Immigration, Migration, Free Movement, and the Making of Europe

Despite the image of European populations as sedentary in comparison to the highly mobile populations of North America, population movements have played a recurrent role in the history of Europe up to and including the present day. How does spatial mobility in all its forms fit into the European integration process? This paper answers this question by contrasting the three principle types of migrants in Europe today: the traditional, postwar immigration of ethnically distinct populations of non-European origin, the free movers (or Euro-stars) living and working as foreigners within Europe via the use of the EU right to free movement, and the citizens from the new East and Central European Member States who gained access to the West European labor market as a result of the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007. It argues that a new European migration system dependent on the secondary labor market exploitation of new East-West movers is in the making thanks to an opening to the East that has enabled a stricter attempt to close doors to immigration from the South and elsewhere along clearly racialized lines.