States of Return: Rethinking Migration and Mobility

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.