Onward Migration as a Coping Strategy? Latin Americans Moving from Spain to the UK Post-2008

Abstract

Research has highlighted that increasing numbers of third-country migrants who have acquired European Union (EU) citizenship in one EU Member State employ the freedom of movement that it provides to onward migrate to other EU destinations. A range of socioeconomic, cultural, and educational factors have been found to drive migrants to move onward to try to fulfil their migration aspirations across multiple locations. This paper suggests that analysing onward migration through the relational lens proposed by the mobility paradigm better acknowledges the processual and dynamic nature of this migration pattern and its motivations. Drawing from a small-scale project focusing on Latin American migrants (with EU citizenship) who have relocated from Spain to the UK post-2008, the paper presents a distinctive form of reactive onward migration. Research is based on secondary data analysis and semi-structured interviews with key informants from voluntary and statutory organisations in Spain and the UK. It finds that, as their socio-economic conditions deteriorate in Spain, some Latin Americans decide to mobilise their civic and social capital (EU citizenship, transnational networks) to move to the UK in search of employment. Yet, the full mobilisation of this civic capital is jeopardised by their limited linguistic and economic capital and the structural constraints that these onward migrants encounter in the UK. By considering the factors that mediate some Latin Americans' post-2008 experiences of stasis and movement between Spain and the UK, this study enhances conceptualisations of onward migration and illuminates cross-border dynamics of migration and precarity within the EU.

Re‐emigration of foreign‐born residents from Sweden: 1990–2015

“…Although refugee migrants are less inclined to return back to their country of origin, they might be more likely to move onward as a way of “adjusting” their migration context, as their choice of receiving country may have been made less out of free will. For example, legal integration through the means of acquiring citizenship is used to overcome legal barriers to preferred host countries (Mas Giralt, ; Ortensi & Barbiano di Belgiojoso, ). In a case study of Iranian refugees moving onward from Sweden by Kelly (), onward migration was found to be related to processes of overcoming feelings of displacement and reinforcing personal agency.…”

Special Issue Introduction: Exploring the Lived Experiences of Intra‐EU Mobility in an Era of Complex Economic and Political Change

“…Another effect is to trigger the phenomenon of onward migration, whereby already‐present immigrants in a country hit by recession do not return to their home country but move on to another destination. There is a growing literature on the onward migration of third‐country‐origin immigrants in Southern European countries – for example Albanians in Greece onward migrating to the UK (Karamoschou, ), Bangladeshis in Italy also relocating to the UK (Della Puppa and King, ), Latin Americans in Spain moving likewise to the UK (Mas Giralt, ; Ramos, ), and Moroccans in Spain onward migrating to Norway (Jolivet, this issue). In all cases, acquisition of the first host country's citizenship gives the migrants the right to move freely within Europe to the country of their choice.…”

Migration responses of immigrants in Spain during the Great Recession

“…Previous research has shown that the migration responses of immigrants to economic shocks can be very diverse, varying over time and among individuals (Pandit 1997;Mas-Giralt 2016;Zimmermann and Zaiceva 2012;Czaika 2012;Czaika and de Haas 2012;Pereira 2012;Calnan and Painter 2016). According to the first hypothesis presented in the introduction, we would have expected internal migration to be preferred during the initial stages of the Spanish recession, but once unemployment became endemic, all forms of international emigration increased significantly to become the preferred response among immigrants.…”

“…Migration responses to the 2008 Spanish financial crisis have generated considerable interest among scholars in this field, with the greatest attention paid to return migration (Cerrutti and Maguid 2016;Recaño and Jáuregui 2014;López de Lera and Pérez-Carames 2015;Recaño, Roig, and de Miguel 2015), followed by remigration (Larramona 2013;Mateos 2015;Pereira 2012;Mas-Giralt 2016). However, with a few exceptions, the changes in internal migration have been largely overlooked (QuinteroLesmes 2016; Bayona-i-Carrasco, Thiers Quintana, and Avila Tàpies 2017).…”