Towards a new map of European migration

Students of European migration have been hampered by the legacy of those established forms of migration which have been historically most important – settler migrations from Europe to the Americas, guest-worker migrations from the Mediterranean Basin to Northern Europe, and refugee migrations after the World Wars. We need to appreciate that many of the key questions that were asked to frame our understanding of the functioning of migration now have a very different array of answers from the largely economic ones which shaped our earlier analyses. Now, new mobility strategies are deployed to achieve economic and, importantly, non-economic objectives. In the new global and European map of migration, the old dichotomies of migration study – internal versus international, forced versus voluntary, temporary versus permanent, legal versus illegal – blur as both the motivations and modalities of migration become much more diverse. In offering an overview of the new typologies and geographies of international migration in Europe, this paper will be less a rigorous cartography than a qualitative exploration of a changing typology including migrations of crisis, independent female migration, migration of skilled and professional people, student migration, retirement migration and hybrid tourism–migration. These relatively new forms of migration derive from new motivations (the retreat from labour migrations linked to production), new space–time flexibilities, globalisation forces, and migrations of consumption and personal self-realisation. More than ever, this multiplex nature of human migration and spatial mobility demands an interdisciplinary approach, enriched wherever possible by comparative studies.