Autocratic regimes often rely on emigration as a safety valve to ease domestic dissent, but this strategy comes at the cost of brain drain. Can such regimes entice politically motivated emigrants to return through selective incentives or improved economic opportunities, or is comprehensive regime change the only pathway to reversing such a brain drain? We argue that these efforts interact with conditions migrants encounter in host countries, which may themselves be experiencing democratic backsliding—or, as is often the case for Russian emigrants, already be autocratic. Under such circumstances, how do host-country political, legal, and economic conditions, combined with changes in the autocratic homeland, shape migrants’ decisions to return, relocate elsewhere, or remain abroad?

To answer these questions, we draw on data from a large-scale conjoint experiment with 7,500 war-induced Russian emigrants residing in around 100 countries, supplemented by 500 qualitative interviews and a longitudinal panel survey. Our findings illuminate the complex interplay of home- and host-country dynamics and provide new insights into the factors that drive return intentions and actual migration outcomes among politically motivated emigrants.