Much discourse around Irish return migration rests on the assumption that migrants want to come ‘home’ and would do so if suitable job opportunities existed. However, that perspective fails to acknowledge the multitude of personal factors that figure into the decision to return. While in many cases emigration from Ireland ...
(Show more)Much discourse around Irish return migration rests on the assumption that migrants want to come ‘home’ and would do so if suitable job opportunities existed. However, that perspective fails to acknowledge the multitude of personal factors that figure into the decision to return. While in many cases emigration from Ireland stemmed from economic circumstances, return raises further questions about migrants’ transnational positions: their evolving relationship to the land of their birth, the maintenance of family and social networks across national borders, the quality of life abroad, and the individual’s life course.
This paper analyzes migrants’ evolving relationships to their ‘home’ over time through cultural connections, visits, and return migration. It focuses primarily on migrants who left Ireland for the United States and Great Britain in the post-Second World War era. Different age and occupational histories mean that fundamental discrepancies exist between the concerns of that generation and others, particularly the better-educated 1980s emigrants. While historians and geographers have concentrated on return in the 1970s and 1990s-2000s because Ireland experienced net immigration in those decades, in fact migrants continued to return throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Combining quantitative data with evidence from oral histories, the paper re-assesses patterns of return migration and its links to life course events. Migrants had varying experiences of settling back into life in Ireland, a product of both individual circumstances and the changes in Irish society in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The paper argues that the process of return is intimately tied to a migrant’s life course and could pose as many challenges as that of departure.
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