Return migration, masculinities and the fallacy of reintegration: Ethiopian experiences

ABSTRACT

The multifaceted notion of ‘returning home,’ and not least the dualities between expectation, anticipation and the realities facing migrants upon their return, is a key component in understanding East African migration dynamics and implications. This article constitutes an exploratory attempt to understand the nexus between return migration journeys, reintegration, psychosocial well-being, and masculinity for the hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian men that migrate every year. Through our empirical findings, we emphasize how fluidity of migration demands a nonlinear interpretation of migratory lives and argue for return migration to be seen not as an outcome or an ending but an unfolding state of being. The traumatic events of irregular Ethiopian migration suggest it becomes an existential journey as much as a physical one. Returning thus should not be seen as a temporary process or journey, but rather an enduring process of personal, mental, and existential change. We ground our argument on analysis of findings of a qualitative study conducted in two sites in Ethiopia, in Arsi zone of Oromia regional state and Addis Ababa, the federal capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethiopia
• migration
• returning
• masculinity
• East Africa
• violence
• reintegration

Knowing how my parents feel about me every time they look at me makes me hate myself and think of going away again. I feel rejected, dejected, and unwanted. I don’t feel that I am welcome at home or in the neighbourhood. I am staying here because I don’t have anywhere else to go. But I strongly feel that I must leave this place […].

It is better to die en route than to live an undesirable life here.¹

The multifaceted notion of ‘returning home,’ and not least the dualities between expectation, anticipation and the realities facing migrants upon their return, is a core component in understanding East African migration dynamics and implications. Accordingly, ‘return migration’ has long caught the attention of academics and policy makers interested in understanding the diverse forms of returning, the implications of return for migrants and countries of origin and addressing the protection risks of migrants and refugees subjected to repatriation and expulsion. With a conceptual history that dates at least back to the 1960s,² the politicization of international migration movements and forced return has long informed the analysis and understanding surrounding return migration and returnees. The complexity of return migration in contemporary migration research is often blurred by politicized understandings of return that consider managing voluntary return as a less humanly costly and politically painful process than forced removal (deportation),³ with policy-centered categorizations of return migration stipulating that voluntariness connotes the absence of physical force, and any non-deported return of migrants as ‘voluntary.’⁴ Policy-oriented research on return has long drawn on bureaucratic definitions of narrowly oriented frameworks that often obscure the process and meanings of return migration.⁵ Such conceptions of voluntary return have informed the institutional categorizations observed inter alia in the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) typology of non-mandatory and mandatory voluntary return.⁶

Return migration is better understood from the point of view of various social, economic and psychological processes of (re)integration; not as the end of a linear trajectory, but rather as another phase in the migration life cycle, such as we will show here. While we make references to the concept of ‘return,’ we conceptually ascribe to a much more nonlinear interpretation of migratory lives. There are deep emotional complexities at play in ‘returning,’ whether it is to a place associated with home, or merely to what can be considered the point (or even just the country) of one’s birth or other origin. The return may have been anticipated as a process of individual stabilization (against the bearable and unbearable dynamism of migration journeys), recognition and development, facilitating a change in maturity, status and appreciation, but it is often seen to be an illusion that may instead be an experience of rupture and disenchantment.⁷ Migrants, like all people, change in encountering new experiences, and they may personally have moved far beyond the situations and places they left behind. Likewise, migrants may see their migration efforts as unfinished and incomplete, their return thus mainly functioning as a preparation for new mobilities to alternative destinations. We should always be careful not to identify a definite inside and outside: either return migrants are fully reintegrated into their families and communities, or they are not.

This article contributes to discussions of return migration in East Africa, seeking to understand Ethiopian experiences of migration and its existential effects. Ethiopia is a large source of migrant flows to almost all parts of the world, especially to the Gulf States in the Middle East, as well as to South Africa and other African destinations. More than 1.5 million Ethiopians live abroad as migrants and refugees. Several hundred thousand Ethiopians migrate annually, almost 200,000 alone as domestic workers to the Middle East. The vast majority of these Ethiopian migrants are irregular, traveling without visas or other legal documentation,⁸ and it is on this category of irregular male migrants we focus here. Migration in Ethiopia is also, as elsewhere, highly gendered.⁹ No matter whether we consider the practicalities of migration journeys (modes of travel, destinations etc.) or the perceptions, the routes they take and the factors accounting for their migration burdens and effects of migration, these concerns are heavily shaped by gendered patterns of socialization, norms, and roles. An interplay of various factors accounts for gendered migration patterns in Ethiopia. One of the key factors is the nature of the labor market in places of destination. In destinations such as the Gulf States, female labor migrants are sought for domestic care jobs. On the other hand, the type of job available in South Africa in the informal trade involving long distances is considered to be ‘more fit’ for men. Earlier, women were found to represent the greatest share of Ethiopian labor migrants, around 60%,¹⁰ as they made up virtually the entire population of those migrating for employment as domestic workers, still almost 80% of the hundreds of thousands of returnees who were forced out of Saudi Arabia between 2017 and 2019 were men because of the irregular nature of their migratory trips. Though far from sufficient to understand the complexities of Ethiopian women’s migration, particularly as domestic workers in the Gulf States, the majority of academic work on return migrants in the Horn has been devoted to this group.¹¹ Thus, we know less about Ethiopian male than female return migrants. Ethiopian men have few opportunities for regular migration, being virtually unemployable as domestic workers in the Gulf States, and instead they take on outdoor jobs as shepherds, day laborers or guards.

