Can expats be lured back? Why these Latvians are coming home.

Elina Zelcha thought she was doing well when she moved from Baltinava, a small village near the Latvia-Russia border, to Hamburg, Germany, in 2018. But something nagged at her.

“Returning home was a call from within, a whisper in my ear,” says the tattoo artist, describing the epiphany she had later. “‘You were born in Latvia for a reason.’” She decided to listen and head home to Latgale, Latvia’s easternmost province.

Latvia is hoping that other emigrants will follow Ms. Zelcha’s lead. The small Baltic nation has a severe population decline problem, one of the worst in Europe. The country has seen its population decrease more than 20% since 2000, to 1.9 million today: the combined result of a rapidly aging population, too few births, and international migration.

So the government is stepping up its efforts to bring them back. And whether it’s due to the pitch of remigration counselors, the promise of telecommuting from their motherland, or the simple lure of family and nostalgia, Latvian emigrants are coming back home.

“We need our people,” says Elita Gavele, the Latvian ambassador-at-large for diaspora affairs. “We want them to come back.”

The lure of home

According to the government, nearly 3,000 people have returned to Latvia over the last three years, mainly from Scandinavia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, while 650 other families have indicated that they are planning to do the same.

The returnees are coming back for a variety of reasons, according to Ms. Gavele. “Some are coming back because they want their children to study at Latvian schools. Others are coming back to buy an apartment or upgrade their living conditions.”

“Others are returning to start a new business based on an idea they developed and wish to try out in their homeland,” she says. “And of course then there are those who miss their family.”

Sentiment is a major factor, if not the only one, propelling the latest wave of Latvian repatriates home. Such is the case for Maija Hartmane. She moved to the U.K., the most popular destination for Latvian emigrants, with her parents in 2007 at the beginning of the Great Recession, but returned in 2018.

“It was never really about moving back, per se,” says Ms. Hartmane, who now manages a guesthouse in Rāzna National Park near Rēzekne. “All my school summer holidays were spent here. My entire family lived in Latvia, and I felt that this was where I belonged.”

The young hospitality worker “always” intended to come back, she says. Besides, she adds, “I never really ‘fit’ into British culture, although I did make some very good friends there.”

Leeds, where her family settled in England, was too “big,” she says. So is the Latvian capital of Riga, for that matter. “I wanted to get back to the countryside and fresh air. So here I am.” Referring to the seclusion of Latgale and the park where she works and lives, she adds, ”This is where my soul belongs.”

Ms. Hartmane gives Astrida Lescinska, the remigration counselor for the Latgale planning region, considerable credit for helping her decide to return. A remigrant herself who had moved to the U.K. as a teenager in 2012, Ms. Lescinska now works to contact potential returnees and create a plan for them to move back to Latvia.

“One of the major challenges of my job is to tell them what Latvia is like today,” says Ms. Lescinska, who is based in Daugavpils, Latgale’s largest city. Many potential returnees are not familiar with how much Latvia has changed, or how much the economy has improved, she says.

“Most emigrants, I find, want to come home,” she says. “They just need a little push – and to know that there is someone there to assist them and to continue to make them feel at home after they do return.”

“Our regional coordinators are actively and relentlessly working in helping our citizens to move back to Latvia,” says Artūrs Toms Plešs, the minister for environmental protection and regional development, which oversees the accelerated remigration campaign. “I believe that the pandemic has played a role, too. Now that people know that they can work remotely, some see that as a productive way to return.”

“A complex decision”

Ms. Zelcha, the tattoo artist who returned to Baltinava in April of this year, works with Ms. Lescinska to encourage other potential remigrants. “I am glad that I moved away,” she says. “Moving away gave me a new understanding of my society and my village.”

“I saw the opportunities it offered, which I hadn’t seen before. Also, I received a lot of support for my hand-poke tattooing business, which is something that is very rare in our country.”

Latvia has changed, and for the better, she says, “but the biggest change for me was internal,” and the way she perceives and appreciates things she hadn’t necessarily appreciated before, like the sublime “calmness” of her village.

For all the remigrant success stories, there are those who feel that the Latvian government could do even more to ease their return.

“I think the government could also allow returnees not to pay taxes for the first year, the way that Canada and Portugal do,” says Liene Ozolina, a sociologist who returned to Latvia with her American husband and young son last year after living for 10 years in London. “I think that this would be a real way for Latvia to incentivize its citizens to return.”

“But,” she adds, “even that in itself would not be the driving force for someone to return.”

The process of re-acclimating to Latvia has not been without its bumps, says Dr. Ozolina, who now lives in Riga, where she teaches at the Latvian Academy of Culture. There have been shocks, particularly the difference between English and Latvian manners. She does not deny that she misses the former. “People are less kind and gracious in public,” she says. “That can hurt. In London, the form is that if you step on someone’s foot you automatically say ‘sorry.’ Not here, I am afraid.”

“The roughness and incivility of the Soviet days dies hard,” she adds, referring to the half-century-long Russian occupation of the Baltic nation, which ended 30 years ago. “You can still feel the trauma of that time.”

Nevertheless, she and her husband are happy with their decision to move back to Latvia. “Returning home is a complex decision with its own emotional and rational dimensions,” says Dr. Ozolina. “What matters is how it feels to be back in a place where you have your childhood friends and your relatives. These were the things which ultimately carried the most weight in my decision to return home.”

“In the end, it was the right decision for me.”