Democratic Decline and Return Migration: What Motivates Highly-Skilled Return Migration to Autocratizing Contexts?

Gulay Turkmen, WZB Berlin Social Science Center

Migration scholars often present democratic decline as a push factor triggering emigration. This effect is especially pronounced in the case of highly-qualified emigration, where citizens with high economic, cultural, and social capital tend to migrate from autocratizing countries to more democratic ones. Yet, not much attention has been paid to the question of why highly-qualified citizens, who have the resources and capability to settle abroad, and who are concerned about the political path the country has taken, would opt to return back to authoritarian contexts. Focusing on Turkey, a country that has undergone a drastic autocratization process in the last decade, this article provides answers to this puzzle. Building on 40 semi-structured interviews with highly-qualified Turkish citizens who were born and raised in Turkey and who, after living abroad for at least two years, voluntarily moved back to Turkey between 2016 and 2020, it finds that return decisions of highly-skilled migrants in Turkey are shaped by three main groups of reasons: affective/emotional reasons (e.g. yearning for family and friends), socio-economic reasons (e.g. experiencing downward social mobility in destination countries), and push factors abroad (e.g. discrimination).Yet, it also find that autocratization, which has so far been highlighted as a push factor for emigration, has paradoxically acted as a motivating factor for some return migrants in Turkey, in that they wanted to move back to the country to bring about political change and contribute to the fight against autocratization. Building on this, the article proposes that, in some contexts, return migration can be seen as voice a la Hirschman and the reasons for return can only be adequately captured through a holistic synthesis of macro-level structural factors, such as class, discrimination, political transformation with micro-level personal motives, such as social ties, identity, and emotions.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 14. (Dis)assembling the State: New Approaches to Studying State and Society