Labour Migration in the European Union: Recent Trends and Future Prospects

Migration, and in particular labour migration, has been approached from many different perspectives. Although it has been a subject of research for decades, in recent years it has become an ever more complex and dynamic phenomenon attracting rising interest of scholars from different fields. Nowadays there are over 86 million migrant workers in the world, a fact that has made labour migration a priority issue on the political agendas of most countries. In the European Union, labour migration flows have recently increased because of the freedom of movement of workers in the area. In addition, three key factors will continue to prompt labour migration in the near future: the ‘pull’ of demographic changes and the subsequent labour market shortages; the ‘push’ of population growth, unemployment and crises in least-developed countries; and, finally, the networks established among origin and destination countries on the basis of familial and cultural ties.