While it may be programmatically logical for organizations trying to help migrants to assume a difference between outward migration, return migration and reintegration, these shape each other in ways that accentuate especially the deep and fluid connection between the events of the journey and reintegration. Rather, these multidirectional processes are fluid, with many migrants seeing themselves in a continuous process of discussing and negotiating their staying or moving,¹² whether with themselves, their families, or communities. And reintegration cannot be isolated as a manipulable process determined by the level of support services provided to migrants. The traumatic events of irregular migration suggest it becomes an existential journey as much as a physical one. The life-altering and irreparable effects of migration mean that what was before will never be again. As such, there are no processes of development, forms of treatment or possibilities of employment that can bring one back to how things were. There is no re-integration, there is only integration anew, stressing the continued need to challenge dichotomous (or linear) representations of mobility and immobility.

The article begins with a description of the circumstances of Ethiopian migration and (forced) return migration, before providing a glimpse of the state of knowledge on return migration and reintegration with a focus on psychosocial well-being, masculinity, and trauma. A methodological section then follows, outlining interviews and data collection, including selection criteria and other concerns. The main empirical body of the article explores the lived experiences of reintegration and readjustment for Ethiopian returnees before ending with the conclusion on our main arguments.

Ethiopian migration and return migration

There are three main irregular migration routes out of Ethiopia.¹³ To the east, migrants take desert and sea routes through Afar, Dire Dawa and Jijiga, often through Djibouti (across the Bab el-Mandeb strait) or Somalia, particularly via Bossaso. From there, they venture into Yemen in transit to the Gulf States. The second route is to the south. Here, migrants often travel to the city of Moyale on the border with Kenya and into the neighboring country, where they are typically helped by brokers, jumping on freight trains or traffickers’ trucks that take them down through Tanzania and Mozambique before they reach what is frequently their final destination, South Africa.¹⁴ The third and north-western route takes migrants past Gonder and through the cities of Metema or Asosa (a widely used transit city) on the border with Sudan, in which many travel through Bunj toward Malakal and from there all the way down to Juba. From here, they can travel through the north-western corridor into Libya and further into Europe over the sea¹⁵ Others go to Egypt through Sudan and then on to Israel, where they may use religious ties to obtain employment.¹⁶ At the same time, Ethiopia itself hosts the second largest number of refugees in Africa, mainly from around the Horn, including South Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia, just as the country is struggling with massive numbers of internally displaced people (IDPs).

All the preferred Ethiopian ‘irregular’ migratory routes are highly dangerous, though in different ways.¹⁷ Some only lead to precarious forms of employment, while other roads are extremely dangerous in themselves. Common to all of them is that they mainly facilitate irregular migration because of the few legal routes and opportunities available to the migrants. Ethiopian migrants are mostly young and single (or married and quickly divorced to strengthen local cultural legitimacy in migration destinations). Most come from Oromia and Amhara, who also make up the majority of Ethiopia’s population. Their migration journeys are facilitated by different mechanisms: many depend on brokers, while others, mostly women, use private employment agencies in the capital to facilitate their transit in forms that are more regularized.¹⁸ The brokers typically manage a particular jurisdiction or territory, for example, being responsible for taking migrants from Adama to Awash, at which point a new broker takes over and leads the group on to Logia, each broker demanding a sum of money for every new stretch of the route. In some instances, brokers arrive at villages and advertise positions as maids or waitresses in the Gulf States, hiding the harsh realities that leave smuggled or trafficked migrants with no legal rights, often combined with heavy (sometimes invented) debts to the smugglers.¹⁹ Many of these male migrants, who are typically between 15 and 25 years old, leave Ethiopia imagining improved living conditions, seeking to escape poverty, or pursuing what they think will be a betterment of their lives in several respects – socially, status-wise, economically – inspired by the few cases of successful migration indicated by newly built houses or rumors of remittances. Most travel with insufficient funds, if any at all, to cover the high costs imposed on them by brokers, who govern different jurisdictions or parts of the journey, each requiring a deposit to allow the migrant to continue in his progress toward the destination. Those who cannot pay are locked up in megazens, literally big halls used by brokers to confine the migrants, where they are beaten, starved, tortured, or killed, as the brokers demand ransom money for them to continue their journeys, forcing them to call family and friends and beg for funds. If ransom money is transferred to save the migrant (e.g. by his family, which has probably mortgaged its house and land), he may continue on the next part of the journey, encountering plenty of challenges outside the megazens: hunger, thirst, extreme weather, suffocation, robbery, forced labor, physical torture, sexual exploitation and abuse, imprisonment and serious psychological distress.

Inflicting this violence upon them are often the brokers – identified by all the migrants in this study as a key source of abuse, physical and psychological violence, and trauma along the migration routes. Parts of the vast desert lands that surround Ethiopia, whether to the east or west, are largely outside the control of government, and this is where the brokers reign free. But they also exist and work everywhere across Addis Ababa, in all regional states (where they approach people dissatisfied with their current standards of living), along all the borders and in all the transit countries.²⁰ They are the major perpetrators of violence and abuse, whether carrying it out themselves, selling migrants to other brokers or imposing unpaid work and abuse on migrants. For the most part, they are Ethiopians.²¹ One of the arrangements the brokers make is to operate on a ‘go now, pay later’ basis, which forces migrants into debt bondage and exploitation over time. But the reality is also that brokers are sought after for their ability to ensure access and mobility – movement – so that the migrants can continue their journeys. But relationships and acquaintances that may start as consensual often end in abusive experiences. The continued conundrum surrounding brokers remains the fact that while these are found to be main perpetrators of violence against migrants, their services are both wanted and needed by the migrants – they maintain a position of simultaneously pushing and stalling, servicing and punishing migrants. To accumulate money for the next part of their journey, the Ethiopian migrants interviewed often worked as camel- or goat-herders, farmers (on local farm fields), businessmen (mostly in South Africa), bartenders, mechanics, and most of them as day laborers – similar jobs to those they are likely to find if they reach their destinations. Many migrants never reach their destinations, however, and some only do so for a few days or weeks before being caught by the local authorities, imprisoned in unspeakable conditions and deported back to Ethiopia.

