Abstract
Recent estimates suggest that nearly half of all international migrants return to their communities of origin within five years of emigration. Motivated by high levels of return migration, scholars are increasingly investigating the ways in which return migrants mobilize resources they acquire abroad, such as human and financial capital, to achieve economic mobility upon return. Yet, resource mobilization and labor market reintegration unfold in heterogeneous community contexts. To understand the labor market reintegration of return migrants in various local contexts, we draw on an eight-year study that included interviews with 153 Mexican returnees to examine how labor market reintegration and resource mobilization vary across three types of communities: urban, urban-adjacent, and rural. U.S.-Mexico migration is the largest binational return flow in the world, providing a unique opportunity to explore variations in the reintegration experiences of returnees. We find that labor market reintegration and resource mobilization are contextually embedded processes that respond to the social, economic, and spatial features of migrants' origin communities. Following our analysis, we extend three testable hypotheses that can guide future research on international migration and return.