A Decade of EU Enlargement: A Changing Framework and Patterns of Migration

It has been a decade since the largest eastward EU enlargement took place in 2004 contributing to a re-integration of the European countries of the former Soviet bloc with the rest of Europe and setting up a new framework for European mobility. Consequently, a variety of unprecedented social phenomena have become inherent in the European reality. In the field of migration, we witnessed: significant emigration of East Europeans to the West of the Union; the occurrence of new forms of intra-European mobility and transnational patterns of migration; the growth of selected migrant communities and a redefinition of interethnic relations, especially in the main destination countries for Eastern European migrants; reconfigurations on the European labour market and many other intriguing processes pertaining to human mobility. The recent economic crisis has posed additional challenges to the economic and social relations between migrants and natives and resulted in a wave of return migration towards the East of the Union, which has been generating both positive and negative outcomes for sending and receiving countries. The Special Issue includes a collection of high-quality syntheses on consequences that the progressing EU enlargement has brought in the field of European migration in the last 10 years. The issue has gathered perspectives from both sending and receiving countries as well as contributions covering the changing European migration system as whole. The articles have been selected on the basis of their interdisciplinary and comparative approach including both theoretical and empirical works employing quantitative, qualitative or mixed methods.