In 2008, Lebanon initiated the first of several bans whereby Middle East countries prohibited Ethiopians from migrating there for work. Lebanon’s argument for closure was mainly related to the high number of reported abuses, deaths and suicides among Ethiopian women employed in the country as domestic workers. In early 2013 then, the Saudi King Abdullah and the Saudi authorities set in motion a number of initiatives to deal with ‘illegal migration’ into the country. An amnesty period of seven months was declared for migrants either to formalize their stay with residence and employment permissions or to leave the country. After the amnesty period, the authorities started searching for irregular migrants, who were detained in one of 64 deportation centers, primarily in Riyadh and Jeddah.²² More than a million migrants (most from Yemen, but more than 150,000 from Ethiopia) were airlifted out of Saudi Arabia, many of whom came through the notoriously violent deportation centers or were rushed aboard planes without their belongings²³ The forced return of Ethiopian migrants started as a trickle, with a small number of arrivals each day, but it then suddenly increased to some seven thousand returnees a day, greatly stretching the logistical arrangements of the humanitarian response. This process was repeated in 2017, with more than 330,000 Ethiopians forcibly returned from March 2017 to November 2019.²⁴

Upon their arrival the returnees were and still are provided with support by the Ethiopian Red Cross (e.g. with free phone services and ambulances for emergency cases) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (including mental health consultation), complemented by the International Office of Migration (IOM) and its agencies in Ethiopia’s regions. From the outset, the relief operation to handle the forced returnees was faced with challenges due to the unprecedented nature of the emergency, the large and overwhelming number of returnees of varying ages and needs, and the short time frame in which to deal with them. These challenges included the availability of accommodation in the transit centers, difficulties in drawing up accurate plans and executing humanitarian responses due to inadequate prior information about returnees (very limited information was provided by Saudi Arabia) and the limited funding available.²⁵ The rushed forced return saw the Ethiopian government institute a temporary ban on migration to the Gulf States with the explicit aim of preventing the harassment, trauma and intimidation of Ethiopians seeking work there. The ban was maintained until 2018, when a new law targeting the many illegal private employment agencies, many of which function as de facto human traffickers, and aiming to safeguard the rights and conditions of labor migrants was introduced. Despite the policy and the law, the Ethiopian government has only weak enforcement capabilities against infringements.²⁶

Return migrants, masculinity, and well-being

A plethora of issues is regularly seen to shape the supposed reintegration of irregular migrants that are forcibly returned. This includes degrees of agency – are they (re)assuming a position with no or little autonomy, do they have agency to move, do they feel trapped in a certain context? Returning to a situation of vulnerability is a likely scenario for many Ethiopian migrants, most of whom are low skilled and do not come back with financial savings and new skills, greatly shaping their prospects for resource mobilization for themselves and their families. Most of the return migrants who took part in this research did not think they had attained their goals of living and working abroad. The reality of being unable to make possible improvements to their lives and that of their families weighs heavily on migrants upon returning home, sometimes lowering their status and on other occasions strongly stimulating efforts to migrate again quickly in hopes of eventual success.²⁷ Returning to financial instability and reverting to a situation of dependence on one’s family is a long way from initial ideas of migrating precisely to support that family. Likewise, many families pool resources, selling houses or land, to finance the migratory journeys of their children, making returning empty-handed even more difficult. This may be reinforced by the potential inability to work (if jobs are at all available) because of trauma and lead to emotional frustration. But individual factors also include volition, which may go in many different directions: the volition to reintegrate and reassume a position once held in the community, or the volition to break from earlier expectations and roles to define a new course in one’s life with returning often producing an initial period of significant stress and trauma in adjusting.²⁸

Though the psychosocial well-being of return migrants is deemed central to successful efforts to return from migration and reintegrate, research on this concept is still limited.²⁹ Psychosocial well-being is best considered as lying along a continuum, as an unfolding and developing experience of life. It is not an outcome, but a ‘state of being that arises from the dynamic interplay of outcomes and processes.’³⁰ In research on poverty, well-being is often conceptualized as combining a person’s objective circumstances and their own subjective perception of their condition. That is, in its broadest form, it encompasses a combination of what a person has, what they can do with what they have, and how they think about what they have and what they can do. We approach well-being from a psychosocial perspective in order to accentuate the emotional, social and cultural aspects of ‘return migration.’ Well-being is shaped by a host of different individual, structural and circumstantial factors that are difficult to separate, both in form and in their effects. The focus on the individual migration experience naturally gives priority to unique experiences of migration and potentially denies us the ability to generalize. Nonetheless, it is not the aim of this article to create an axiomatic understanding of the factors and experiences of return migration for Ethiopians, but rather to provide a glimpse into the nature of their experiences.

The return experience, involving adjusting oneself to the dynamics of the return context whilst potentially engaging with institutions that push for immobility (i.e. through reintegration programs that are focused on reducing re-migration), is intricately linked to notions of the past, present and future, three dimensions that cannot be separated. Migrants will relate to current events based on their past experiences, as well as their future expectations or imaginaries. We might implicitly assume that migrants returning to their place of departure are going ‘home,’ but we cannot assume that the migrant still affords this place such qualities. Spaces and places never remain the exact same over the course of years, whether in the objective conditions of their physical infrastructure, housing etc. or in the relationality of the point of return. Many different forms of social and economic capital are spatially tied to a place, such as access to credit, employment opportunities, education, self-sufficiency, or subsistence agriculture. This evokes important questions of what return migrants associate with their new-old place of living, as well as how it and their relationship with it have changed through the course of the migration journey, perhaps challenging their memory of what they left behind, which could very well have been idealized during the time they spent away from it.

