The returnscape: The labyrinthine return trajectories of temporary migrant workers

Abstract

The discussion of labor return migration has often framed workers’ reintegration and settlement within the migration-development debate, with a particular interest in promoting migrant entrepreneurship. This article extends such discussion beyond the confines of the development frame by providing a dynamic and diverse understanding of return using a bottom-up perspective. Building on the critical scholarship on labor return migration, it stresses that through the process of their migratory life, workers undergo shifts in, and reflections of, their value system and life goals. Our findings, drawn from interviews with migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, and return workers in Indonesia and the Philippines, show that while some workers might continue to conduct circular returns for economic and other purposes, others embarked on home-return for settlement, also for different purposes. The fact that both their home-bound and destination-bound returns entail motivations beyond economic narratives, leads us to propose a broad conceptual frame, the ‘returnscape’. This concept allows the capturing of the different temporalities, spatialities, motivations and outcomes of labor return migration derived from the emic perspectives of return. This article thus helps stretch the scholarship of labor return migration beyond the migration-development nexus, and provides a proactive and more nuanced approach to the complex nature of ‘returning’.