Choosing to Return

The experience of skilled migrants returning home has not received significant attention in the literature. This work explores the experience of voluntary return migration as a matter of personal choice and not forced by economic adversity or issues of status. Participants were interviewed in Athens, Greece. The author then adopted an innovative phenomenological method to extract essential themes. Themes encompassed persistent coexisting feelings of both belonging and Otherness, a significant event triggering the return, and language as transient identity. Findings are discussed in the light of the existential notion of choice, as well as in relation to poststructuralist approaches to identity and ‘subject'. Common to phenomenological research, the topic was chosen out of personal interest, as the author is a skilled voluntary migrant, who chose not to return.