When long term expatriates return to their country of origin
Mar 11, 2017 6:44:47 GMT
Post by Deleted on Mar 11, 2017 6:44:47 GMT
This was a very minor topic for a long time, but it has become more and more of a problem in this century. Countries that were safe are suddenly not safe anymore, and countries where foreigners were welcome are turning against them. Employment is sometimes a problem as the economies change, and that affects health coverage or the possibility of paying school fees for children. I'm not talking about expats who just leave home for 2 or 3 years but the ones who really settled in a country and didn't expect to ever leave. Very often there is no family around to help with the transition back.
Studies have been made recently about the principal problems and anxieties facing people when they decide to pull up stakes and return "home."
1. Housing. The #1 problem is finding a place to live. Long term expatriates have been working at ordinary jobs in the countries where they live and generally do not have a hefty nest egg of cash like short term expats who have been earning big bonuses abroad -- besides usually keeping a residence on hand for their holidays. So people arrive in a country where often everything is more expensive than they are used to. Most of them can't afford to buy a place, and it is very hard to rent when you don't have a job yet, and showing payslips from a foreign country generally does not impress owners or agencies. So people have to rent something on a highly temporary basis and hope that things improve rapidly.
2. Documentation. Bureaucracy is different in every country, and facing everything at the same time can be a nightmare: social security cards, getting children into a school, opening a bank account, applying for various aids... On top of that, many administrations require a justification of domicile and other such documents which the person does not have yet. It takes nerves of steel to get through this.
3. Employment. In a lot of countries, the job market is not all that great, and while some countries value international experience, many others can make no sense out of a person's foreign experience since job titles and descriptions are extremely variable from place to place. Unemployment benefits are out of the question for people arriving out of the blue, and as mentioned in #2, most applications also require a justification of domicile, etc.
4. Culture shock. Anybody who left their country more than 10 years ago, or even just more than 5 years in many cases, quickly discovers that it is no longer the same country and there is no sense of belonging. On top of that, people who have returned involuntarily feel a sense of failure in their lives, often leading to depression. Returnees feel completely left out of society, because everybody is talking about events or politicians or media stars who are totally mysterious to them, and people are rarely interested in what they themselves did. (There is a thread here somewhere about the frustration of telling friends or family about one's amazing travels and discovering that almost nobody has the slightest interest in the subject.)
Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again was published in 1940, but the statement remains as true as ever. Of course "repats" end up behaving very much like expats in foreign countries -- they group together to complain about where they are living and how much better the other place was. Certain countries have had quite a bit of experience with the subject, France in 1962 and Portugal more recently, when hundreds of thousands of people 'returned' to a place they didn't know. France had to absorb 800,000 'overseas French' while others went on to Israel, Canada or Argentina for a new life. They had a completely different lifestyle, diet and view of the world. Just to show how difficult it is, 55 years later, the older generation of pieds-noirs (North African French) still remain a completely different group in French society and a number of them still get buried in Algeria, their only real home.
Naturally, all of the new communications tools are helping to dilute all of these shocks quite a bit. Many of the necessary administrative chores can now be done before even returning home, and there are also lots of support groups on Facebook and elsewhere for people in the same situation. But it isn't until your feet are back on the ground in the country of your birth that it all feels real.
Studies have been made recently about the principal problems and anxieties facing people when they decide to pull up stakes and return "home."
1. Housing. The #1 problem is finding a place to live. Long term expatriates have been working at ordinary jobs in the countries where they live and generally do not have a hefty nest egg of cash like short term expats who have been earning big bonuses abroad -- besides usually keeping a residence on hand for their holidays. So people arrive in a country where often everything is more expensive than they are used to. Most of them can't afford to buy a place, and it is very hard to rent when you don't have a job yet, and showing payslips from a foreign country generally does not impress owners or agencies. So people have to rent something on a highly temporary basis and hope that things improve rapidly.
2. Documentation. Bureaucracy is different in every country, and facing everything at the same time can be a nightmare: social security cards, getting children into a school, opening a bank account, applying for various aids... On top of that, many administrations require a justification of domicile and other such documents which the person does not have yet. It takes nerves of steel to get through this.
3. Employment. In a lot of countries, the job market is not all that great, and while some countries value international experience, many others can make no sense out of a person's foreign experience since job titles and descriptions are extremely variable from place to place. Unemployment benefits are out of the question for people arriving out of the blue, and as mentioned in #2, most applications also require a justification of domicile, etc.
4. Culture shock. Anybody who left their country more than 10 years ago, or even just more than 5 years in many cases, quickly discovers that it is no longer the same country and there is no sense of belonging. On top of that, people who have returned involuntarily feel a sense of failure in their lives, often leading to depression. Returnees feel completely left out of society, because everybody is talking about events or politicians or media stars who are totally mysterious to them, and people are rarely interested in what they themselves did. (There is a thread here somewhere about the frustration of telling friends or family about one's amazing travels and discovering that almost nobody has the slightest interest in the subject.)
Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again was published in 1940, but the statement remains as true as ever. Of course "repats" end up behaving very much like expats in foreign countries -- they group together to complain about where they are living and how much better the other place was. Certain countries have had quite a bit of experience with the subject, France in 1962 and Portugal more recently, when hundreds of thousands of people 'returned' to a place they didn't know. France had to absorb 800,000 'overseas French' while others went on to Israel, Canada or Argentina for a new life. They had a completely different lifestyle, diet and view of the world. Just to show how difficult it is, 55 years later, the older generation of pieds-noirs (North African French) still remain a completely different group in French society and a number of them still get buried in Algeria, their only real home.
Naturally, all of the new communications tools are helping to dilute all of these shocks quite a bit. Many of the necessary administrative chores can now be done before even returning home, and there are also lots of support groups on Facebook and elsewhere for people in the same situation. But it isn't until your feet are back on the ground in the country of your birth that it all feels real.
