Margaritaville: Motivations for Expatriate Migration

People from the northern, industrialized world frequently use southern, tropical nations as tourist destinations, resulting in temporary, often seasonal, shifts in the demographic and economic conditions in the host nation. This pattern of one-sided tourist migration is part of globalization, especially with the growing ease of travel. Increasingly, tourist destinations are becoming the residential locations of choice for expatriating retirees from northern nations and the scale of this process of tropical relocation is likely to grow with the ¡°coming of age¡± of the baby-boom generation in the global North. But what motivates the phenomenon of expatriate immigration? This paper argues that relocating retirees are likely to have a pre-constructed expectation of life in a foreign, tropical setting based both on prior personal experience and on representations of these places, leading them to the creation of an idealized conception of place, or even a simulacrum, a ¡°simulated reality.¡± To adjust to life in their new setting, the retirees will need to develop a sense of ¡°place identity¡±, however it is proposed that this process may be protracted if there are inconsistencies between the real daily-life experiences and the preconceived, idealized expectations.