Social remittances as a moral economy, ambition for betterment, and identity

ENThis chapter is based on in-depth individual and focus group interviews with highly skilled return migrants from Western Europe and North America to Lithuania. The bulk of the data cover information concerning each respondent’s personal history of migration, framework of identity/belonging, family relations, work sphere, and public life. Those who do migrate enact their skills, knowledge, experience, values, beliefs, practices, social capital, and so forth to accomplish their goals and realise their expectations abroad. However, they are rarely devoid of relationality with their own people (i.e. family, friends, and significant others) back home. From the non-migrant perspective, a return migrant is implicitly expected to return with resources and to have some form of moral obligation to give. Meanwhile, from the returnees’ point of view, to return with resources is often charged with expectations of receiving recognition (the obligation to receive) from nonmigrants or the society of origin. In both cases, migrant-non-migrant linkages are morally charged by reciprocity. In my approach, transnational return migrants or (re)migrants are perceived in the framework of moral relationality with non-migrants as responsive, resourceful, and responsible: first, they are seen as being responsive through networking within family networks and with their significant others; and second, migrants are viewed as being resourceful in terms of remittances, both economic and social, while being expected to share these resources when abroad and/or upon their return. [Extract, p. 148].

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