Concepts: Diaspora, transnational ties, return

The impact of migration is commonly seen as the creation of gaps in the sending country – brain drain, skills shortages, ‘unemployment export’, a reduced working-age population supporting an increasingly aged popu-lation, and so on. However, in recent decades scholars and policymakers have become more aware that migration creates ties as well as gaps: ties with foreign receiving countries that have impact on sending ones. Kapur (2010, 14), writing about India, distinguishes four channels of impact: a prospect channel (where hope of future migration shapes stayers’ behav-iour), an absence channel, a diaspora channel and a return channel. This section focuses on understanding these transnational links and, in particu-lar, diaspora and return channels of impact.

As Brubaker (2005) and Faist (2010) discuss, the term ‘diaspora’ has been stretched in recent years. It has been losing connotations of forced dispersal, with a longing to return to a lost homeland. Although this remains relevant for refugees, ‘diaspora’ is often used for any group of migrants originating from the same country. In keeping with its original meaning, however, ‘diaspora’ is often used in the singular, as if all

co-nationals scattered around different foreign countries shared a single group membership.

The ‘diaspora’ construct is one way of imagining migrants collec-tively. Morawska (2011, 1030) refers to it as an ideal type. Diaspora help for sending countries is often considered an attractive alternative to migrant return, and a key to positive migration impact. Since UNESCO’s 1970s programme for encouraging diasporas to diffuse scientific knowl-edge in countries of origin (Raghuram 2009, 106), policymakers who believe migration impact can be shaped have adopted the term, together with its built-in assumptions of ethnic solidarity. The impression that a diaspora really exists as a single unit is bolstered by specific migrants claiming to speak and act on its behalf (Sinatti and Horst 2015, 136).

Indeed, Brubaker (2005, 1) suggests diaspora should be considered ‘not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim’. Although our book does not refer to a Polish diaspora, on the grounds that the phrase implies a misleading degree of unity, we do use ‘diaspora organisations’. These denote groups with a strong sense of diaspora identity, which claim to speak for fellow nationals abroad. As a result, they often ignore the sepa-rate interests of less powerful co-nationals such as women and manual workers.

Migrants can help increase income and wealth in their origin coun-tries via ‘social units such as hometown, religious, ethnic, village or alumni associations’ (Faist 2016, 334). In many countries, migrants display impressive concern for their communities of origin. For example, Xiang (2013, 188) writes about villagers living in Beijing who ‘made generous financial contributions to traditional ceremonies and public projects such as road constructions even though the villages were almost empty most of the time due to outmigration’. Hometown associations are often seen as the quintessential development tool, and are quite common in many countries across the world (Goldring 2004; Orozco and Rouse 2007).

However, as far as we know, the literature provides no examples of hometown associations among CEE migrants living in western Europe.³ Moreh (2014, 1764), writing about Alcalá, near Madrid, argues that Romanians abroad do not form hometown associations and suggests that, in the one case where a group did support a twinning arrangement, this was an exception to their normal preoccupation with members’ affairs in Spain. Although CEE policymakers would like to utilise diaspora organi-sations (Hazans 2016b, 338; Nevinskaitė 2016, 139),⁴ migrant organisa-tions are usually concerned about the affairs and cultural identity of co-nationals living in the receiving society (see also Thaut 2009, 220, on Lithuania). Rare instances of CEE diaspora engagement seem to be based

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on economic self-interest. An example is the pressure exercised through social media by Moldovans living abroad on the Moldovan government to lower road fees for cars with foreign licence plates (Cucoş 2015).

In the case of contemporary CEE migration, which is a mass migra-tion of individuals, claims by an organisamigra-tion to speak on behalf of a ‘dias-pora’ should be treated with care. It is more helpful to understand the situation as being one where members of a certain society have to some extent transferred themselves abroad. ‘Polish society abroad’ is theorised in chapter 9. The most significant point to note here is that ‘society abroad’

emerges thanks to the creation of dense transnational fields.

