Eric Pido's monograph addresses a significant gap in the literature on Filipino migration and the United States: the effects of their return on migrant subjects themselves and on their homeland. In the last twenty years, scholars have covered the experiences of care workers, the American imperial legacy, and Filipino identities in the Pacific world. Pido supplements this scholarship with a compelling account of the intersections of neoliberal capitalism in the global South, the relevance of longing and nostalgia, and urban development. He disentangles the complex relationships between these topics through the subject of his study, the balikbayans, a term that describes Filipinos who emigrated to the United States after 1965, and have been returning to the Philippines for the last twenty years in growing numbers. While the term also includes overseas workers, Pido is mostly interested in those who have acquired American citizenship, and focusses on a sample of migrants who returned from the American West Coast to Metro Manila between 2006 and 2011.

The study conceptualizes migration as an interconnected process rather than a unidirectional movement. These migrant journeys are shaped by global economic constellations, first drawing workers to the United States who then use the acquired capital to return to and retire in the Philippines. On a second level, and this is one of Pido's most valuable contributions, it is not just the migrants’ bodies that are traversing a globalized economy, but also their emotions. This “labor of imagination” (6), Pido argues, eventually materializes as malls, retirement communities, and balikbayan homes that capture migrants’ capital as well as their longings for the homeland, as the trajectories of returning migrants are channelled by government regulation, tourism, real estate, and visa policies.

The three chapters that form the first part of the book lay out this balikbayan economy, the structural factors which favour return migration. The book first provides the macroeconomic and historical context, explaining how the Philippines were transformed under Ferdinand Marcos and in the two decades that followed his rule. He delineates how an economy focussing on import substitution became a destination for foreign investment through devaluation, structural adjustment, and the deregulation of the property market. The second chapter explores the return economy in more detail. Pido argues that migrants embody the link between the nation-state and global capital: exported as workforce, their remittances make up for the failure of the state, as their funds help families to provide for basic needs. As remittance circulation was eased through legal and technological changes, migrants also remained invested in the homeland through cultural and familial connections maintained by shipments of consumer goods and shared experiences of Filipino media. The part concludes with an analysis of the transnational network that channels funds of balikbayans into Filipino real-estate development. Spurred by the American mortgage crisis of 2008 and migrants’ loss of personal assets, estate agents and brokers started to target retirees. Using catalogues and interviews, Pido demonstrates convincingly that American modernity is blended with idealized images of the Philippines. Balikbayans are promised a return to an updated version of the country of their childhood memories, where Western standards of security and the built environment are reproduced with a local flavour.

While the first part of the book delineates the economic conditions for the balikbayan economy, the second part is supposed to focus more on experiences. Its first chapter explores the tourism industry that targets potential returnees but has to manage their anxieties. The “paradox of overseas Filipino tourism” is addressed directly in the marketing as a “visit home” (122), but also in the (re)construction of nostalgic childhood experiences and in attempts to dispel negative perceptions. The next chapter addresses how actual returnees construct their new homes and identities. Pido explores how Filipino homes are embellished with Western features and how American customs are replicated in domestic spaces, arguing that the absence of the extended family and the provision of space for domestic help epitomize the position of the balikbayans between two worlds. The last chapter, and one confusingly titled “Conclusion,” addresses the Filipino retirement industry. These two chapters re-create the dual analysis of earlier parts: Pido lays out the financial and legal structures that attract not only balikbayans, but also Chinese and Korean retirees, and explores their spatial manifestations of private homes and immigrant communities, followed by a brief epilogue summarizing the study's main points.

This imbalance in the second part is one of the few criticisms that could be made about this insightful book which skilfully connects structural change in the Philippines with global flows of capital, people, and ideas. Pido's account works best in the chapters that make these connections most explicit, but some readers might struggle with the in-depth conceptual and theoretical discussions. Where the book attains the equilibrium between structure and agency combined with an elegant mixture of evidence from interviews and empirical data, the significance of its contribution becomes most evident. Pido's inclusion of the emotional dimension, best captured in his dense description of balikbayan domestic spaces and experiences, makes this a truly innovative work. In his analysis of immigrants’ hopes, anxieties, and identities manifesting in the intimacy of living spaces in their old and new homelands, readers grasp how transnational connectivities fundamentally transform not only these lives, but also the spaces they inhabit. Through his ethnographic investigation of the circulation of funds, imaginations, and bodies, Pido provides a convincing example of what a modern, transnational analysis of migration can attain. While this monograph will not take a central role in classrooms where a classic story of immigrant adaption or assimilation is told, it is an important contribution for scholars and students interested in the complex relationships of people, capital, policies, and ideas across national borders.