: Regions Benefitting from Returning Migrants’. Because of the increasing relevance of return migration to CEE countries and a lack of comparative studies, this project explored for the first time current flows of return migration in a comparative way, including eight CEE countries. Within the frame of the project, scientific partners organised an international scientific workshop on the topic ‘Return Migration and Regional Development in Central and Eastern Europe’, which took place on 7–8 November 2013 in Budapest. This workshop brought together leading scholars in this field. The present book is a result of the scientific discussion during this workshop. Many of the contributors to this book participated in the workshop, while other contributors joined the discussion and this book project at a later stage. However, all share the observation that current policy debates and migration research in Europe focus more on the emigration of Europeans and immigration towards Europe from other world regions, while return migration of fellow nationals remains an under-researched subject in the European context.
With this book, we aim to enrich the debate on the changing migration patterns in Europe based on up-to-date theoretical and empirical work in the field of return migration. We do not employ the term ‘return’ as a normative concept, but rather use it to describe the direction of a move. Return moves are as definite or indefinite as departures, yet they may have another meaning for the migrants and may therefore deliver different outcomes.
Our focus on return migration within the European Union and from EU member states to neighbouring countries (e.g. Turkey or Serbia) is motivated by changing mobility patterns in the context of European integration, with an intensification of mobility fuelled by the opening of labour markets, and freedom of residence throughout the European Union. In this specific and poorly regarded context, differences in economic prosperity and wealth are less pronounced than between Europe and Africa or Asia. However, the ongoing transformation processes in the post-socialist countries, combined with the global financial crisis and its economic effects, makes this region an excellent case to study actual mobility processes in conjunction with economic and societal transformations, and in their dependence on earlier migration processes. Furthermore, the book will enrich the debate on the migration-development nexus by presenting findings on the role of return migration for regional development, not only at the macro level, but also by analysing individual behavioural patterns that reveal the substantial weight of identity construction, family biographies and subjectivity in the perception and evaluation of the social and economic environment and development opportunities.
This chapter serves as an overall introduction to the book. First, we provide a short overview of existing knowledge and unanswered questions in the context of European return migration by highlighting theoretical and empirical aspects. Following this, individual chapters of the volume will be introduced, pinpointing their position within the general framework of the book. Our collection had to remain selective—as in other edited volumes. We believe that the strength of this book lies in the joint discussion of the presented conceptual and methodological findings from different case studies. It is an anthology of state-of-the-art research on return migration in Europe, but this selection cannot cover all European regions in detail. The featured chapters represent a focus on post-socialist countries, which—since 1989—have provided strong migration flows and changed migration patterns in Europe. In addition, we have included case studies from Turkey and Ireland, because they add valuable insights for the study of our topic.
1.1 Significance of Return Migration in Europe
Migration of skilled labour from East to West has had a complex history in Europe since the Iron Curtain was dismantled in 1989. First, it was from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) that the mass emigration of qualified labour took place. According to migration statistics, Eastern Germany has lost more than 2 million people since the German reunification in 1989/90 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2013). These emigrants moved mainly to Western Germany, but also to Switzerland, Austria and other Western European and Scandinavian countries. Later, the exodus from Eastern Germany was followed by migration from other post-socialist countries (e.g. Poland, the post-Yugoslav States). Yet emigration from these countries remained limited throughout the 1990s as a result of remaining administrative restrictions. However, since the first EU enlargement towards the East in 2004, many regions in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia have witnessed the large-scale emigration of young, and skilled, people. In particular, peripheral rural regions have suffered from the ‘brain drain’ process, whereas large urban agglomerations—mainly capital city regions such as Prague, Bratislava and Budapest—gained internal migration surpluses (European Union 2012). Between 2003 and 2007, it is estimated that about 2.2 million ‘Eastern Europeans’ moved to Western European countries to find a better life and better-paid work (Smoliner et al. 2013). With the accession of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007, East-West migration intensified as wage levels in these countries had been significantly lower than in the other reforming countries. As a result of the financial crisis of 2008 and the termination of (normally 5-year) employment restrictions, migration from the Eastern part of Europe to the West became even more pronounced after 2010. Since the latest EU enlargement in 2013, its labour market also attracts many Croatian migrants.
This large-scale emigration from post-socialist countries—and in particular from CEE—often resulted in a lack of skilled labour in the sending regions. The age-selective outflow has accelerated demographic ageing processes in the regions that have been worst affected. Businesses located in these regions are increasingly struggling to replace retiring workers with young and skilled people (Nadler et al. 2014). This shortage of labour does not affect all regions and all economic sectors in a similar way. Still, it has consequences for the economic prosperity and competitiveness of many—in particular rural and old industrial—regions in Central and Eastern Europe. Many national and regional governments have, in the meantime, realised that long-term economic goals are seriously threatened by the shortage of skilled labour. Several governments have started to adopt retention and/or re-attraction initiatives (Kovács et al. 2013), which, however, are largely unknown to the emigrants, as recent empirical studies show (Lang et al. 2014, p. 37).
This kind of emigration and brain drain should not be considered a permanent process. According to an OECD study (OECD 2008), 20–50 % of emigrants leave their host region within 5 years of their arrival, many of them heading back home. In fact, emigrants often leave their home countries with the intention of returning, making emigration merely a temporary stage in their lives (Vertovec 2008). Surveys have revealed that 63 % of all emigrants consider returning home, and that most actual returnees succeeded in going back to their home regions (78 % of all returnees) (Lang et al. 2014, p. 19). Indeed, a substantial number of those who left their Central and Eastern European home regions seem to have been returning in recent years. The proximity to friends and family, the attachment to their homeland, its cultural and/or natural environment, decreasing wage differences and improved job opportunities often draw former emigrants back home (Lang et al. 2014; Zaiceva and Zimmermann 2012). Thus return migration is not merely a marginal phenomenon. It is shaping European migration patterns increasingly. Nevertheless, we can still experience a gap of knowledge regarding the more recent phenomena of return migration within Europe, and specifically in the post-socialist countries, as return migration so far has mainly been studied in the specific context of return from industrialised countries in Europe or North America to less-developed countries in Latin America, Africa or Asia (Smoliner et al. 2013; Kovács et al. 2013). For our approach of highlighting phenomena linked to return migration within Europe, the issues described in the following paragraphs need to be taken into consideration.
1.2 Scarcity of Data on Return Migration
One of the main problems in studying return migration is the lack of reliable data. Return migration cannot be measured directly as registry systems in most EU countries do not allow for an observation of individual migration biographies, including return movements to a point of departure. One possible way to estimate the weight of return migration is to analyse the social composition of incoming migrants. While this estimation might contain measurement errors (e.g. being blind to immigrants having acquired citizenship abroad through birth or naturalisation and coming to the country for the first time), it is still th...