Do Return Migration Policies Matter? A typology of young Romanian returnees’ attitudes towards return policies

Abstract

Abstract During the last decades, the interest in migration policies has increased, both at institutional level and in academia. However, if the scientific understanding of policies associated with migration at destination has tremendously advanced, our knowledge about origin countries interventions in migration stays limited. Our paper addresses one of the largely unexplored topic of this area: if and what kind of policies supporting return/returnees the returnees themselves find appropriate. The analysis is based on 120 interviews with Romanian returnees, aged 18 to 39, coming back after at least 6 months of working or studying abroad in different EU countries. The article reveals that even if the return policies are generally positively evaluated by the Romanian returned migrants, not all of them support the idea of having policies specially designed for attracting migrants back to the origin country. Some of them simply reject the idea and others are sceptical about the state capacity of implementing this type of policies. The paper explores all the main clusters of attitudes towards return migration policies and illustrates each of them with excerpts from in-depth interviews.