This paper investigates the potential rupture that the United Kingdom's "Brexit" referendum of June 23, 2016, might bring about in intra-European Union youth mobilities, with a specific focus on the London region. In many respects, and counter-intuitively given the Brexit result, London has already become a "Eurocity": a magnet for young people, both highly educated and less educated, from all over Europe who, especially since the turn of the millennium, have flocked to the city and its wider region to work, study, and play. Now, these erstwhile open-ended migration trajectories have been potentially disrupted by a referendum result that few anticipated, and whose consequential results are still unclear. The main theoretical props for our analysis are the notions of "liquid migration," "tactics of belonging," "whiteness," "privilege," and "affect." Data are drawn from 60 in-depth interviews with Irish, Italian, and Romanian young-adult students and higher and lower skilled workers, carried out in late 2015 and early 2016, plus 27 reinterviews carried out in late 2016, post-Brexit. Results indicate participants' profound and generally negative reaction to Brexit and, as a consequence, a diversity of uncertainties and of plans over their future mobility: either to stay put using "tactics of belonging," or to return home earlier than planned, or to move on to another country. Finally, we find evidence that new hierarchies and boundaries are drawn between intra-European Union migrants as a result of Brexit. (Engbersen & Snel, 2013). We find these constitutive elements of liquid migration attractive for our study of contemporary youth migration within Europe, although some of our findings suggest that flexibility, openness to opportunities, and the search for security are more realistic characteristics of migrant motivations and behaviour than "intentional unpredictability."In the literature on youth life-course transitions, two concepts are important for our analysis in this paper. On the one hand, the "inclination to constant change" referred to in Bauman's quote above is advanced by Worth's (2009) notion of youth and young-adulthood as a continuous process of "becoming": we see this as more relevant and appropriate to our analysis than the traditional practice of agedefined life stages. On the other hand, the reality of sudden changes due to "fragility and vulnerability" (Bauman again) is nicely highlighted in the term "rupture" (Hörschelmann, 2011). Taken together, the notions of "rupture" and "becomings," combined with the framework of liquid migration, constitute a useful conceptual toolkit for understanding the social and spatial mobilities of young European Union (EU) citizens, both before and after the referendum of June 23, 2016, which saw 51.9% vote "leave" and 48.1% "remain."According to Bauman (2000, p. x), the key to the puzzle of liquid modernity is the premise that the "liquidity versus solidity conundrum"is not a dichotomy but that both conditions should be seen and treated as a couple "lock...

The nexus between ageing and migration throws up a variety of situations. In this paper we map out the various circumstances in which ageing and migration fuse together as entwined trajectories to produce situations of vulnerability, coping, active ageing, and variable wellbeing. The ageing process is seen to be socially constructed and culturally embedded; hence place-at 'home' or 'abroad', or some transnational mixbecomes a paramount structuring variable. Different models of successful ageing compete as migrants move and age in different countries and different cultures; the western model of individual self-reliance should not necessarily be imposed on ageing migrant populations. In the final part of the article we challenge the prevailing trope of vulnerability applied to the perceived double disadvantage of being both an older person and a migrant, and present four case-studies in which older migrants enact agency and independence to achieve a greater level of material and subjective well-being.

This paper compares the motivations and characteristics of the recent migration to London of young-adult graduates from Germany, Italy and Latvia. Conceptually the paper links three domains: the theory of core-periphery structures within Europe; the notion of London as both a global city and a 'Eurocity'; and the trope of 'crisis'. The dataset analysed consists of 95 in-depth biographical interviews and the paper's main objective is to tease out the narrative similarities and differences between the three groups interviewed. Each of the three nationalities represents a different geo-economic positioning within Europe. German graduates move from one economically prosperous country to another; they traverse shallow economic and cultural boundaries. Italian graduates migrate from a relatively peripheral Southern European country where, especially in Southern Italy, employment and career prospects have long been difficult, and have become more so in the wake of the financial crisis. They find employment opportunities in London which are unavailable to them in Italy. Latvian graduates are from a different European periphery, the Eastern one, postsocialist and post-Soviet. Like the Italians, their moves are economically driven whereas, for the Germans, migration is more related to lifestyle and life-stage. For all three groups, the chance to live in a large, multicultural, cosmopolitan city is a great attraction. And for all groups, thoughts about the future are marked by uncertainty and ambiguity.

