Who Goes? Who Stays? Who Returns? : Migration Journeys of Highly Skilled Workers from Russia to Germany and Back Home

The subject of this book are migration journeys of highly skilled workers. By focusing on migration as a journey, the research considers all stages of migration (remigration in particular) and complements the approach to the phenomenon with a life-long perspective. In this sense, the prism of migration journeys allows to look at migration motives in a novel manner. The book discloses motive as a complex phenomenon, which may also change over time. The chosen perspective helps to explain why under similar conditions some workers migrate while others do not, and in the same manner, why some remigrate, while others stay put in destination countries. The empirical basis for the case of highly skilled (re)migration from Russia to Germany has been constituted by unstructured interviews with narrative parts, which were conducted by the author in various cities of Germany and Russia.