"They Think I Am a Free Lunch". Why Everyday Interactions Between Emigrants and Sending Communities May Actually Discourage Return

The recent research on transnational fields has had the great merit of claiming attention to the important topic of the relations between Emigrants and the sending communities. Such research has documented how international migration is a factor of social change not only in receiving societies, the traditional focus of research, but also - and may be even more - in the places of origins of emigrants. The potentiality of such approach, however, have been unduly constrained by the widespread - and often implicit - tendency to assume that transnationalism is perceived as a challenge only in receiving states and societies. We will argue, on the contrary, that receiving communities show a deep ambivalence toward their emigrants. We will document how it is possible to identify in many sending communities a  set of social mechanisms - operating at the kinship, interpersonal, communal and symbolic level - that severely constrain the maintenance and development of long-term transnational relationships. Such understudied mechanisms may actually weaken such transnational spaces and contribute to prevent return migration. 

These arguments will be grounded in an analysis of the data collected in a long-term, ethnographic, multi-sited project on female migrations from some Eastern European countries to the household services sector of some Mediterranean countries. Researchers have carried out in coordinated way ethnographic observations of foreign careworkers both in the sending and receiving contexts over several years. A particular importance has been given to following some informants in their trips back home as well as carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in the place of origins while they were absent.