Psychosocial well-being accentuates how deeply the instrumental (economically driven) and emotional dimensions of migrant life intersect.³¹ One’s inability to provide financially for one’s family may lead to frustration, just as social concerns over declining family care, peer pressure, and pressure from families or community misconceptions can lead to social isolation and thus an inability to take up employment, forming a problematic cycle of aggravation. Stigma and accusations of blame from families because of unfulfilled expectations may lead to failures of support and reassurance.³²

Identity and subjectivities greatly shape motivations and life expectations. Individuals react differently to events due to some of the factors already described. Their coping mechanisms and ways of interpreting and reacting to the world vary greatly, influenced by their individuality, their upbringing, and the events they have experienced in their lives thus far, which are unique to them. All migrants will have different degrees of resilience to different events. Some might see minor events reactivate past emotions, instilling forms of trauma in them, while they can also experience terrifying events that are less conflictual because of cultural backgrounds or past experiences. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find patterns of reaction to events across such large groups as Ethiopian return migrants. Though individual subjectivities are important, relationality also remains a core feature of psychosocial well-being, strongly influenced by relationships and interactions, with positive outlooks depending on migrants’ abilities to re-establish themselves and access networks and support upon their return.

Ethiopian migration and the psycho-social implications of returning, as in all parts of the world, are greatly shaped by gender norms. As men and women often travel via different routes to (relatively) different destinations and seek out different employment opportunities in the destination countries, they experience ‘return migration’ and ‘reintegration’ differently. The often-explicit focus on the female vulnerabilities of migration and acceptance of them, risks positioning men in a vulnerable state of inattention subject to stereotypical assumptions that they are resilient and able to cope with the stressors of migration. This can be best referred from the existing institutional support bases offered for male returnee migrants. Migrating men are situated in complex cross-pressures based on social norms of manhood and masculinity. With gender being performative, situational, and relational,³³ always renegotiated and in flux, upon their return Ethiopian men must renegotiate and struggle over their social status, as they attempt to find a place again in their families and communities. Hopes of upward social mobility are often disappointed, greatly challenging masculine statuses and identities tied to social norms.

Finally, it is impossible to apprehend Ethiopian (return) migration without recognizing the impact of abuse, violence, and trauma. Most Ethiopian migrants are irregular migrants who both travel along perilous roads to their destinations and engage in precarious low-skilled work once there, seldom having legal papers or the ability to uphold their rights through formal institutions. The violent and traumatic migration experience, and not just the process of returning, is a key factor in shaping the return experience.³⁴ We cannot consider the process of ‘returning’ or ‘reintegration’ without understanding the conditions under which the men migrate or are forced ‘home.’ And we know that the journeys and eventual stay and employment in the destination countries are dominated by social, physical, psychological, and economic hardship. Men rarely take up migrant employment as domestic workers, but they are still exposed to abuse, violence, and trauma. They travel and live under extremely precarious conditions, with regular deaths on migrant boats to Yemen or in lorries going south toward South Africa, just as they are often locked up in megazens as they leave Ethiopia, no matter whether they travel to the east, west or north. Coupled with knowledge of how severe life events of humiliation and defeat can be, like those evidently experienced by many Ethiopian migrants, these conditions greatly affect psychosocial well-being, with traumatic experiences potentially leading to a failure of reintegration, especially given the limited access to mental health provision, counseling or support upon return that we already know about.

Methodology

Though migration forms a central coping strategy in pursuing improvements in livelihoods, limited data and limited primary knowledge has been produced on this issue for Ethiopia, not least because of a lack of comprehensive statistics on migrants and returnees. We draw here on primary empirical data gathered through fieldwork conducted at two sites in Ethiopia, the federal capital Addis Ababa and in Arsi, in Oromia regional state. Addis Ababa, because it is the main transit point for returnee migrants (most are airlifted to here, as mentioned), many of whom never venture further ‘home’ than the capital city before eventually trying to re-migrate, and Oromia because it is in the relative vicinity of the capital, making it more probable for returnees to return to their cities and villages here than e.g. migrants from northern regions. The study was conducted in the two research sites in 2019 and 2020. The study used various data-collection tools such as in-depth interviews with key informants, collecting migrants’ narratives (self-descriptions and own definitions of their situations), key stakeholder interviews and focus-group discussions. As many aspects of reintegration are subjective, drawing on individual stories helped provide nuances with respect to the complex reintegration process. In Addis Ababa, 25 male return migrants were interviewed individually and complemented by a focus-group discussion (FGD) with another group of returnees. The in-depth interviews were conducted in Amharic on the basis of collectively identified themes, with the aim of grasping the nuances of their migration decisions, experiences during their journeys, return processes and potential reintegration. At the second research site in Oromia region, Shirka district, ten returnee male migrants were interviewed individually. At this site, another FGD was held with a group of male returnees in the town of Gobessa. These are part of the sites identified as a spot for migration in Oromiya regional state.³⁵ The Focus group discussions brought together returnees from diverse backgrounds; i.e. a range of age groups, religions, education levels and migration experiences. In the process of selecting the key informants, due attention was given to their diversity. One of the criteria for selecting the informants was the diversity of the countries they migrated to, providing informants that had returned from different countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. The second criteria we took into consideration was the duration of their stay overseas which ranged from a short-lived stay to prolonged stays of more than three decades, while a third criteria concerned ethno-regional backgrounds.

Furthermore, semi-structured interviews were held with different government and non-government stakeholders to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the existing psychosocial reintegration support systems and the different challenges pertaining to reintegration. Appropriate ethical precautions were taken in approaching individuals with experience of serious physical, psychological and emotional traumas. The very nature of return migration raises important issues of sensitivity regarding the questions asked, the vulnerability of the research subjects and other issues that need to be addressed at different stages of the research, including both fieldwork and data analysis. A careful research design was made to avoid potential harm to the participants’ current and future lives, as the research team carefully designed the approach in order to take into consideration ethical guidelines regarding the confidentiality, privacy and informed consent of the informants. In order to protect our informants, we have anonymized all interviewees in all the statements used here.

