When Helmut Kohl became chancellor in October 1982, he resolved to fulfill the CDU’s promise of turning a remigration law into reality. But given the potential backlash at home and abroad, he knew that achieving his goal – getting rid of half of the Turkish migrant population – would be difficult. How, after perpetrating the Holocaust forty years prior, could West Germans kick out the Turks without compromising their post-fascist values of liberalism and democracy? How could they do so while minimizing criticism from the Turkish government? The answer, codified in the 1983 Law for the Promotion of the Voluntary Return of Foreigners (Rückkehrförderungsgesetz), was to pay Turks to leave. The West German government offered unemployed former guest workers a “remigration premium” to take their families and leave by September 30, 1984, with no option to return. While the remigration law fell short of Kohl’s 50 percent goal, it sparked one of the largest mass remigrations in modern European history. Between November 1983 and September 1984, 15 percent of the Turkish migrant population – 250,000 people – returned to Turkey. Nearly half of those return migrants came to regret their decision, as they encountered difficulties “reintegrating” both socially and economically into their own homeland.

Chapter 22 investigates Ilf and Petrov’s encounters with Russian immigrants, especially the Molokan, Christian sectarian community, in San Francisco. A comparison of their travelogue with the life stories produced by the nearly contemporary project organized by the anthropologist Paul Radin to survey San Francisco’s foreign-born population offers a means of assessing and contextualizing the writers’ more limited fieldwork. Central to Radin’s project – and also, if less explicitly, to Ilf and Petrov’s journey – was the premise that when cultures came into meaningful contact, people on both sides “acculturated.” The chapter argues that Ilf and Petrov acquitted themselves creditably as amateur ethnographers, pushing against their own presuppositions in their efforts to consider their informants’ perspectives.

The present chapter provides an overview of the main questions investigated in research on bilingual returnees. Returnees are second/third generation speakers who grow up in a migration setting and move back to their families’ country of origin at a certain moment of their life. On the one hand, research on returnees focuses on dominant language attrition, i.e., on the linguistic changes that affect the previous societal language after moving to the homeland. On the other hand, it targets L1/HL development after immersion in the L1/HL environment and possible outcomes of heritage language reversal. In addition to the focus on language development, we discuss the pedagogical and sociological implications of return to the country of origin, which go hand in hand with changes to the returnee’s language competence.

This chapter deals with the difficulties of Jews who left Israel in the immediate years following independence. During those years, Europe was the main destination for emigrants from Israel. But while some emigrants wished to settle in Europe, many went there in search of further emigration possibilities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the hardships faced by new immigrants in Israel and the motivations behind emigration. It then focuses on the circumstances surrounding emigrants’ departure from Israel and arrival in Europe, their encounters with relief agencies and Jewish communities, and their attempts to emigrate overseas.

Emigrants found that relief agencies and countries of immigration were reluctant to provide material support and resettlement services to people who had already settled in Israel, which was regarded as the foremost country for resettlement of Jewish refugees. Migrants also encountered constraints imposed by the Israeli government which obstructed emigration from the country. They found that by leaving Israel, they had gone against the grain and put themselves in conflict with the bodies on whose assistance they were hoping to rely. Immigration to Israel for them was not a permanent return from exile but rather another stage in the struggle to find a home.