Nieswand (2014, 404) writes of a ‘wave of transnationalization of the Ghanaian society that was stimulated by mass migration from Ghana over the last few decades’. This phenomenon equally characterises other sending societies. Empirical research across the world testifies to an inten-sification of migrants’ links with friends and relatives in the origin country through transnational practices and ‘simultaneity, or living lives that incor-porate daily activities, routines, and institutions located both in a destination country and transnationally’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, 1003). Accord-ing to Guarnizo, Sanchez and Roach (1999, 369) ‘transnational migrants tend to merge into a single social continuum (that is, transnational social field), rather than separate their settlement “here” and their communities

“there”.’ Transnational activities include using social media that allow migrants to conduct their lives simultaneously with friends and family physically based in the other country, as well as more traditional prac-tices such as eating ethnic food, following news and popular culture, pay-ing visits home, and so on. Through such practices, migrants develop some sense of ‘double belonging’ (Vertovec 2004, 975), ‘dual membership’

(Levitt 2001) or, in a formulation which hints that more than two coun-tries or locations can be involved, a ‘diversity of reference points’ (Boc-cagni 2014, 2). However, in different settings abroad, and at different moments, one membership is felt more strongly than the other. As Castles (2002, 1159) observes, ‘Individuals and groups constantly negotiate choices with regard to their participation in host societies, their relation-ships with their homelands, and their links to co-ethnics.’

Without using a transnational lens, it is hard to understand how migrants and stayers function in today’s world, and our thinking remains trapped in the ‘container’ of methodological nationalism. The existence of transnational social space affects the emotional lives of many millions of non-migrants, such as the hero of the Allegro advertisement described in chapter 1. In fact, in high-migration countries such as Poland or the United Kingdom, it is hard to agree with Carling (2008) that any sending

and receiving country residents live lives completely untouched by migra-tion and therefore outside transnamigra-tional social fields.

The term ‘transnational families’ captures this idea of families living in two or more countries, although it is used differently by differ-ent scholars. It refers alternatively to nuclear families split between two countries, when migrants maintain a ‘shadow household’ (Faist 2004, 8) in the sending country, and to nuclear families who live together abroad but maintain transnational links with extended family in the country of origin. This is a particularly sensitive topic on which, as Slany shows in chapter 6, scholarly, evidence-based interpretations can contradict assumptions made by politicians and journalists. Caregivers are by nature prone to worries about the adequacy of the care they provide, and to feel-ings of guilt if it might be perceived as falling short of an ideal. Caring for relatives at a geographical distance magnifies such concerns, particularly when the norm in sending societies such as those in eastern and south-ern Europe is that female family members should be at home to fulfil car-ing responsibilities. Mădroane (2016, 239), for example, writcar-ing on Romanian media anxieties about children ‘left behind’, mentions ‘cultural perceptions that proximity is a condition for care’.

The transnational lens permits a close-up view of the actual, many and varied types of relationship that are maintained transnationally. Schol-ars writing about migrants with good opportunities for engaging in trans-national practices point out that absence of migrants from relatives in the sending country has a different quality today from in the past. More intense and real-time contact, thanks to technology, ‘softens’ absence and facili-tates more intense transnational caring than used to be possible. Nedelcu, for example, quotes a Romanian engineer in Toronto who reported: ‘This evening I have to baby-sit. When my wife is home alone [in Bucharest] and she has to go downstairs, for example to prepare dinner, she focuses the webcam on the babies. I keep an eye on them and if one of them starts to cry, I let her know by SMS.’ She concludes that ‘in the digital age of com-munication, family ties have not really weakened’ (Nedelcu 2012, 1351).

Other scholars are less upbeat. While recognising that migrant relatives often try their best, they also highlight that they can find it hard to provide intensive care at a distance. (See, e.g. Vullnetari and King 2008 on Albania;

on villagers in Bulgaria and Romania, see Kulcsár and Brădăţan 2014.) Transnational ties are also economic. Many households practise complex livelihood strategies, where one member’s labour abroad facili-tates livelihoods in the origin country. For example, Nagy (2009, 8–10) describes the pluriactivity (pluriactivité) of households in Maramureş:

migrants send money back to Romania, which families invest in building

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and improving guest houses for foreign tourists; these relatives then invest profits from guest houses to subsidise another family member to go abroad.

