ABSTRACT
The publication in 2005 of our collection entitled The Experience of Return Migration: Caribbean Perspectives heralded the emergence of a new agenda in international and transnational migration research; namely, examinations of the experiences and adaptations on return of younger and youthful migrants to their ancestral homes in the global South (Potter et al. 2005). Prior to this publication, there had been a few references to such pre-retirement returns in examinations of international circulation (Byron and Condon 1996; Condon and Ogden 1996; Conway et al. 1990; Ellis et al. 1996), in investigations seeking to link return visiting with return migration (Duval 2002, 2004), or in wider samples of returnees to specic Caribbean origins (Byron 2000; DeSouza, 1998; Duany 2002; Gmelch 1987, 1992; Thomas-Hope 1986, 1999). One of the present authors, Rob Potter, had published work on young returnees to Barbados a few years earlier (Potter 2001a, 2001b, 2005a, 2005b), so that research in this area was underway, but the topic largely remained ‘under the radar’. Fortunately, we were able to recruit contributors to our 2005 collection with different islands as their research foci, so that we ended up with a wide regional coverage of Caribbean case studies – Barbados, St Lucia, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Accordingly, comparative insights could be drawn on these pre-retirement, young or youthful return migrants’ experiences and adjustments ‘back home’.
