Portuguese emigrants in France: comming back

Abstract

Even if the Portuguese situation makes it little probable or desirable a massive comming back of workers, emigration is the result of a set of individual choices and therefore, in spite of the crisis and ignoring the official policies, a certain number of families choose to remake their lives in the homeland. Nevertheless the lack of documents makes it impossible to analyse such comming back, either in the immigration countries or in those of the emigration. But a chance of study has been offered to the researches recently: the processes concerning those people that went homewards within the scope of the French «return aid». The study of the processes concerning those Portuguese that decided to get a «cost aid» for their comming back are for the author the only source to size not the number of the returned Portuguese but the fraction of the colony settled in France that chose to resettle in Portugal. The 3792 processes on which this study has been based correspond to the whole of processes classified at the ONI (at the end of July 1978, when such study started), after the fulfilment of every procedure established for the granting of the «return aid». They are therefore regarding those Portuguese families that came definitively back to their country after receiving their amount of money. The target guiding the analysis of a sample of Portuguese people in such situation was not to evaluate the efficiency reached by the Stoleru's policy as far as its aims are concerned but to seize, through the only existing data, the demographic and economic structure of the fraction of the Portuguese colony that came back.