This paper examines the pre-and post-Brexit experiences and perspectives of migrants from three "new" European Union (EU) countries-Latvia, Poland, and Slovakia-who are living and working or studying in the London area. Deploying the key concepts of power-geometry and relational space, the analysis explores the way that Brexit impacted the migrants' connections to the U.K. "bounded space" and their ongoing mobility behaviour and plans. Empirical evidence comes from 35 in-depth interviews with migrants, most of whom were interviewed both before and after the referendum of June 23, 2016. We find that migrants are unequally positioned socio-spatially to deal with the new power-geometries resulting from Brexit, and we detect diverging trajectories between the more highly skilled and high-achieving EU citizens and the more disadvantaged low-skilled labour migrants. First, we probe the uncertainties brought about by juridical status, related to the length of stay in Britain.Second, we explore personal and professional connections and disruptions. Third, we question how the power-geometries of time, juridical status, and personal/professional connections/disruptions shape future mobility plans. KEYWORDS Brexit, London region, migrants from "new" EU countries, power-geometry, relational space 1 | INTRODUCTION Immediately after the European Union (EU) Referendum, on the morning of June 24, 2016, speculations, fears, and uncertainties emerged:Who would qualify to remain, who would be "forced" to leave, who will want to leave the United Kingdom? Brexit poses many questions to population geographers. But they all are grounded in the chasm between "bounded" and "relational" space: between territory defined by borders and regimes of migration control, and space as constructed through social relations and fluid, contested boundaries. Furthermore, these judicial, migration management-inflicted questions invite us to step back and uncover deeper historical relations between the notions of "settled" status versus mobile migrants, between "old" and "new" migrants and the politicisation of certain types of newcomers. In an infamous quote prior the United Kingdom's general election in 2015, Nigel Farage, then leader of the UKIP party and the key figure in stirring anti-immigrant sentiments during the "Leave" campaign, moulded colonial and post-socialist migration contexts in the United Kingdom's history of making migrants as follows: I have to confess I do have a slight preference: I do think, naturally, that people from India and Australia are in some ways more likely to speak English, understand common law and have a connection with this country than some people that come perhaps from countries that haven't fully recovered from being behind the Iron Curtain. (Mason, 2015)The people who came to the United Kingdom from countries that once were behind the "Iron Curtain" are at the heart of our inquiry.Most of our research participants arrived through the free movement of labour regime within the EU. However, the Leave campaign built i...

This paper examines recent migration from three little-studied EU countries, the Baltic states, focusing on early-career graduates who move to London. It looks at how these young migrants explain the reasons for their move, their work and living experiences in London, and their plans for the future, based on 78 interviews with individual migrants. A key objective of this paper is to rejuvenate the core-periphery structural framework through the theoretical lens of London as an 'escalator' region for career development. We add a necessary nuance on how the time dimension is crucial in understanding how an escalator region functions -both in terms of macro-events such as EU enlargement or economic crisis, and for life-course events such as career advancement or family formation. Our findings indicate that these educated young adults from the EU's north-eastern periphery migrate for a combination of economic, career, lifestyle and personal-development reasons. They are ambivalent about their futures and when, and whether, they will return-migrate.

Rather than a marginal activity, visiting friends and relatives (VFR) is a fundamental part of the migrant experience. We illustrate this assertion by an in-depth study of Latvian labour migration to Guernsey. Since the 1990s, low incomes and high unemployment in post-Soviet Latvia combine with niche-specific labour demands in Guernsey to create migratory flows of mainly female workers. The small-scale nature of this circular migration system allows a deeper theorisation of the many linkages between migration and VFR. In particular we deploy time-geography and rhythmanalysis to explore the various ways that migration and VFR are enfolded within each other, within the lifecourses of the protagonists, and within the capitalist rhythms of temporary labour migration. Empirical evidence comes from interviews with 90 Latvian migrants in Guernsey and with 16 employers. VFR mobilities are space-time events of co-presence which can take place either in Latvia or in Guernsey. Both directions of visits can involve touristic functions, and VFR to Guernsey can also carry the potential to stimulate further migration. Further research could pay more attention to gender aspects and to prospects for permanent return migration to Latvia. Copyright

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Human capital has been long an exceedingly important concept in migration research. Over time there have been attempts to provide more nuanced, and less economistic interpretations of human capital. Based on outputs from the EU Horizon 2020 project YMOBILITY (2015-2018) and two additional papers, this Special Issue seeks to advance this agenda further by addressing the complexities of the mobility of human capital. Migration problematises human capital assumptions due to challenges in transferring human capital across national borders. In this introductory paper we propose rethinking the human capital of migrants in a threefold way. Firstly, we question the interpretation of skills and competences beyond the conventional divide of 'higher-skilled' and 'lower-skilled' through the concept of a 'knowledgeable migrant'. Secondly, we probe deeper into an understanding of the transferability of skills in relation to 'location', exploring the possibilities and constraints to the transfer of human capital in different spatial contexts. Thirdly, we theorise human capital in terms of new temporalities of migration and the role these play in skill acquisition. We illustrate our novel theoretical thinking with selected empirical data, both quantitative and qualitative, on youth mobility in Europe.