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Particularly in rich countries, people often assume that once a migrant arrives, they are likely to stay for life. This is not true. Many migrants move to another country only temporarily and return to their home country within a decade.
Here, I explore what we know about this reverse flow (return migration) - how many migrants will eventually return to their home country, how long they stay abroad, how these migrants differ from those that stay and what happens to both them and their home countries when they return.
How common is return migration?
Somewhere between 30% and 60% of migrants will likely return to their home country within ten years. This appears to have been true for decades if not centuries.
The largest multi-country dataset of return migration seems to be Amanzadeh, Kermani and McQuade 2024. This uses LinkedIn data to track 350 million skilled international migrants across 180 countries. After a decade, 50% of migrants are still in the country they moved to; 38% have returned to their home countries; 12% have moved to a third country.
This paper does only consider skilled immigrants, but the 40% return number is remarkably durable across contexts. Ward 2016 found that 40% of migrants who entered the US in 1917-1924 eventually returned home. Akee and Jones 2019 found that 40% of all US migrants in 2005-2007 return migrated within 10 years. There is 80 years between these two measurements!
Obviously, it is not universal that exactly 40% of migrants return to their home countries. In some cases, the return rate is lower; Dustmann and Görlach 2016 finds only a 20% return rate from Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States (combining a variety of studies in figure 1). In some cases, it is higher - 85% (!) of Greeks who migrated to Germany from 1960 to 1984 eventually returned to Greece. Across contexts and skill levels, average return rates seem to be around one-third.
This bears some emphasis; for many, many immigrants, immigration is not a permanent decision. Indeed, most workers who go abroad do not intend to stay abroad forever. It is a relatively common pattern for workers to migrate to higher wages, work there long enough to achieve their financial goals and then go home.
We should not treat migration as a one-off, permanent choice; rather, it is sometimes a permanent relocation and sometimes a temporary economic choice.
Who stays and who returns to home countries?
So: who tends to return and who stays?
At the country level
At the country level, the predictors of likelihood of return are not very surprising. Many emigrants from wealthy countries with strong economies eventually return; poor, war-torn countries see much lower rates of return.
However, that simplification elides the role of the receiving country. It is the difference in your fortunes at home and abroad that appears to make you more (or less) likely to stay. The richer the destination country, the likelier you are to stay long-term; the richer your home country, the likelier you are to go home.
GDP isn’t destiny, though; Indonesia, Zambia and Mongolia stand out as being poor countries with high rates of return, while wealthy England has about the same rate of return as Albania.
Interestingly, cultural similarity does not seem to make you more likely to stay; indeed, the reverse is true. Migrants from another country that speaks the same language - for instance, Nigerian migrants to the UK - are more likely to go home, not less.
At the individual level
More interesting than looking at the country level, though, is the predictors of an individual staying long-term. What kinds of people are likely to stay?
One could imagine two different worlds. In one, the highest skilled migrants are the most likely to go home, because they have the best options at home and don’t need to stay abroad for good opportunities.
In another, the lowest skilled migrants are likeliest to go home because they are struggling in the new country. For instance, if you’re down on your luck, it’s relatively common to move in with family for a bit to help you get back on your feet. If your family is in another country, back you go to that country.
Which one of these is a better reflection of what actually happens?
On average, return migrants appear to be negatively selected relative to the migrant population. While not universally true, this pattern seems to be relatively robust across countries and time periods. It has been true in the US in the age of the mass migration and it is still true in the modern US, in the Netherlands, in Egypt…
To me, this makes sense.
Return rates are relatively high across the board; a reasonable percentage of returns will be driven by external shocks - for instance, one might have an ailing parent at home and you end up returning to take care of them. This is likely to happen with roughly the same frequency among both above-average and below-average migrants; your parents’ health is unlikely to be correlated with your relative success in your new country.
But of the returns driven by skill level, I think the below-average are more likely to return than the above-average. Most people migrate to places where they will make more money than in their home country; staying is probably the earnings-optimizing path if you’re doing OK.
It is the people who are struggling - who might have struck out in the new job market - that are more likely to look around and go “fuck this, I’m going home”. Indeed, this can be driven by the visa process itself - some people have to have employment to stay in the new country, and if they’re fired, they must return home.
To the recipient country, this means that people who stay long-term tend to be positively selected relative to the overall immigrant population. If you are a fiscally motivated country, this pattern is clearly great for you. You’ve ended up with doubly selected migrants - you first selected the migrants you thought were valuable to admit and then those that didn’t succeed go home. Amazing for you!
However, it does raise the spectre of brain drain from sending countries. If only the most successful migrants stay, does that mean that advanced economies are siphoning off the talent of the developing world?
Migration, Innovation and Skill Acquisition
In some sense, yes, this is true by construction. In most countries, migrants are more educated and richer than average; if some of this population never comes home, the country has lost people who are educated and wealthy.
I think this explanation ignores two important things, though:
1. The general equilibrium effects of migration
I’ve written about this elsewhere, but the case for general equilibrium effects boils down to: you are more likely to spend time and effort on training if there are higher returns to that training.
Let’s say you are a person with a high school education in Uganda. You make perhaps $1000 a year. Getting a degree will cost you $500/year, so a total of around $2000 (excluding foregone wages and opportunity cost), but it will increase your earnings to $1500 a year. This is clearly worthwhile, but paying back a loan for tuition would likely take you some time.
