Migration trends in the European Union following the 2004 Enlargement
Abstract: Following World War Two emigration from Central and Eastern Europe, in particular, has grown in spite of increasingly strict border controls. Given this rise in migration pressure from the East during a strictly regulated period, the 2004 EU enlargement of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia threatened to transform the migration landscape, as well as invoked fear of a mass East-‐West migration. In order to protect their labor markets, old member states established transitional arrangements that suspend access of their labor market to citizens of new member states for 7 years. The following study investigates the impact of these legislations on intra-‐EU migration by analyzing 111 country pairs. The findings suggest that the transitional arrangements in specific EU-‐15 countries were more influential than others on the migration experience between all country pairs in the study. In addition, the evidence suggests that there is an interrelationship and between migration rates and labor market restrictions across EU-‐15 countries.
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