Migrants also send long-distance advice (‘My son phoned me from Spain a week ago to say he had already sent the money and how I should do the work’) and, back in Romania for the summer, use their know-how to act as ‘cultural brokers’ and liaise with foreign guests. Grill and Anghel describes the upward social mobility of Slovak and Romanian Roma (Anghel 2016; Grill 2012, 1273–4) who enhance their status relative to their fellow villagers by temporary spells of working abroad.

These are not merely household-level economic activities, but are embedded in a social context. The term ‘transnational social space’ indi-cates that ‘social life is not confined by nation-state boundaries’ (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, 1007). In some senses, whole countries seem to be linked by a dense web of migration-created ties, creating societies that spread across borders (see chapter 9), but in other contexts, regions or even localities have their own transnational identities. As discussed in chapter 2, regional migration cultures, otherwise known as ‘cultures of migration’ (Kandel and Massey 2002) are noticeable in Poland, as indeed in other CEE countries such as Romania (Horváth 2008) or Estonia (Nugin 2014). We use the term to denote norms about who should migrate, why, how and where; sets of meanings attributed to migration; and the assump-tion that internaassump-tional migraassump-tion is a commonplace livelihood strategy (White 2016d; 2017).

In such locations, migration networks constantly expand, as migra-tion breeds migramigra-tion. This is one of migramigra-tion’s most important impacts.

Moreover, one aspect of this culture is often a preference for international over internal migration, which Bélorgey et al. (2012, 3) claim typifies the whole post-communist region. International and internal migration strat-egies exist in relation to one another (King and Skeldon 2010); in the case of contemporary CEE, it seems that international migration depresses internal migration. As Hazans (2016b, 314) writes about Latvia, Lithua-nia and EstoLithua-nia, when everyone now has close family members and friends abroad, international migration becomes the ‘new normal’.

To sum up, since the launch of the transnational perspective in migration studies by Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton (1992), a considerable literature has emerged, reflecting the fact that most migra-tion scholars agree this perspective is central to understanding contem-porary migration and its impact on sending and receiving societies. Our book examines transnational practices, identities, families and livelihoods, and considers how individuals, both migrants and – most importantly for

our argument – stayers, are changed by living in transnational social spaces.

Turning to ‘return’, it is a relief to use a word that, unlike ‘diaspora’

or ‘transnational’, is used in everyday speech. This is generally an advan-tage for qualitative researchers conducting interviews, but it can lead to ambiguity. As Long and Oxfeld (2004, 3) remark, ‘Return is a category that people themselves use, embellish and understand.’ The ambiguity arises because different people imply different degrees of finality to the concept.

For many, ‘return’ implies ‘return for good’, though this is often not spelled out. When considering the topic, it is wise to keep in mind the question

‘return for how long?’

Our discussion starts from the premise that return is not ‘the end of the story’ but a process of migration backwards. It therefore shares nearly all the same properties and complexities as the original migration move.

(See discussion in White 2017, 200–1.) Return can best be thought of as intertwining with integration experiences and transnational practices, in both countries. It often seems to happen that migrants experiment with return, but this experience puts them off living in the origin country, and they perform a ‘double return’ (White 2014a, 2014b), sometimes to settle abroad, definitively removing themselves from the sending country population (see, e.g. Hazans 2016a on double returns from Latvia). Some-times they continue circulating between their origin country and places abroad.

Media in both sending and receiving countries have a tendency to speculate about ‘return waves’ of migration (see, e.g. King and Mai 2008, 235, on Albania, or media interest in post-Brexit referendum return from the United Kingdom). If such waves took place, they would have profound impacts on both sending and receiving countries. The global economic cri-sis did result in quite a lot of return migration globally (OECD 2017, 246) but did not produce a return wave to CEE (Barcevičius et al. 2012; Benton and Petrovic 2013; OECD 2013; Zaiceva and Zimmermann 2016).⁵ This suggests that the EU mobility area – where it is possible to sit out crises with support from the receiving country welfare state, or fairly easily move to a different EU destination – may not be conducive to return migration waves.

