Ask most migrants about their plans when they first leave, and you'll hear a strikingly consistent answer: they're going back. Surveys conducted across decades and continents — from Turkish guest workers in Germany to Filipino nurses in the Gulf — consistently show that a majority of migrants frame their move as temporary. A few years of hard work, some savings accumulated, a specific goal achieved, then home.

Yet the data tells a persistently different story. Return migration rates fall far below what stated intentions would predict. What researchers call the "myth of return" is one of the most robust findings in migration studies — a gap between what migrants say they'll do and what actually happens that holds across nationalities, time periods, and receiving contexts.

Understanding why requires looking beyond simple individual choice. The forces that convert a temporary move into permanent settlement operate across economic, social, and psychological dimensions — often below the threshold of conscious awareness. Three interrelated patterns explain why the journey home keeps getting postponed, sometimes by years, sometimes by a lifetime. And they reveal something important about how migration actually works.

When migrants leave, they typically carry a specific target in mind. A sum of money to build a house back in the village. Enough capital to start a small business. School fees for children who stayed behind. The move is instrumental — a clearly defined means to a clearly defined end. Researchers call this target earning, and it shapes how migrants initially understand their own mobility.

But targets have a way of shifting once you're embedded in a new economic reality. Exposure to higher living standards recalibrates what feels necessary. The house back home now needs to be bigger — the original plan looks modest by comparison. The business idea requires more startup capital than first estimated. New expenses emerge that weren't part of the original equation — a car, better schooling for children, consumer goods that signal success to peers in both countries.

Economists describe this as a shifting reference point. Migrants initially compare themselves to peers back home, and by that standard their earnings look impressive. But over time, the comparison group shifts to include coworkers and neighbors in the destination country. As the reference group changes, so does the threshold for what counts as "enough." The original savings target that seemed perfectly achievable from a distance becomes insufficient when measured against new standards of adequacy.

The result is a mechanism of perpetual deferral. Return gets pushed to next year, then the year after. Each individual postponement feels entirely rational — just a bit more time, a bit more money saved. But the cumulative effect is that a temporary stay quietly stretches into years, then decades. The finish line doesn't move once and hold still. It keeps receding, always just beyond comfortable reach. In migration, "just a little longer" may be the most powerful sentence never quite examined.

Takeaway

When the definition of 'enough' keeps changing, temporary becomes permanent by default. The most powerful force delaying return isn't a single obstacle — it's a finish line that moves every time you approach it.

Migration scholars use the concept of cumulative causation to describe how each year spent in a destination country makes return incrementally less likely. The mechanism is deceptively straightforward but remarkably powerful. Social and economic ties accumulate on one side of the border while they quietly erode on the other. Time does the work that conscious decisions rarely do — reshaping the geography of belonging without anyone quite noticing.

In the destination country, connections multiply steadily. Migrants form friendships, join community organizations and religious congregations, develop workplace relationships that carry real significance. Children enroll in local schools and build social worlds entirely their own — worlds a parent cannot dismantle without considerable cost. Partners find meaningful employment. Property gets purchased, credit histories established, pension contributions accumulated. Each strand in this web of attachment grows denser and more load-bearing with every passing year.

Meanwhile, ties to the origin community thin in ways that are easy to underestimate in real time. Extended family members pass away or relocate themselves. Old friendships lose the texture and intimacy that regular proximity sustains. Property back home deteriorates without daily oversight or becomes entangled in family disputes. Local economic conditions evolve in directions the absent migrant no longer fully understands. Professional networks go stale. Bureaucratic knowledge becomes outdated. Social capital quietly expires.

This asymmetry compounds over time with quiet decisiveness. At some point — and it is rarely a single dramatic moment of reckoning — the balance of attachment tips toward the destination. The origin community becomes the unfamiliar place that would require fresh adaptation, while the destination, however imperfect, has become something genuinely like home. Returning would mean uprooting a settled existence, not recovering a previous one. The ties that were supposed to be temporary have become the most permanent things in a migrant's life.

Takeaway

Belonging isn't a switch you flip — it's a web that builds strand by strand. At some point, the place you meant to leave temporarily holds more of your life than the place you always planned to return to.

Perhaps the least visible but most consequential factor in the myth of return is deceptively simple: migrants change. The person who left is not the person who would return. Years of navigating a different society, operating in another language on a daily basis, and adapting to unfamiliar social norms — these experiences reshape how someone thinks, what they expect, and who they understand themselves to be. Identity shifts gradually but profoundly.

Migrants often develop what researchers describe as dual frames of reference. They evaluate their origin community partly through the lens of destination experience, and the destination through memories of home. This dual perspective can be genuinely enriching, but it also creates a form of permanent in-betweenness. Returning migrants frequently report the disorienting experience of feeling like outsiders in places they once knew intimately — familiar with the streets but estranged from the rhythms of daily life.

The origin community registers these changes too. Returnees are often perceived as different — in their speech patterns, their consumer habits, their expectations, their patience for local conventions they once accepted without thought. They may encounter quiet resentment for perceived superiority, or simply discover that their transformed worldview generates friction with people who stayed behind. Social reintegration can prove more emotionally demanding than the original adaptation to a foreign country, precisely because no one — including the returnee — expected it to be difficult.

What this means is that return does not restore an earlier state of affairs. There is no going "back" in any meaningful sense, because both the person and the place have changed independently. The hometown a migrant remembers is partly a construction of memory, preserved in amber while the real place kept evolving. What migrants imagine as homecoming is, in practice, a second migration — complete with all the cultural adjustment and identity negotiation that term implies.

Takeaway

You cannot return to a place that no longer exists as you remember it, as a person who no longer exists as you were. What we call 'going home' is really a second migration in disguise.

The myth of return persists because it serves essential psychological functions. It offers comfort during difficult early years abroad and maintains a sense of continuity with one's origins. For many migrants, the intention to return operates less as a concrete plan than as an emotional anchor — a way of making displacement feel temporary and therefore bearable.

Recognizing this pattern carries real policy weight. Integration programs designed around the assumption of eventual return underserve people who will, in practice, stay permanently. Origin communities building plans around remittance-funded homecomings may need to recalibrate their expectations accordingly.

Migration is not a discrete event with a tidy endpoint. It is a process that reshapes people and places continuously, in directions no one — least of all the migrants themselves — fully anticipated at the start.