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Currently, two distinct bodies of scholarship address the increased volume and diversity of global return migration since the mid-1990s. The economic sociology of return, which assumes that return is voluntary, investigates how time living and working abroad affects returnees’ labor market opportunities and the resulting implications for economic development. A second scholarship, the political sociology of return, recognizing the increasing role of both emigration and immigration states in controlling and managing migration, examines how state and institutional actors in countries of origin shape the reintegration experiences of deportees, rejected asylum seekers, and nonadmitted migrants forced home. We review these literatures independently, examining their research questions, methodologies, and findings, while also noting limitations and areas where additional research is needed. We then engage these literatures to provide an integrated path forward for researching and theorizing return migration—a synergized resource mobilization framework. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 46 is July 30, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates. 

Recent estimates suggest that nearly half of all international migrants return to their communities of origin within five years of emigration. Motivated by high levels of return migration, scholars are increasingly investigating the ways in which return migrants mobilise resources they acquire abroad, such as human and financial capital, to achieve economic mobility upon return. Yet, resource mobilisation and labour market reintegration unfold in heterogeneous community contexts. To understand the labour market reintegration of return migrants in various local contexts, we draw on an eight-year study that included interviews with 153 Mexican returnees to examine how labour market reintegration and resource mobilisation vary across three types of communities: urban, urban-adjacent, and rural. U.S.-Mexico migration is the largest binational return flow in the world, providing a unique opportunity to explore variations in the reintegration experiences of returnees. We find that labour market reintegration and resource mobilisation are contextually embedded processes that respond to the social, economic, and spatial features of migrants’ origin communities. Following our analysis, we extend three testable hypotheses that can guide future research on international migration and return. 

“[L]abor-market reintegration is a complex and uneven process for return migrants.” Sixth in a series on social mobility around the world.