EMPLOYMENT RATES OF RETURN MIGRANTS: THE FINNISH CASE

Abstract. During the second half of the 20th century half a million Finns migrated, mainly to Sweden. A majority of these also returned to Finland. This paper utilises Finnish longitudinal population registers in order to identify the return migrants and analyse their employment rates as compared with non-migrants. We find that both male and female return migrants have odds of employment that are only about half those of non-migrants, also when factors such as age, education, mother tongue and place of residence are accounted for. Even within higher-educated people, return migrants are in a worse employment position than observably similar non-migrants. The employment rates tend to deteriorate with migration duration and improve with time subsequent to return migration. This suggests that there could be an effect of lost contact with the home country labour market when being abroad, which may override any premium that accrues through human capital of foreign work experience or other practices gained abroad. Also return migrants with short stays abroad and long periods at home are in a poor relative position, however. Our findings therefore illustrate that the return migrants are highly selected on some latent personal characteristics that have detrimental effects for the job finding probability, and that this non-negligible group in the labour market should be given more policy attention