The findings in the previous seven chapters show us that the human capital gains potentially available through education and migration are contingent on time and place. What unites wildly divergent cases is the desire of parents and children to improve their lives and future prospects, often using migration as a tool to improve human capital gains. At the same time, the effects of the COVID-19 epidemic put at risk these gains, although the degrees to which human mobility and educational investment are reduced by the circumstances of 2020 are yet to be seen.As the chapters in this book have shown, the connections between education, migration and human development across a sample of various Asian countries are complex and varied. When we focus on specific case studies, such as left-behind children in rural China or highly skilled return migrants in India, we are dealing with situations that ostensibly have little in common. At the same time, the aspirations of parents and children in both cases have doubtless commonalities: the children have dreams and ambitions that education can help them realize, and the parents want their children to realize those dreams. Migration, forced or voluntary, has the potential to disrupt or limit such dreams, as shown in the two examinations of Japan and most tellingly in the case of Timor-Leste. On the other hand, migration is often portrayed as a contributor to better educational achievement when it combines with increased income and improved access to high-quality schooling, whether in the country of origin or destination. In the context of Asia, a vast space that houses areas of great wealth and poverty and highly developed and less developed education systems, it is no surprise that we would find such a wide array of experiences when we analyze how migration and education affect and feed off each other. Nonetheless, at a very deep level, all the people who feature in the preceding chapters share the same goal of maximizing the human development potential and well-being of themselves and their children.
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