There are 184 shops crammed into the Albanian end of Aleksandar Makedonski Street, selling carpets, furniture, jewellery and wedding gowns. The shops make most of their annual turnover during the summer months, when thousands of Albanian migrants return to get married or build houses in their villages. In this period, the Albanian quarter bustles with activity, and Cadillacs and other impressive cars with Chicago and Alaska license plates are parked along the sidewalks. Many of Kicevo's 300 private taxi drivers make a living shuttling the diaspora to and from Skopje airport. The heart of the Albanian economy is made up of traders, restaurateurs, construction workers, money changers, tradesmen and a few lawyers and private doctors. [ESI 2002, 8] The social expenditures of the Albanian diaspora tend to be unrelated to local development, e.g., a hall for social functions such as weddings and even a new soccer stadium. The researchers illustrated the social structure and expectations by taking the entering 1989 class in a high school in the neighboring mixed town of Kicevo and then looking at what they were doing a decade later. Of the ethnic Albanians, all except one were working abroad and the one's father was working in Germany. Of the ethnic Macedonians, all continued to live in the immediate region. This illustrates the self-reinforcing critical mass dynamics of the labor migration for the ethnic Albanians and the lack of migration for the ethnic Macedonians.

Emigration tends to be a cumulative process. Its incidence is a positive function of the number of earlier emigrants who provide money, information and support for newcomers. If Kicevo's ethnic Macedonians have relatives abroad, they usually emigrated for Australia in the 1950s and no longer maintain close links with family who remained. There is no equivalent of the dense networks which Albanian have constructed between Kicevo and the outside world over the past two decades. [ESI 2002, 25] There was one interesting exception to the rule of non-productive expenditure of the remittances from the Albanian diaspora [concerning Albania itself, see Martin et al. 2000 and Nicholson 2001, 2002]. An ethnic Albanian with a clothing company in France set up a cut-and-sew subcontracting company in Kicevo with about 100 workers (ironically, all but two of them are ethnic Macedonians who worked for a former Yugoslav textile company). Cloth is trucked in from France and the finished product is sent back with the company in France acting as the contractor. While this is not an example of a migrant returning permanently to run a business at home, it is a case reminiscent of the small garment factories _(maquiladoras)_ in Guanajuato, Mexico where the company is a labor-intensive part of a value chain based in the North.

I would argue that the local developmental project is lost if this labor migration continues as a way of life. There are two related arguments here. One argument is that the static-efficiency option of increased earnings through semi-permanent labor migration is dynamically inefficient in the sense of foreclosing on the option of local development. Martin and Straubhaar noted this when commenting on studies such as Abadan-Unat [1976] about the Turkish experience with _gastarbeiters._ These studies concluded that Turkish areas of origin were not primed for an economic take off before emigration began, and that remittances and returning migrants reinforced trends that prevented a take-off rather than fueling the take off for reasons that included ... :

- nonproductive use of remittances, e.g., to speculate on real estate or to imitate a successful service such as a delivery service, taxi, or a shop

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