The expansion of the European Union eastwards in 2004, with an ensuing increase in East-West migration from the accession countries, has been represented as a new migration system. Its specific features are rights of movement and low mobility (and information) costs accompanying persistent East-West wage differentials. In principle it provides an ideal context in which to develop understandings of the ‘new mobilities’ and the challenges to more unidimensional and unidirectional, economic models of migration and settlement. In this paper we utilise a unique, four-country data source covering over 3,500 migrants to enable the quantitative characterization of the new migration, focusing on Poles migrating to Germany, the Netherlands, Dublin and London in 2009-2010. We exploit information on pre-migration experience as well as expressed migration motivations and post-migration subjective and objective measures of relationship to the receiving country. We conduct a three-stage analysis that first employs latent class analysis to allocate the migrants to six migrant types. Second, we link these migrant types to pre-migration characteristics and estimate multinomial logit models for class membership. Third, controlling for these pre-migration characteristics we are able to explore how the migrant types are associated with subjective and objective measures of wellbeing and receiving society integration.
Presented by:
Renee Luthra (ISER)
Date & time:
December 11, 2013 1:00 pm
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