Return in fact does not usually occur in waves. Why migrants return, and how well they succeed, are individual, often emotional matters, depending on a range of emic and etic factors (King 2000). It seems that

‘non-economic factors generally weigh more heavily in the return decision than do economic factors, certainly in comparison to their role in the original decision to emigrate’ (King 2000, 15). Even if migrants return

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because their job abroad ends, this is not strictly an economic reason, since emotional ties mean that migrants usually return home rather than to a new location in the sending country. A study of Hungarian, Latvian, Polish and Romanian returnees during the global economic crisis concluded that most ‘went back for family reasons or because they had achieved their emi-gration goals’ (Barcevičius et al. 2012, 1). The persisting wage gap between old and new EU member states reduces the economic incentive to return (Kaczmarczyk, Anacka and Fihel 2016, 222).

The fact that many returnees choose, for sentimental reasons, to return to locations with few economic prospects calls into question the assumption made in policy literature (see below) that return migration aids development. It is also important because migrants already have pre-conceptions about their home locations, for example, scepticism about their capacity for change. On the other hand, they have an emotional investment in the place, which should prompt them to wish to improve it.

Typologies of return migrant have been constructed to aid under-standing the complexity of return. Often, typologies relate to migrants’

socio-demographic characteristics. For example, it is noted that highly educated returnees will have different impacts than manual workers.⁶ Other typologies focus on the success/failure and innovatory/conservative dimensions of return, building on the insights of Cerase (1974). Cerase distinguished between returns of failure, conservatism (where the returnee assimilates back into the sending society without attempting to change it), retirement and innovation. The return of any migrant changes the com-position of the origin society, so all returns are significant. However, the

‘return of innovation’ is the most interesting for analysing how change might be diffused more widely. Since returnees act in transnational social spaces, transnational approaches are particularly helpful for understand-ing their potential influence (Cassarino 2004, 262, 265). As discussed in chapter 4, many factors contribute to whether migrants become ‘agents of change’ (Grabowska, Garapich, et al. 2017).

Reintegration post return is particularly well-researched. Carling, Mortensen and Wu (2011, 3) list 257 publications on the topic. As empha-sised in literature on immigrant integration, integration is a two-way process, involving both the migrant and also the wider society and state.

Successful return can be supported by origin country institutions (see, e.g.

Kaska 2013, 34–7, on Estonia; Mereuta 2013, 134, on Romania; OECD 2017, on non-EU countries). Barcevičius et al. (2012, 44–5) suggest that in Poland, Romania and Latvia returnees are a priori sceptical about offi-cial initiatives and not much aware of their existence. Some non-European countries, such as Indonesia, accord returning migrants a hero’s welcome

(Fardah 2012). However, other societies receive returnees less enthusi-astically. Latvia (Barcevičius et  al. 2012, 44), Lithuania (Nevinskaitė 2016),⁷ Estonia (Anniste, Pukkonen and Paas 2017, 106) and Poland (Dzięglewski 2016; Dziekońska 2012, 249) are probably not the only CEE countries where emigrants and returnees can feel disliked by some employers and neighbours. This is turn can promote pessimism about whether returnees can effect change in their country of origin. Particu-larly delicate is the integration of ‘returnees’ who were born abroad as descendants of Cold War émigrés. This helps explain the relatively lim-ited impact of a specific type of post-communist ‘return’, when second- or third-generation co-nationals migrated after 1989 to countries such as the Czech Republic and Croatia (Tomić 2016) or Poland (Fihel and Górny 2013; Górny and Kolankiewicz 2002; Górny and Osipovič 2006, 99–100;

Klein-Hitpass 2016).

3. Socio-economic costs and benefits of migration