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Return migration has been traditionally conceptualised within a framework of 'homecomings', emphasising primordial ethnicity at the expense of micro-level and cognitive aspects of migrants' belongingness. Drawing on the narratives of Albanian-origin children and young people who moved (back) to Albania with their families from crisis-ridden Greece, this paper explores their experiences of otherness in the presumed homeland, and puts emphasis on their agency in the context of return migration. Memory emerges as an important aspect of agency in the process of what we term 'the transnational mirroring of otherness'. Brought up in Greece, the Albanian-origin children are othered upon return because of their perceived 'Greekness' among the locals and limited ability to speak Albanian. Beyond establishing and maintaining transnational ties and identities, participants show initiative in positioning themselves against shifting transnational identification frameworks, as they contemplate a spatially mobile future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative research with migrants, their children and key informants in Albania, this paper investigates the experiences of return migrants with social protection and their positionality towards social protection stakeholders. Return migration to Albania has intensified in the past few years due to the economic crisis in different European countries where many Albanians have migrated to since the beginning of the 1990s. Findings of multisited fieldwork testify to the centrality of social protection in the process of migrants' relocation to the country of origin. Due to the trans-national and trans-temporal dimensions of the return process, access to and overall experiences of social protection are mediated by different understandings and regulation of the thresholds of vulnerability, need and welfare held by return migrants, locals, policy makers and service providers. These staggered understandings and thresholds are embedded in an observed trans-national and trans-local developmental gap between the country of immigration and country of origin where migrants relocate to. Resource environment in the context of return is, therefore, characterised by cognitive and material discontinuities at trans-national and trans-temporal level. Experiences of these discontinuities impact on returnees' social protection strategies and have significant implications for their social and economic positioning upon return to the country of origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on empirical research conducted in Albania, this article reports that educational experience and performance, and hence, integration of the children of (returned) migrants in their parents' homeland is obstructed by structural factors linked to the educational system. A finding such as this challenges the centrality of an essentialized notion of ethnicity in models of "second generation" integration and evidences the centrality of the nation-state, and the education system as one of its pillars, in the integration of migrants and their children. Comparative integration context theory appears to apply to the integration of children of returned migrants; yet it needs to take into account the mobile lives of migrants and their children, the transnational disjuncture between different educational systems, and the role of locality within the nation-state. Moreover, including children in analyses of integration, in the context of education, calls for the inclusion of life-course and scale in integration theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]