Why Fewer Than One in Four South African Families Plan to Return After Emigrating
If fewer than one in four South Africans who’ve already emigrated say they plan to come back, is it honest for your own family to keep planning this move as something temporary?
What the data actually says
A 2026 South African Diaspora Report — run by the University of Cape Town and the Liberty Institute of Strategic Marketing, surveying roughly 1,500 South Africans across 73 countries and reported by Bloomberg — found that fewer than 25% of respondents plan to return to South Africa. South african families who plan to return after emigrating are, on this evidence, a real but genuinely small minority of everyone who’s already made the move, not the “we’ll go for a few years and see” majority many people assume they’ll join.
The honest caveat first
This is a self-selected online survey of people who have already emigrated, not a random sample of the diaspora as a whole — so it describes who chose to respond, not every South African abroad, and its figures (roughly 60% of respondents reporting household income over $100,000, for instance) are almost certainly skewed upward by who tends to answer these surveys. Do south african emigrants come back is a bigger, messier question than any one study can fully settle. Treat the under-25% figure as a genuine signal, not a hard national statistic.
Why the number still matters for your own planning
Even with that caveat, the pattern lines up with other things the same survey found: around half of respondents cited insecurity and safety as their main reason for leaving, and the great majority hold a tertiary qualification. People who leave for those reasons, with those qualifications, tend not to be testing the water — they’re making a considered, largely one-way decision. Planning a permanent move to canada with that context in mind is simply more realistic for most families than treating the move as reversible by default.
A framework for deciding which one you actually are
- If safety, opportunity or your children’s future are the driving reasons, plan as though this is permanent — sell the property, close out what needs closing, and build your Canadian life without a mental safety net back home.
- If the move is tied to a specific, time-limited reason — a contract, a spouse’s posting, testing the waters before older children finish school — build in the paperwork and financial structures that keep a genuine option to return open.
- If you’re genuinely unsure, the diaspora data suggests you’re the exception rather than the rule, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about which camp you’re actually in rather than deferring the decision indefinitely.
Selling everything versus keeping a foothold in South Africa
Selling everything versus keeping a foothold in south africa isn’t purely a financial question — a retained property or a bank account left open costs money and administrative attention either way. But given how few families in this data end up actually returning, keeping a foothold “just in case” is worth weighing honestly against what it costs to maintain, rather than defaulting to it out of habit. That’s really the question at the heart of this: whether your own family, having left South Africa, will end up wanting to come back — not whether it’s possible, but whether it’s honestly what most people in your position end up doing.