Abstrakt
Migration from Central and Eastern European countries to other (Western) parts of Europe so far has primarily been approached as labour migration from an economically and politically less developed region to a more advanced one. Studies analysing the potential "threat" of low-skilled workers from A8 countries overtaking the EU-15 labour markets after EU 2004 and 2007 enlargements bear evidence to this.
On the other hand, the movement of Western EU member state citizens has been viewed in terms of unrestricted elite work, academic, retirement and lifestyle mobility. Taking Czechia as a case study, I try to show that the EU and Schengen free movement policies have contributed to making the story of mobility vs. migration in the European space less black-and-white.
I claim that the migration careers of East European migrants in the EU are an embodiment of the mobility-enclosure dialectic which characterizes life in the European free movement zone as such. This perspective serves as a useful departure point for the study of social, cultural, economic and political integration of mobile EU citizens in their new places of settlement.
The Czech migrants - and presumably also other mobile East EU citizens - can be described both as post-modern elite transmigrants who move to take attractive job offers, and as the "stereotypical" unprivileged labour migrants who enter the receiving country labour markets via entry-level unskilled (and grey economy) positions. Setting this argument in the context of the existing scholarship on intra-EU migration, I look into what the key barriers and facilitators of integration associated with these migration flows might be.
I conclude by explaining the importance of employing transnational approaches in the study of migrant integration .