Return Migration

 Because our textbooks illustrated the movement of peoples with arrows on maps, we acquired the idea that migration was solely in one direction. With some groups this was true.  Persecuted people, like Jews or Sudanese, seldom returned to the country they came from. But Mexicans, Greeks, Irish, English and dozens of other peoples moved here and then back again, or back and forth several times. 

A large number of records from Norway during the age of migration show that about a third of Norskis moved back, and often got better jobs than they had when they left. To the New World and Back Again: Return Migrants in the Age of Mass Migration.  Summary article here.

 The data showed that immigrants who held low-paid occupations or who came from rural parts of Norway were more likely to come back after moving to America. Once back home, the return migrants held higher-paid occupations than the Norwegians who never moved, despite hailing from poorer backgrounds.

This was not just a 19th/20th C American phenomenon. Anglo-Saxons who came to East Anglia after the fall of the Western Roman Empire often went back after making a little money hiring out as mercenaries, or as fortunes changed for their clans. They would return for wives and decide home was better after all. Men go places specifically find wives and then come home.  Children of immigrants go back for a few visits and decide they like their grandparents digs better than a tenement. Or find that speaking additional languages gives them an edge in some businesses.