Trinity Immigration Initiative Migrant Careers and Aspirations Past Events
Symposium, 5 June, 2008
Trinity Immigration Initiative/ERC Research Symposium:
From East to West and Back Again? Migration, Mobility and Employment in the New Europe
Since the accession of ten new member states to the European Union in April 2004 the movement of people from East to West has been a multiple of official predictions. Today, while migrants continue to leave Poland, the Baltic states and elsewhere for countries such as Ireland, there is now also a reverse flow from West to East. This is the context for this research symposium organised by the Trinity Immigration Initiative (TII) at Trinity College Dublin.
For a country such as Ireland, this mass immigration is almost completely novel. The temptation is to understand the process in terms of the historical experience of the mass immigration to the ‘core’ countries of Western Europe from the 1950s onwards. However, labour markets are now regulated in different ways, the employment structure has long moved away from the large manufacturing enterprises which employed so many of that wave of immigration. Employers therefore may utilise migrant labour in very different ways to the past.
More than ever before, migration within Europe today highlights the role of individual decisions and individual choices. Migrants are conscious actors, with more or less developed career strategies and aspirations which are adjusted and changed over time as new problems are encountered and new opportunities arise.
Above all, transportation and communication technologies make physical and ‘virtual’ travel qualitatively easier. Migration and employment are now perhaps one form of mobility within a wider European or even global labour market.
This one day symposium brought together European researchers to discuss such issues. Topics discussed included:
-
From Migration to Mobility: Transnationalism or return of the guest worker?
-
New Member States and European Labour Markets: Regulating labour mobility and/or Facilitating Circular Mobility
-
Implications of labour mobility for the EU-15: labour displacement of workers and wage pressure and/or skills and labour growth?
-
Implications of labour mobility for EU-8: From brain drain and labour shortages to brain gain, new skills and new businesses?
The symposium was organised by the Migrant Careers and Aspirations research project within the Trinity Immigration Initiative.
For further information, please contact Elaine Moriarty at 01 8963549 or elaine.moriarty@tcd.ie
Programme:
|top|