Nowadays scholarship pays increased attention to migrant transnationalism and social remittances. Based on 324 in-depth interviews with Indian, Moroccan, Ukrainian, Bosnian and Filipino migrants in a number of EU countries (Austria, Italy, Spain and the UK), our paper aims to explore nuances of their social remittances especially in connection with their transnational mobility and social repositioning. Our findings show that social remittances become part of complex socioeconomic scripts and transactions. We recognize the following three types of social remittances: cultural, civic and political social remittances generated for personal and/or communal concerns and invariably related to the migrant's new social status. The most prevailing activities are: running an ethnic shop or restaurant; helping co-nationals abroad to adjust or to return; organizing cross-cultural exchange between the countries of origin and destination; and participating in political protests. Although transnational mobility becomes an essential element in the remittance transaction, social remittances of various kinds allow migrants to make a valid social contribution to their countries of origin while avoiding repatriation.

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Anna Triandafyllidou 'When I was packing for Greece, I thought that my MBA from Harvard would allow me to easily find a good job in Athens, something like the chief executive officer or, at least, the project manager in a large firm'. Georgia, who is now 47, moved from Boston to Greece in the mid 1990s, following her Greek husband. Since then, she has been helping her father-inlaw with their family poultry business in a small Greek city, switching between the duties of their family-owned shop assistant and the housewife. Her conational Vicky, who had grown up in Washington DC and received the law degree from the UCLA, also moved to Southern Europe as a marriage-migrant to reunite with her Italian husband in Rome in the late 1990s and to discover eventually that she 'has always been no more than a housewife' there. Like Georgia, she admits, 'It was not only the new language that I had to master. It was everything: the children, the in-laws, the local economy and the growing corruption. Many doors were closed for me from the very beginning'. A former business executive from Miami Odette, who arrived in Greece only five years ago and who has been unemployed all this time, concludes, 'It is both very funny and sad to see that our American degrees have not been really demanded here'. The career-failure stories of these women-migrants are not exceptional. According to the Eurostat release from 2011, almost 30 % of all tertiary educated migrants in Europe (which is around 10 million) are over-qualified and de-scaled women of the active working age. How does it happen that highly educated, professional women like Vickie, Georgia and Odette enthusiastically engage in a migration project yet end up under-employed and de-skilled in their destination countries? Feminist scholarship shows that for them, there are indeed many factors that may adversely affect integration and future professional development in the new country. Understanding this, Odette confesses that she sees no future for herself in Greece in the milieu of the global financial crisis and seeks to persuade her Greek husband to relocate back to the United States. Studies conducted by feminist scholars indicate that Odette is far from unique in her pessimism, especially when it comes to the effect of the crisis upon both women and skilled migrants. The impact of the global financial crisis of the new millennium and related economic austerity measures on high-skill migration (HSM) is frequently mentioned in the scholarly literatures and policy texts (

Today marriage-migration remains the dominant form of naturalization in Italy and Greece, even for women from such high-income countries as the USA. Pilot studies of intra-OECD female migrants to Southern Europe show that the majority of them marry local men, consider their matrimony a mistake and feel isolated. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive knowledge about dynamics of their socio-cultural integration or expat nationalism (although scholarship generally acknowledges a strong relationship between these two processes). Based on narrative-biographic interviews with sixty Anglophone female expatriates married to Italian and Greek men, our study explores the women's negotiation of culture within the context of their Italian and Greek families, and looks at emerging challenges for their integration. We show that these women are nationalistic and culturally-stringent actors, who often find it extremely difficult to fully learn and integrate to the new cultures of Southern Europe.