Lived experiences en route

Seeing as we know that processes of returning are heavily influenced by experiences during migratory journeys and stays, we must start from an exploration of what lived experiences look like en route for Ethiopian men. The male Ethiopian migrant workers interviewed for this study experience strenuous challenges, forms of abuse and grave violations of any or all their human rights during their journeys, both en route within internal transit points, transit states and in their destination countries. Most of these experiences, as an informant put it, are ‘debilitating, degrading, traumatizing, and, by and large, cause deep rooted feelings of indignity and hopelessness,’³⁶ or as another migrant framed it: ‘Everyone is for himself or herself in the desert.’³⁷ During their travels, Ethiopian migrants regularly experience or witness extensive abuse, rape (committed both on women and men), violence, murder, torture or death from thirst, hunger, or heat. Those who travel with the help of brokers, especially if aiming to go to Europe, often face labor exploitation and are subject to forced and unpaid labor, including exploitation by local police forces. Informants interviewed in Addis Ababa told of Libyan police forcing detained migrants to dig ditches to build barracks, load, and unload weapons into and from storehouses, transport logistics for troops or even participate in fighting before robbing the migrants of their belongings and selling them off to brokers. In Libyan prisons, several migrants experienced having to work as day laborers for local Libyans, who would hire the prisoners to work in their fields, but pay the police, not the migrants.³⁸

Such challenges and harmful experiences are often exacerbated by ethnic tensions along the migration routes. Part of the risk factor mentioned by interviewees is the ethnic identity of migrants in the context of underlying tensions and conflicts between two or more ethnic groups. One migrant who traveled through Yemen to reach Saudi Arabia explained how groups of brokers are divided between Oromo and Tigrayan ethnicities, with ethnicity being decisive in fights for market share. At night the two groups would often clash, some of our informants told us, leaving many migrants dead or wounded, described by another migrant as running into the hundreds every day. The same hostility is seemingly transferred to the prisons in Yemen and Saudi, where fights between different ethnic groups, often between Oromo and Tigray migrants, were a common occurrence for the interviewed migrants.³⁹

The most frequently described challenge that male migrant workers experience during their journeys is physical torture (beatings, stabbings, being tortured with electric shocks, torture by chaining the hands and legs together and even killings), not least in the big halls in transit countries at warehouses where brokers keep and torture migrants for ransom money before allowing them to continue on their journeys. These acts of violence are often committed by the human smugglers as a way of forcing migrants’ families and friends, both abroad and back in their home countries, to send ransom money. Still, payment of ransom neither guarantees safe arrival at destination nor safe return to their birth villages. Linked to ransom are sales of migrants between brokers, resulting in the repeated experience of physical torture, inhumane and degrading treatment, and repeated sufferings by the migrants in again usually humiliating attempts to force families and friends to pay ransom money for their lives and security.

Though a marked taboo among Ethiopian migrants, rape and others forms of sexual violence also seem to be an everyday reality for many male migrants. Sexual exploitation is perpetrated by employers, smugglers, brokers, or local groups, just as it is widespread in situations where brokers sell off migrants to guerrillas, who do with them as they please, including rape and sexual abuse. Although there are documented instances of sexual violence inflicted upon male migrants by Sudanese and Saudi citizens, as well as repeated cases of sexual violence perpetrated by Yemenis against male migrants,⁴⁰ work on violations of the rights of Ethiopian migrants tends to mainly explore such faced by female migrants.⁴¹ But several of our interviewees underlined the frequency of male migrants being offered money to participate willingly in intercourse or of being forcibly raped. Attempts at rape, sometimes gang rape, seems to take place especially in the countryside, where male migrants told that they were taken on the pretext that they are going to work.

Returning ‘home’

Most of the returnees who took part in this research were deported after being imprisoned in the territory of the destination country and at places of transit they traveled through. Others were returned to Ethiopia through the IOM and its Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration program, a joint European Union–IOM initiative. Finally, a few migrant returnees traveled back to Ethiopia on their own after facing the strenuous challenges of their journey. All of them arrived back with serious physical or mental health challenges, no money and little clothing. The major challenges they faced upon their return included health problems, the stereotypical attitudes of other Ethiopians, stigma, discrimination and rejection by their families, and financial and resource constraints.

Male return migrants face particular challenges of absolute poverty (destitution), frustration, feelings of guilt and a lack of confidence.⁴² Although returnees may come back with the expectation (sometimes based on promises made and sometimes on rumors) that the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs or the IOM will cover costs of reintegration, accommodation, clothing and transportation, many are faced with the stark reality that this may not be possible, further complicating their return. After receiving emergency health care and treatment upon their arrival, most of the returnees interviewed were registered by the Ethiopian Red Cross Society or IOM and stayed for a couple of months before being sent to organizations such as the Agar Rehabilitation Center or agencies in regional states. Other interviewed migrants, especially young male returnees who sought to avoid all interaction with the authorities, simply walked out of the airport not knowing where they were going, some eventually seeking help from the Oromia Regional Bureau, who transferred them to shelters. Language barriers are another key challenge some face upon arrival. As migrants come from different regions of Ethiopia, they may not be conversant with the language of the federal capital, Amharic, and thus face challenges in communicating.

The following sections present a brief overview of some the central psychosocial and physical challenges the interviewed male migrants faced upon their return, acknowledging the complex nature of both the challenges and their potential responses. These multifaceted challenges of the imagined reintegration and readjustment process range across economic, social, psychological, cultural, and physical concerns, from a lack of employment opportunities to depression, anxiety, and social stigma.

