The Road Back Home is Never Long: Refugee Return Migration

Abstract The current paper, building on qualitative research for refugees’ return migration, endeavours to provide an empirical evaluation of return migration. More specifically, this study focuses on the effect of political and economic stimuli on refugees’ choice to return. We conducted a quantitative analysis using a negative binomial model with fixed effects on a longitudinal dataset for more than 150 countries for the period 1991–2018. Our results reveal that the strongest predictors of return migration are political factors. Notably, a reduction in human rights violations, the elimination of genocides/politicides, the termination of wars and peace agreements are the most influential variables. Economic incentives are relatively weak, indicating that economic motives are not the principal factor for refugee returnees’ decision-making. The most robust economic covariate, educational access, is a conglomerate of economic and social factors; consequently, it is more influential within its group.

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