Migration Seminar - Fourfold Labour Migration. On the Differential Attachments of Migrants from Central and Eastern Europe
Prof. Dr. Godfried Engbersen, Faculty of the Social Sciences, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, the Netherlands
I will present an empirically grounded typology of labour migration patterns among migrants from Central and Eastern Europe. This typology is based on two dimensions: attachment to the destination country on the one hand and attachment to the country of origin on the other. We conducted an empirical survey (N=654) among labour migrants from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania in the Netherlands. We found four migration patterns in our data: (i) circular migrants (mostly seasonal workers) with weak attachments to the country of destination, (ii) bi-nationals with strong attachments to both the home country and the country of destination, (iii) footloose migrants with weak attachments to both the home and the destination country, and (iv) settlers with weak attachments to the home country. Our findings demonstrate the relevance of distinguishing different migration patterns for the debates on transnationalism and the integration of labour migrants from Central and Eastern Europe in Dutch society.
About the speaker
Godfried Engbersen is professor of Sociology and research director of Sociology at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. He studied sociology at the University of Leiden and worked at the Universities of Leiden, Utrecht and Amsterdam. Spring 1996 he was a visiting professor at the Centre of Western European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written on new forms of social inequality, urban marginality and migration and integration in advanced welfare states. He is the author of more than twenty books, including (with others) Cultures of Unemployment. A Comparative Look at Unemployment and Urban Poverty Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (second print with a new introduction, Amsterdam Academic Archive). Engbersen is Dutch correspondent for the continuous Reporting System on Migration (SOPEMI) of the OECD, and an elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) (since 2007). Between 2001-2009 he was an elected member of the Dutch Advice Commission on Alien Affairs (2001-2009). Engbersen chaired the KNAW-committee on the Future of Dutch Sociology (2003-2006). He is currently working on transnational citizenship, the relationship between patterns of labour migration and integration, and unauthorized migration. He recently (2010) edited (with others) A Continent Moving West? EU Enlargement and Labour Migration from Central and Eastern Europe (Amsterdam University Press). Another recent book is Fatale Remedies. De onbedoelde effecten van beleid en kennis [Fatal Remedies. The Unintended Consequences of Policy and Science, AUP 2009]
Venue: Conference Room, UNU-MERIT/MGSoG, Keizer Karelplein 19, Maastricht
Date: 14 December 2011
Time: 12:30 - 13:30 CEST
