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  • Ethnic Return Migrations—(Are Not Quite)—Diasporic Homecomings
  • Fran Markowitz (bio)
Keywords

Return migration, diasporas, co-nationals, ethnicity, citizenship regimes

Diasporic Homecomings: Ethnic Return Migration in Comparative Perspective. Ed. Takeyuki Tsuda. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.

In February 2004, in preparation for the publication of our co-edited volume, Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, Anders H. Stefansson conducted a search of book titles on Amazon.com. That search revealed 7,575 titles under the subject heading of “immigration/emigration.” Of these, a mere 157, or 2%, reappeared in the “return migration” category. Some five years later, I replicated that search. This time, 19,700 titles were listed under immigration/emigration, and 20% (4,027) of these turned up as publications about return migration. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, from an under-researched curious footnote, return migration has transmogrified into a “clearly recognized . . . significant global phenomenon” (Brettell 2006, 989). Anthropologists and sociologists, storytellers, statisticians, economists, and political analysts have delved into, and are researching and writing about the return of diasporic people(s) to their ancestral homelands.

One of the latest explorations into this “significant global phenomenon” is Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda’s 2009 edited volume, Diasporic Homecomings: Ethnic Return Migration in Comparative Perspective. The book’s major strength is in the tightness of its focus and the unifying tone of its chapters. Perhaps it strives to do for ethnic return migration what Robin Cohen (1997) did for diasporas: to define, categorize, and compare them; to delineate common tendencies and unusual variations; to serve as a guide for policymakers, as well as a reference book for academics. In all these ways, Diasporic Homecomings differs mightily [End Page 234] from its two immediate predecessors, the much more tentative and poetic volumes edited by Long and Oxfeld (2004), and Markowitz and Stefansson (2004). The titles of those volumes speak to the uncertainty of home and the unsettling cultural disruptions that accompany return migration. Conversely, Tsuda’s title announces that there are diasporic homecomings, and defines them as ethnic return migration. The volume’s chapters provide analytical descriptions of the social, political, and economic causes and effects of these phenomena as they occur at opposite ends of the Eurasian continent.

Throughout the 1990s, social scientists strove to define, classify, and understand diasporas (see esp. Safran 1991; Clifford 1994; Cohen 1997) and often looked to them as a way of busting the boundedness of nations (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994) and challenging the dichotomies of insider/outsider, native/alien, “us” and “them” (Brah 1996; Radhakrishnan 1996). At the end of the first decade of the twentyfirst century, Tsuda has delineated a distinctive space within the migration and diasporas literature for what he calls “ethnic (sic) return migration” (1). Undergirded by Weber’s classic definition of ethnicity, the book establishes itself as an authoritative resource that documents and explains the complex dynamics of diasporic people returning to places where they, their parents, and even grandparents never set foot. The book’s fifteen contributors join with Tsuda to provide analyses of “most of the world’s major ethnic return migrant groups” (1).

Diasporic Homecomings wastes no time in announcing its major findings. From the very first pages, the book disabuses readers of any romantic notions they might hold of ethnic solidarity. Tsuda states unequivocally, “Most ethnic return migration has been primarily a response to economic pressures” (3). One by one the chapters show that ethnic return migrants set off for the ancestral homeland not with the ideological goal of reuniting with the nation but motivated individualistically and instrumentally to improve their, and their children’s, socioeconomic status (compare Pattie 2004, who provides a stunning example of a national reunification project among twentieth-century diasporic Armenians). Co-ethnicity provides these individuals with the means to their ends via favorable immigration policies (as is or was the case in Germany, Israel, Japan, and Spain), and/or shared language and the ease of entering the homeland (as in the cases of Finland Swedes’ immigration to Sweden; Transylvania Hungarians crossing from Romania to Hungary; and Korean Chinese returning to South Korea). As varied as these peoples may be, both in the homeland and in diaspora...

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