Some Influences of Returnees on Their Home Country

Abstract

It is remarkable how little attention migration studies have paid to this aspect of return migration. Even in the massive pile of literature on social change, modernization and Westernization, one hardly finds any discussion about the role returnees play in these processes. This is all the more surprising if we remember that many elites in the “new states” have been educated in Western countries (short references can be found in Benda (1962) and Shils (1960) but these authors certainly do not make foreign education the focus of their analysis). The main reason, I think, why returnees have been passed unnoticed in social research so often, is that their number is nearly always very modest. Though their local effect can certainly be important.