States of Return
Rethinking Migration and Mobility

Deborah A. Boehm (Edited by), Mikaela H. Rogozen-Soltar (Edited by)

9781479823352

Paperback / softback, published 9 July 2024

272 pages, 1 b/w image
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.463 kg

"Examines the flip side of migration: return migration. As the authors show in rich ethnographic detail, migrants return to their country of origin, or not, for many reasons, including deportations, asylum denials, job loss, lack of access to social and medical support programs, and the desire to restore family relationships. The strength of States of Return is its multi-national focus, which provides new understandings of what return migration means to those who experience it...A must-read book for both scholars and the general public who wish to understand the implications of today's turbulent migration politics on the people who experience forced and unforced return migration." (Leo Chavez, University of California, Irvine)

Explores global migration through the concept of "return"
The current global moment is characterized by both forced and desired returns, whether it's the United States' mass deportations to Mexico, ships carrying North African migrants turned back en route to Spain and Italy, urban Chinese migrants going back to their rural home communities, or domestic workers returning to their families in Bolivia and Ghana. Yet, the majority of migration research still centers unidirectional movement, which assumes settlement in a host country.
States of Return addresses the many political, economic, and cultural transitions that have accelerated and transformed return during the first decades of the twenty-first century, including new migratory routes, new forms of violence, changing economic conditions, new regulatory regimes of incarceration and deportation, and generational transitions.
This volume features contributions from leading scholars and offers a new theorization of the idea of return. It centers migrants' own understandings of what return movement is and is not, and how it is experienced in terms of impacts on family relationships as well as state interventions that guide return migrations and create new configurations of citizenship and belonging, especially as migrant workers tend to return to states that lack strong infrastructures to support them or welcome them back.
At its core, States of Return highlights the ways in which different migrants' returns reflect conditions of power, privilege, injustice, and violence. The result is a broad and deep account of returns—imagined, achieved, thwarted, or impossible—that captures movement across borders in the world today.