Free-moving West Europeans: An Empirically Based Portrait

Abstract

Free movement – i.e., the possibility to relocate freely across state borders – is a unique feature of the European Union. Such an open migration regime has been taken advantage by about 2% of EU15 citizens. In this paper we describe this population on the basis of the EIMSS survey conducted in 2004 in Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Spain. A profile of EU movers is drawn using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to encompass a wide range of sociodemographic and attitudinal variables. MCA leads us to single out two key dimensions that seem to extract the basic input and output factors of individual migration choices – namely, social status and integration. Migrants who originally came to study show the highest values on both dimensions. Those who came for love/family reasons are lower on the status dimension than those who came for work reasons, but both groups share an above average integration into the country of residence. The worst integrated are those who moved exclusively to improve their quality of life. Most of the migrant groups defined in terms of CoO/CoR (country of origin-country of residence) combinations turn out to be rather similar: They have upper secondary or tertiary education and middle to upper class jobs. Their language proficiency is decent and they are relatively well integrated socially into their CoR. However, there are two markedly deviant cases: The first group is composed by the Italians and the older Spanish migrants to Germany. They constitute remnants of the guest-worker migration age, characterized by very low values on the status dimension and with an average position on the integration dimension. The second group, composed by British and German movers to Spain, shows the reverse picture: an intermediary position on the status dimension and a very low position on the integration dimension. They are mostly lower middle class (pre-) retirement migrants. While low-skilled labor migration is a matter of the past among Western Europeans, this kind of migration is likely to increase in the future.