(Im)Mobility, Cognitive Migration and Return in Ghana

Abstract

The study explores cognitive migration and return using in-depth biographical interviews of 21 failed migrants in Accra and Kumasi to understand the role of the mind in imagining a future away from home; how the mind travels ahead of the body to the imagined destination, the different trajectories of failure encountered and their effects as well as the process by which the mind returns to the origin in pursuit of a homeward future. The study finds evidence for cognitive migration in Ghana. Secondly, the study establishes the salience of imagination as the true essence of cognitive migration and not necessarily the intense planning and preparation that migrant aspirants undertake. The study shows that the effects of failing a migration project in situ, transcends monetary and temporal losses; cognitive migrants see failure as a disruptive event with life-altering implication for their wellbeing. To this end, psychology’s understanding of migrants’ social integration and psychological well-being can no longer be consigned to destination countries. Thirdly, the study finds the reconfiguration of imaginations not to be only a spatio-temporal process but a spatio-temporal-cognitive process. By clarifying how cognitive migrants return their minds to invest in a homeward future in the wake of failure, the study extends the current concept of cognitive migration to cognitive return migration and delineates the cognitive return migrant or the immobile cognitive returnee as a new immobility category. The study recommends the incorporation of immobile cognitive returnees into migration praxis to make migration an intrinsic part of broader social processes of development, social transformation and globalisation. Migration statistics, it is strongly recommended, must make cognitive return migrants or immobile cognitive returnees visible by counting them. Other policy implications have been fully discussed.