Trauma, hopelessness and emasculation

Regardless of whether the interviewed migrants traveled south, west, north, or east, their journeys were immensely traumatizing. Young migrants experienced situations of violence, death, grief and extreme personal hardship, as their fellow travelers died of thirst, conflict, or torture. Many had been in situations where they were forced to give up other people’s lives, perhaps being unable to carry injured companions through the desert and having to leave them for dead. This is illustrated by two different experiences of interviewees:

I know a man called (…). The smugglers asked him to make a phone call to his family to make a deposit on his behalf. But he was unable to remember the phone number of his two daughters in Saudi Arabia. As a result, they killed him in front of us.⁴³

Another migrant explained, ‘It took two months to reach Bossaso, and the journey on sea took three days. (…) One of my friends from Wollo died, [and] the other three lost their minds on the sea due to extreme suffocation.’⁴⁴ One young migrant described the macabre violence he had seen inflicted on his friends, including eyes being pulled out by using a water bottle (a well-known practice done by placing an empty water container on the eye of the victim and hitting the plastic bottle, after which the eye pops out), experiences that are scarring for life.⁴⁵

All the interviewees being men, many of them also recounted horrible experiences of seeing young girls and women being gang-raped by brokers, policemen or soldiers. The lasting effects of these horribly dehumanizing experiences on the migrants are clear: ‘The traumatic experiences I underwent hurt me so much. Even after my placement (at the shelter, ed.) I tried to kill myself. I couldn’t sleep most days because of thinking too much about what I have been through,’ one migrant explained.⁴⁶ The failures of migrants’ journeys, their subsequent placement in shelters and their inability to care for their families have detrimental human effects, as a migrant from Tigray told us: ‘My wife calls me and tells me that she is going to leave our children and hang herself. As a result, I don’t sleep at night.’⁴⁷

Almost all the returnees also reported sustained feelings of loneliness and helplessness. Fearful of returning to their communities and families and being confronted with their debts or perceived failures, many of the migrants were caught in contexts in which they do not have anybody or know anybody, whether in Addis Ababa or in other regions of Ethiopia. One migrant who returned from South Sudan through the IOM explained this concern in the following way:

In Addis Ababa, I don’t have anyone I know. I found out that people are not cooperative in Addis Ababa. While sleeping under the bridge, the street children who were sleeping under the bridge thought that I was a thief and told me to go away. I was begging in the streets in Addis Ababa, but no one gave me anything. I spent days without food. One day the policemen found me sleeping in the street and thought that I was drunk and had lost my way home and they slapped me and told me to go away. I have been here (at a shelter, ed.) for two weeks. I have not been given any clothing or shoes. They only give me meals.⁴⁸

Inadequate support or information about reintegration processes only serves to aggravate these feelings of loneliness and of isolation from others. Most forced returnees arrive at Bole International Airport without adequate clothing or shoes and with empty pockets, exhibiting different levels of psychological challenge. While immediate support is provided to most returnees by the humanitarian responders, the ensuing process of traveling further inland is one of vulnerability. In circumstances where migrants come back empty handed there is a growing sense of rejection by close family members. They live in a vacuum between migratory journeys and the realities of having to face questions and scepticism if they return home empty-handed: ‘(…) there is no place for me here in Addis. I feel hopeless here,’ one explained.⁴⁹

The hopelessness of their perceived failures is aggravated further by patriarchal cultural values regarding family life and gendered roles in the community. Men are seen as having superior positions to women, who are expected to be socially, culturally, and economically dependent on them.⁵⁰ This idea of men as decision-makers is nested even in everyday uses of language and proverbs, with Amharic clearly indicating strong patriarchal values that underpin the discriminatory notions about women’s involvement in decision-making.⁵¹ Most informants emphasized that migration experiences that end negatively in, for instance, deportation and forced return often cause negative changes in status and power dynamics in returnees’ families. The notion of wendinet in Amaharic (literally meaning manhood), is scripted on the basis of the strong patriarchal values and the power of relationships whereby a successful woman is often described as wenid (male) while on the other hand men who fail to live up to the ideal manhood of providing for a household/family are on the other hand considered as set (a female). Wendinet is often measured in reference to men’s control over household assets and income, men’s decision-making and overall influence at the household and in the community. This notion is common in other parts of Ethiopia like among the Oromos where dhirumaa (manhood) connotes male authority. One migrant explained:

As a result of the migration we often get emasculated. If a man doesn’t provide for his wife, and if a man does not manage to buy a loaf of bread for his starving kids, he is no longer a man.⁵²

The failed migration projects of male family members are thus described as reversing gender roles by leaving women to be the heads of families, while male return migrants describe themselves as being reduced to setinant (womanhood).

Distress from debt bondage and financial challenges

Most of the migrants we interviewed described their migratory journeys as failures because of their inability to earn money for themselves and their families, which forces them to return empty-handed (in situations where the migrants had a choice of returning and were not forced). Among the major financial challenges male return migrants face include their inability to pay debts owed to families, relatives and friends, the lack of job opportunities, and delays in obtaining start-up capital or seed money as part of reintegration efforts supported by local organizations. All the respondents who had been deported from Saudi Arabia indicated that they owed their families and relatives money ranging from 20,000 to over 70,000 ETB. According to the returnees from Saudi Arabia, the first thing that keeps them constantly worried is the question of how they are going to repay the ransom money to release them from the megazens. This is also cited as a reason why respondents decided not to return to their families but rather stay in Addis Ababa trying to find jobs:

I tried to migrate to Saudi Arabia two months ago, and now I am here in Addis Ababa. I cannot think of going back to my family. They would be angry, not about the decision I made to migrate, but about the money I lost in the unsuccessful attempt to migrate abroad. I worked very hard to get the 20,000 birr, which I got selling cattle. This is going to make my family very angry. I don’t plan to go back to them. I am planning to work in Addis Ababa as a day laborer.⁵³

