Reasons to Return During Global Pandemic: The Bulgarian Case

The aim of this paper is to examine which factors indicate a greater influence over Bulgarians regarding their decision to return home due to the COVID-19Pandemic. For this purpose an online survey among Bulgarians abroad examines their expectations towards the economic consequences in their country of residence and how it will affect their attitude regarding possible remigration. As the main question is not whether, but when the economic crisis will happen, many emigrants decided to return to their home countries. This strongly affected the international labour migration. The biggest factors prompting emigrants to leave could be divided into two main groups – social, based on emotions and willingness to be close to their families, and economic, related to employment and income changes.There is a lack of studies on the examined problem – how crises are affecting the remigration processes, which is author's contribution to the researched problem.