Paper short abstract:

On the basis on return migrants' life stories, this paper will deal with the emotional consequences of circular migration between Egypt and the Gulf for Cairene returnees. Then, it will address the impact of these equivoque feelings on the representations and practices of returnees.

Paper long abstract:

Since the opening of national borders at the beginning of the 1970s, Egypt has become an emigration country, with millions of labourers setting off each year for the neighbouring countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. However, difficulties to settle in there together with the density of migrants' transnational networks push Egyptians to return to their home country. Migrants' experiences all along their round-trips are knitted within a dense structure of institutional and social constraints. Based on a two years' ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo, my contribution will focus on return migrants' narratives, which convey both bitterness and nostalgia, and dreams of success offshore. Insisting on the strict "material" change that migration have triggered in their lives, returnees do partly legitimize the ambitious social expectations linked with emigration back home. Nevertheless, ethnographic data also helps illuminate the ordeals and sufferings resulting from discrimination and exploitation, as well as the huge disruption of routine and certitude that travel entails. How do they manage to combine these apparent paradoxes in their life narratives? What is the social impact of these cognitive and practical changes at the collective level? Such are the interrogations to be addressed in this contribution.