Let us contrast the case where you have a 10% chance of migrating to somewhere where you make $10,000 a year. Your expected value of a degree is now considerably higher and you should be more willing to spend money and take out loans for training.
Thus, the number of skilled people in an economy should scale with the returns to skill. Since migration raises the returns to skill, it pulls more people into pursuing additional training. And indeed, this is what we observe in the Philippines; the possibility of becoming a nurse in the US led more Filipinos to train as nurses.
Thus, it is the prospect of being able to migrate that creates some of those educated and wealthy individuals.
2. The skill effects of migration
This is the key value of return migration to a country: migrants gain important skills while abroad. Some of these skills might be impossible to obtain in one’s home country; some skills might simply be easier to obtain in other economies.
The most obvious version of this is for specialized training. For instance, some low-income countries do not have some kinds of medical training (e.g. anesthesia). If one is to become an anesthesiologist, one must migrate to another country. Some of those migrants will stay in the new country; some will eventually return to their home country. But even if only a few come home, you’ll still end up with more anesthesiologists than you started with in the home country, because return migration is literally the only way you acquire anesthesiologists at all.
There are less drastic examples of this as well. There have been a number of industries that were kickstarted by bringing back skills from another country. People go abroad, gain skills and then bring those skills back to improve the efficiency of firms in their home country.
Bahar, Özgüzel, Hauptmann and Rapoport 2019 highlights “the textile sector in Prussia, of the IT sector in India or Israel, of the garment industry in Bangladesh, or of the car-parts industry in Bosnia” as examples of such. They also show that when migrants from Yugoslavia returned from Germany, they brought knowledge that increased the productivity of Yugoslav firms.
That is, return migration is how technological and knowledge diffusion happens. We can see this in knowledge production specifically. Choudhury 2016 finds that migrants in India spurred innovation; Fry 2022 also finds that returning scientists build bridges and collaboration between the production frontier and home countries.
This is in effect a theory of neither “brain drain” nor “brain gain”, but rather “brain circulation” - “human capital enhancement via (temporary) mobility which, implicitly, is used more effectively upon return”.
What’s the counterfactual?
Would firms be better off if those people had stayed in the country the whole time? This is a harder question to answer, but I think the answer is probably not.
In general, having advanced-economy job experience is highly valued in emerging economies. Indeed, it’s considerably more highly valued than having worked the same number of years at home (with returns to international experience up to 200% of that from home experience).
This is very widely reported: in addition to Amanzadeh, Kermani and McQuade 2024’s multi-country data, there are papers showing an earnings premium for return migrants in Hungary, Albania (1, 2), Romania, Ireland, Mexico, “several West African countries” and Egypt. If we think employers are acting rationally, this suggests that skills gained by migrants really are very valuable and home countries benefit from having return migrants.
Return migrants also appear to be more likely to become entrepreneurs (and employers of others) than those who have never left home. A review found that the likelihood of self-employment is higher among return migrants than non-migrants, even when the migration itself is quasi-randomly assigned.
Notably, it is not just that return migrants are more likely to employ themselves; they become more likely to employ others as well. Return migrants appear to be particularly likely to be “job creators”, thus raising employment levels in the areas they return to.
Note that all of this is true even though return migrants are negatively selected. Even migrants who didn’t do all that well as migrants - who earned less than average - appear to benefit from the experience.
For instance, during the age of mass migration in the US, Norwegians were more likely to move back when they weren’t very successful in the US. But “upon returning to Norway, return migrants held higher-paid occupations than Norwegians who never moved, despite hailing from poorer backgrounds. They were also more likely to get married after return.”
Beyond economics: what are the cultural impacts of return migration?
This is largely a literature review about the economics of migration, but I am a political scientist. Therefore, it’s worth noting one other impact from return migration: cultural change.
In general, migrants tend to move to more democratic countries (relative to their home country). This is not particularly because people have a strong preference for democracies, but rather because most rich countries are democracies. If you are maximizing earnings, you want to go to Europe or the US and so you want to go to a democracy.
When people migrate, they begin to integrate into their new society, adopting at least some of that society’s norms. When people migrate to democracies, they seem to develop a taste for political accountability.
Batista and Vicente 2011, Chauvet and Mercier 2014 and Tuccio, Wahba and Hamdouch 2019 all find that return migrants keep this taste for accountability and demand more from their home governments.
Conclusions
I worry sometimes that this literature review - of which this post is a part - comes across as too positive about migration. Surely migration cannot be good on all fronts; someone must be worse off because they have lost (or gained) population.
And it is true that there are possible negatives to migration. I think it’s plausible that migration would be net negative for sending countries if all migrants stayed away for their entire lives. It’s also plausible that the fiscal impacts of migration would be worse if every receiving country kept every migrant forever.
Return migration blunts both these criticisms. Sending countries gain innovation and skills; the receiving country keeps doubly-selected migrants. Migrants that stay abroad generally have much higher incomes than if they had stayed home, but migrants that return home also have higher income than if they’d never left.
Return migration is a key part of what makes migration the little intervention that could.
Executive summary: This exploratory analysis argues that return migration—where roughly one-third to one-half of migrants eventually go back to their home countries—is a vital but underappreciated part of the global migration system, generating economic, social, and institutional benefits for both origin and destination countries through “brain circulation” rather than simple brain drain or gain.
Key points:
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