The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

This book talk examines the role of balikbayans, specifically those Filipinos returning to their homeland after living in the United States for several decades, in the economic development of Metro Manila. While global migration and its effects on migrant homelands tend to focus on remittances or the impact of out-migration on local economies, the concept of return economies provides an elucidative case to reconceptualize the discourse around development, migration, and home(lands) through the embodiment of balikbayans and the economies they help to produce. Return economies convey the material afterlife of global migration illustrating new ways that scholars in ethnic studies, as well as globalization and development studies, might rethink transnational circulations throughout the globe.