Migration is one of the defining issues of the globalized world and often the “talk of the day” in sending and receiving countries. This has gone hand in hand with an intensification of research in the area of migration in the last few decades. However, this upsurge of migration-related research is often characterized by disproportionate attention on receiving states as compared to sending ones. Likewise, the relation between migration and social protection, that has gained significant interest only in the early 2000s, has evolved around the centrality of the nation-state and issues of migrants’ access to formal social protection in the country of destination. The proliferation of research in the area has not substantially tackled migrants’ positionalities towards different social protection forms (including informal ones) and stakeholders in both sending and receiving countries. My talk focuses on the role that access on formal and informal social protection plays as a push/pull factor in the nexus of migration, return and re-migration. I do this by looking at the narratives of migrants and return migrants from Albania – a country topping the list of origin countries with almost one third of its population currently living abroad.
Photocredit: Xavi Bou