Since the families of migrants obtain loans by providing their land as collateral, they find repaying their debts difficult (in the context of the failed migration of their children), which in turn leads to alienation from their families and communities. This becomes a key reason why returned migrants do not think of returning to their families and neighborhoods, fundamentally challenging their social reintegration. Being seen as worthless or failures in the eyes of the community, renders employment, marriage and many social relations virtually impossible. Those who have wives and children are anxious because of their inability to provide for their needs:

[K]nowing that there are our wives and children expecting us to provide them with the means of survival and not actually living up to their expectations deeply saddens and constantly keeps us worried.⁵⁴

The shelters do not seem to help here:

Here [at the shelter], we spend our days eating and sleeping. We are not allowed to leave the compound. We could have helped ourselves had we been given seed money and allowed to choose the kind of businesses we would like to engage in. We are healthy and capable of working and supporting ourselves and our families, but they keep us locked up in here. We feel worthless.⁵⁵

While employment, or a lack of it, remains a central driver of Ethiopian migration, the lack of resources makes it exceedingly difficult for humanitarian and other organizations to live up to pledges made to migrants involved in voluntary return schemes about job support at home. Several migrants in this study reported that they were trained in vocational skills they already possessed, simply in the hope of obtaining some seed money to start a business, which they could not do without following structured courses at the shelters. For those who do not receive such support (even if ineffective), the inability to deliver on promises made is not just a problem in that few returnees are granted support in seeking out livelihoods or employment, but also because it discredits the entire system of relief and voluntary return that surrounds Ethiopian migrants. Interviewed migrants felt left behind and succumbed to hopelessness when they are failed by the system that promises them much but only delivers little, some going so far as to see their forced involvement in misappropriated training as an institutional punishment. Delayed integration support, coupled with their lack of welcome by society generally, only serves to make returnees eager to migrate again, even in light of the traumatic events they went through the first time. Sustained migratory efforts are thus difficult to address, if they should be at all in the first place. ‘If there are no other viable options in the coming weeks or months, I will be forced to begin another round’ one returnee told us, which was representative of many interviews.⁵⁶ Migration is seen as a central coping and livelihood strategy for many, even though their actual experiences of migration are far from providing them with improvements to their lives.

Suffering from stigma and the break-up of family relations

Ethiopian returned migrants encountered substantial rejection, dejection, and isolation from the societies they return to, whether in the city or the countryside. Male migrants who return to Ethiopia with no indication of having lived a successful life abroad seemed to be gossiped about and isolated and to experience mental distress. This was especially the case in local communities, where they are called 50/50s, a name used to suggest that they are only half sane. Young male migrants who return to Addis Ababa without any discernible changes to their lives are suspected of having suffered prison life and torture, or even worse, having been subjected to sexual exploitation and/or being HIV positive:

In the first place people in the neighbourhood are likely to have been informed about our travel to South Africa. If after our return to our country people see that we have not been successful in going abroad, they begin heaping all kinds of assumptions upon us. People think that we got back being HIV positive, or beaten, tortured, and robbed, or even forcibly raped. This is the kind of ascription we get from people, and this has seriously affected migrant returnees. I know many migrant returnees who actually went crazy as a result of their rejection and such gossip.⁵⁷

The return migrants also explained their double victimization whereby male survivors of gender-based violence decide to stay away from their home due to fear of social stigma. This relates to the strong societal taboo associated to homosexuality whereby male victims of rape and sexual violence face strong stigma.

Social stigma seems to seriously complicate social reintegration, if not preventing it altogether. Return migrants explained that they are not respected in society, not trusted (especially with money), do not take part in various community-based organizations (i.e. are isolated) and are not regarded as mentally healthy:

I returned back to my place of birth with bare hands. After coming to my village nobody welcomed or supported me. In fact, my father died while I was abroad. Many of our communities consider us losers and unlucky. There are also times when we are unable to get wives due to such backward and biased social attitudes to male returnees.⁵⁸

Another interviewee expressed a similar feeling:

People in my neighbourhood would think that I am useless and shameful. And because of my failure to succeed like others who went abroad and succeeded in supporting their families here, I would be rejected and lose the respect of others. This is how people in my neighborhood would see me. I will never go back.

This sentiment was often repeated, as another migrant explained to us:

Nobody trusts us. People think that we are mentally sick, as they believe that what we might have experienced throughout the course of our travels abroad has tortured us to the extent that we have gone mad. We are regarded as being unpredictable, unreliable, unstable and sometimes dangerous. I usually observe that my presence around people makes them feel insecure and discomforted.⁵⁹

These stigmas, coupled with events that occurred during migration journeys, often lead to broken relationships with one’s parents, children and spouses:

The state of insecurity we often find ourselves in forces us to lose communication with the family we leave behind. During my stay away for eight years I only talked to my wife and our son during the first year. The hardships I encountered did not even give me the chance to talk to them or send remittances back home. That cost me my family, as my wife, who was only 24 at the time I left, decided to be in another relationship, which is understandable.⁶⁰

Another interviewee shared the feeling of guilt toward his parents and the presumed resentment of the community:

Knowing how my parents feel about me every time they look at me, I hate myself and think of going away. I feel rejected, dejected and unwanted. I don’t feel that I am welcome at home or in the neighborhood. I am staying here because I don’t have anywhere to go. But I feel I must leave this place […].⁶¹

Home is not what it used to be and coming to terms with the new realities that had arisen while they were away was difficult: ‘Despite the hardships encountered on the way and in the destination countries, we often tend to compare the living conditions in our birth villages with those of the places we have been to.’⁶²

Conclusion

This article explores the nexus between migration journeys, psychosocial well-being and masculinities for Ethiopian men, in an East African context. Accentuating that migration is a continuous process, and a phenomenon that takes place within social fields extending beyond those of the migrants themselves, allows us to nuance the conception of ‘reintegration.’ While it may be logical for international organizations working on migration to assume a difference between outward migration, return migration and reintegration, these shape each other in ways that accentuate especially the deep and fluid connection between the events of the journey and the process of returning. Reintegration cannot be isolated as a manipulable process determined by the level of support services provided to migrants. The Ethiopian men interviewed for this study all stressed the life-altering qualities of their efforts to migrate, meaning that there is no separation of phases of migration into during and after. The traumatic events of irregular migration suggest it becomes an existential journey as much as a physical one, its effects lingering even when the aspect of physical mobility may be considered to have ended.

