ABSTRACT
Migration has traditionally been considered as a single, one-way, and permanent change of residence. The dominant narratives on international migration typically focus on the relocation of surplus workers from poorer to richer countries, as well as on their impact on the host society, particularly the United States (see Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996; Portes and Rumbaut 1996). However, an axiom of international migration is that every flow of people generates a corresponding counter-flow. For instance, historians have documented the massive reverse movements from North America to southern and eastern Europe – especially Italy and Poland – in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Hoerder 1985; Rosenblum 1973). Contemporary patterns of return migration have also been studied in Central America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, West Africa, and other regions of the world (see Cordell et al. 1996). Less well known is the propensity of some groups of people – such as Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Jamaicans – to move back and forth, or circulate, between their places of origin and destination. Such two-way, repetitive, and temporary moves do not fit easily within conventional models of migration. As Douglas Massey et al. (1998) point out, current thinking on transnational migration remains largely framed within nineteenth century concepts and methods.
