ABSTRACT
The idea that out-migration implies re-migration, that what ventures off must come back, has been a truism in theoretical writing for many years. As early as 1885, the scholar Ernest George Ravenstein, Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, delivered a historic paper entitled “The Laws of Migration,” in which he asserted that migratory flows tend to generate significant compensating “counter-currents” or “counter-streams.”2 Subsequent studies from the intervening decades went on to substantiate Ravenstein’s “fourth law” and provide numerous examples of European migratory return movements. Since the 1970s, a more specialized scholarly literature about re-migration has emerged, marked off by Frank Bovenkerk’s monograph The Sociology of Return Migration: A Bibliographic Essay (1974), where many of the issues and angles of the return phenomenon are taken up and related to a range of quantitative and theoretical studies. As might be expected, scholarly and public interest has increased significantly with the advent of transnational demographic movements and widespread circular migratory patterns under globalization.3 The drama of migratory “counter-streams” and the lifeexperience of migrants settling back into or paying visits to their countries of origin and ancestral homelands is endemic to the contemporary period, and promises to grow in frequency and intensity in the foreseeable future.