Although there are instances of voluntary and assisted voluntary return, most Ethiopian returnees have recently been deported through Saudi Arabia’s massive air repatriation scheme, which sees migrants landing in Bole International Airport with literally nothing but the clothes on their backs. Upon returning to Ethiopia, some avoid interaction with the authorities and trickle into Addis Ababa, while others are directed to local shelters or possibly one of the few institutions in the city that provide physical or mental health care. From here, they make efforts to adjust or integrate in familiar or unfamiliar cities, or in many cases prepare for the next attempt to migrate abroad in the hope of a better life, even in the face of repeating the traumatic events they have already gone through. However, there is no singular return migration experience, but rather a plurality of such experiences, just as there is no smooth reintegration or easy transition back to earlier positions in the community. Returning involves a personal struggle, a complex and multi-layered process closely linked to the uniquely distressing circumstances of migratory journeys, to which all individuals react differently.

Migration is not a temporary process or journey, but rather an enduring process of personal, mental, and existential change. The life-altering and irreparable effects of migration for the Ethiopian men interviewed here, seldom for the better, means that what was before will never be again. There are no processes of development, forms of treatment, or possibilities of employment that can bring one back to how things were. Our empirical findings show the boundlessness of migratory concepts that are sometimes sought bounded and sequenced for the sake of explanation (i.e. leaving, journeying, staying, returning). Returning rarely forms the end of a migratory journey but rather remains part of migrants’ continuous process of negotiating their mobility and lives altogether, including their personal development and well-being. Instead of neatly confined conceptions of stability-rupture-stability, migration is an existential part of lives like the flows of a river; sometimes in rapid movement, sometimes stalled, but always changing, even in attempts to recapture what was or come to terms with what is. We have contributed here to work stressing how this fluidity demands a nonlinear interpretation of migratory lives, using the empirical findings to argue for return migration not as an outcome or an ending but an unfolding state of being at the deep intersections of instrumental and emotional migrant life that while foregrounding individual subjectivities, is really about relationalities.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the reviewers and editors for their comments on drafts of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interviews with returnee migrants, Addis Ababa, 2019.

2 Cassarinio, “Theorising Return Migration.”

3 Ottonelli and Torresi, “When Is Migration Voluntary.”

4 Chimni, “Globalization, Humanitarianism.”

5 Hammond, “Examining the Discourse of Repatriation.”

6 Beltman, “Voluntary Return Facilities.”

7 Christou and King, Counter-Diaspora; Vathi, “Migration and Psychosocial Wellbeing.”

8 RMMS, Blinded by Hope.

9 Zeleke Eresso, “Sisters on the Move.”

10 Kuschminder, Andersson, and Seigel, “Migration and Multidimensional Well-Being.”

11 See; Birke et al., “Migration and Mental Health.”

12 Vathi, “Migration and Psychosocial Wellbeing.”

13 Zeleke Eresso, “Sisters on the Move.”

14 Feyissa, “Beyond Economics.”

15 Treiber, “Becoming by Moving.”

16 Minaye, “Attitude, Risk Perception.”

17 Kerilyn, “Aspriring for Change.”

18 Busza et al., “Learning from Returnee Ethiopian.”

19 Interview with returnee migrant in Addis Ababa, 2020.

20 FGD with five returnee migrants Arsi Zone, Gobessa district, 2019.

21 Ibid. and Interview with a returnee migrant Addis Ababa, 2019.

22 RMMS, Blinded by Hope.

23 Interview with returnee migrant, Arsi zone, 2019.

24 IOM, “They Snatched from Me My Own Cry.”

25 Interview with director of a shelter in Addis Ababa, 2020.

26 Fernandez, “Irregular Migration from Ethiopia.”

27 see Birke et al., “Migration and Mental Health.”

28 Erdal and Oeppen, “Forced to Leave?.”

29 Vathi, “Migration and Psychosocial Wellbeing.”

30 Gough and McGregor, “Well Being,” 19.

31 Boccagni and Baldassar, “Emotions on the Move.”

32 Atnafu and Adamek, “The Return Migration Experiences.”

33 See Kleist, “Negotiating Respectable Masculinity.”

34 Bilgili, Kuschminder, and Siegel, “Return Migrants’ Perceptions.”

35 Interview with director of a shelter in Addis Ababa, 2020.

36 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

37 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2019.

38 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2019.

39 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2020.

40 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

41 See Zewdu and Suleyiman, “Depression and Coping Mechanism”; Nisrane, Ossewaarde, and Need, “The Exploitation Narratives.”

42 Interview with returnee migrant in Addis Abba, 2019.

43 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

44 Interview with returnee migrant in Addis Abba, 2019.

45 FGD with returnee migrants, Addis Ababa, 2020.

46 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

47 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

48 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2019.

49 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2019.

50 Zeleke Eresso, Women in Ethiopia.

51 Zeleke Eresso, “Sisters on the Move.”

52 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

53 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2020.

54 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

55 FGD with returnee migrants, Addis Ababa, 2020.

56 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2020.

57 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2020.

58 FGD with returnee migrants, Addis Ababa, 2020.

59 FGD with returnee migrants, Addis Ababa, 2020.

60 Interview with returnee migrant, Addis Ababa, 2020.

61 Interview with returnee migrant in Arsi zone, Shirka district, 2019.

62 FGD with returnee migrants, Addis Ababa, 2020.