Infrastructuring exit migration: Social hope and migration decision-making in EU families who left the UK after the 2016 EU referendum

Since the 2016 EU referendum, estimates on net-migration by the UK’s Office for National Statistics have shown two parallel trends: declining new arrivals from the EU (EU immigration) and increasing departure of EU nationals formerly living in the UK (EU emigration). To date, little is known of the latter and of the circumstances and factors that inform and shape EU citizens’ decisions to leave the UK. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 37 EU families who left the UK after the EU referendum, this article offers insights into their social hopes, migratory trajectories, motivations and decision-making. Using a family-centred approach, the analysis of these ‘exit trajectories’ through the lens of migration infrastructures reveals a range of challenges EU migrants must negotiate and overcome – often within their households. The analysis complicates assumptions of the meaning and experience of ‘going home’ as seen from a family perspective and reveals the intergenerational tensions, challenges and accommodations that ‘return’ produces and how these differently affect each family member. Faced with diverging interests, needs and expectations, families pursued two main strategies for accommodating these differences: a spatial strategy, namely negotiating and choosing a destination that would suit the present and future of the family members, or a temporal one, planning the exit strategy not as a one-off event but taking place over a longer period. However, accommodation and reconciliation are not always possible, leading in some cases to the fragmentation or dissolution of the family unit.