Towards a new map of European migration

Abstract

Students of European migration have been hampered by the legacy of those established forms of migration which have been historically most important ± settler migrations from Europe to the Americas, guest-worker migrations from the Mediterranean Basin to Northern Europe, and refugee migrations after the World Wars. We need to appreciate that many of the key questions that were asked to frame our understanding of the functioning of migration now have a very different array of answers from the largely economic ones which shaped our earlier analyses. Now, new mobility strategies are deployed to achieve economic and, importantly, non-economic objectives. In the new global and European map of migration, the old dichotomies of migration study ± internal versus international, forced versus voluntary, temporary versus permanent, legal versus illegal ± blur as both the motivations and modalities of migration become much more diverse. In offering an overview of the new typologies and geographies of international migration in Europe, this paper will be less a rigorous cartography than a qualitative exploration of a changing typology including migrations of crisis, independent female migration, migration of skilled and professional people, student migration, retirement migration and hybrid tourism±migration. These relatively new forms of migration derive from new motivations (the retreat from labour migrations linked to production), new space±time¯e xibilities, globalisation forces, and migrations of consumption and personal selfrealisation. More than ever, this multiplex nature of human migration and spatial mobility demands an interdisciplinary approach, enriched wherever possible by comparative studies.

Knowledge Spillover Agents and Regional Development

“…Several terms such as "international brain exchanges" (Salt 2005) or "brain circulation" (Saxenian 2000) can be found in the literature as denominations for this phenomenon. The trend towards circulation is strongly linked to the changing temporality of skilled labour migration, which is about a shift from longer-term to shorter term mobility ( Koser and Salt 1997;King 2002). As Williams et al (2004, p. 28) put it: "Longer-term migration has increasingly been replaced by more diverse, shorter-term flows, so that it is more apposite to refer to circulation and mobility than to migration".…”

International return mobility, learning and knowledge transfer: A case study of Slovak doctors

“…The research deficit is particularly marked for returned migrants, an increasingly important group both because of growing mobility, and shifts to more cyclical (King, 2002) mobility -but see Brown and Connell (2004). Their experiences pose questions about the multidirectional nature of learning and knowledge transfer both while abroad and on return.…”

Return and the Social Environment of Andalusian Emigrants in Europe

“…However, like other social phenomena, return has a substantial social and psychological component, so care must be taken in making generalisations, and there is a need to analyse individual, family and social patterns of behaviour. The general criteria usually applied in measuring it, such as nationality, the emigrant's prior status and the length of their stay, give rise to different types of return emigration to which researchers need to be sensitive (King 1986(King , 2002. Social workers and social policy planners need to be mindful of what is likely to constitute a growing challenge, and this underlines the need for further research into international return migration.…”