Returnee Populations in Rural North Macedonia

Two thirds of return migrants left North Macedonia for economic reasons. Joblessness, money, a better standard of living somewhere else. That matters because it reframes what return actually means, these aren't people fleeing violence who found safety and came back. They are people who left because the economy failed them, and who came back to an economy that, in most cases, still does.

In 2024, over 530,000 North Macedonians were living abroad, equivalent to approximately 30% of the population remaining within the country. 30% of households in North Macedonia have at least one return migrant. Rural populations have fallen from 66% of the total in 1960 to 40% in 2024. 58% of young people currently say they want to emigrate. The country loses approximately €333 million annually to emigration. North Macedonia ranked among the top ten countries globally for inability to retain or attract talent between 2015 and 2016. What these numbers collectively describe is a country in a slow demographic outflow, where return is often a temporary condition rather than a permanent settlement, and where the structural conditions driving people out have not been addressed in the time they were away.

Dr Mitko Arnaudov, a Research Fellow at the Institute of International Politics and Economics in Belgrade whose research focuses on regional governance and state strategy in North Macedonia, is direct about why. The institutional framework is weak. Political and criminal interests have compromised the capacity of state institutions to function as they should. Returning populations find themselves unable to access the rights and services they are formally entitled to, not because the formal entitlements don't exist. The strategies are written, the documents are published, the civil society organisations are nominally active, but because the political will to implement any of it is absent. Weak states, Dr Arnaudov notes, run on political will. When that's missing, formal frameworks are decoration.

EU funding has not filled the gap in the way it was supposed to. Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA) funds, channelled through candidate state status since 2005, have been misused. Buildings constructed with European money sit non-functional. Rural infrastructure projects remain incomplete. The promises made during political campaigns, and they have been made repeatedly, for 35 years, to rural and marginalised communities across the country, have not been kept. What EU accession candidacy has produced, at the community level, is a cycle of expectation and disappointment that has contributed to the emigration numbers rather than reversed them.

Employment is where the structural failure is most visible and most damaging, with unemployment rates in 2025 being at 12.3%. There is no coherent government strategy for addressing unemployment. Public sector jobs are distributed through party alliance rather than merit, salaries are set high enough that the private sector cannot compete, which produces a labour market where employment is a political reward rather than an economic function. The result is that young people with qualifications either leave or learn to navigate patronage networks. A 2013 survey found that 70% of young people expressed reluctance to report cases of university admission secured through personal connections. That figure is not a measure of individual moral failure. It is a measure of how thoroughly patronage has been normalised as the operating logic of institutional life.

Remittances do real work in this environment. Every additional €35 per household in remittances reduces the probability of poor health outcomes by a significant 63% on average, a statistic that reveals, in a single number, how far the formal health system falls short of what households actually need, and how much of that gap is being plugged by money sent from abroad. Healthcare has struggled visibly since COVID-19, which hit the Western Balkans harder than most of Europe in terms of death rates, a stark indicator of a health system unequipped for contemporary demands. The reliance on remittances as a substitute for functional public services is not a sustainable model. It is what communities do when the alternative is worse.

Social tensions around return are more complicated than the standard post-conflict framing suggests. Dr Arnaudov pushes back on simplified narratives: Macedonian heritage returnees tend to be welcomed because they bring capital. The sharper anxieties in border communities attach to migrants from outside the region, amplified by local media that has its own dependency on public funding and limited appetite for nuanced reporting. The civil war dynamics of the early 2000s, politically driven rather than arising from genuine grassroots ethnic hostility, left a residue that formal reconciliation processes haven't worked through at the community level, because formal processes focused on political settlement, not on the people living beneath it.

Returning to rural North Macedonia means returning to a place that has been losing people and investment for over 60 years, where the institutions that should support reintegration are compromised, and where the political will to change any of this remains contingent on EU pressure that has itself stalled. People come back. They find out what hasn't changed. And then, too often, the calculation begins again.

Further information and opportunities to engage with organisations working in this area are listed below:
https://north-macedonia.iom.int/
https://www.caritas.eu/caritas-macedonia/
https://www.undp.org/eurasia/projects/reintegration-returnees

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