Mid Sweden University

This article examines the mobility patterns in East-West movement within Europe and challenges the prevailing perception that migration is an act of agency while staying put is seen as having a lack of agency. It argues that staying put can also involve extensive strategies and should be recognised as an active choice. The article utilises Bourdieu's three types of capital (economic, social and cultural) to understand the strategies employed in both staying put and successful migration. It suggests that individuals can compensate for the absence of one type of capital by leveraging another type; however, it also suggests that, in order to understand mobility space between CEE and Nordic countries, the presence of formalised welfare provision in Nordic countries is an important aspect. The focus of the article is on single mothers, who are considered to be one of the most vulnerable groups in Central and Eastern European societies. Based on 25 interviews with Estonian single mothers, the article suggests that migration often occurs due to a lack of alternative options. 

This article explores the EU free movers’ experience of borders and describes how they experience borders as complicated and complex. Although some variation exists in terms of the place of the free movers in the labor market, the advantage gained by being a corporate transferee is easily lost when individuals cease to be useful to their employers. The ambivalence – which is highlighted in past literature and experienced by Estonian migrants in Sweden also – is exploited by employers who create and also negotiate borders when they feel the need to. The article concurs with the suggestion of Wagner (2015) that free mobility within the EU functions as a sieve – i.e., there is free mobility for services, but workers’ rights are often disregarded. Furthermore, due to the complex nature of borders, EU free movers themselves are often either unaware of or confused about their legal status and their rights.

Welfare provision as a border control strategy is often discussed in relation to irregular migrants and refugees. However, this article focuses on EU migrants. Using discourse theory, it explores interviews with policy experts from four migrant-receiving EU countries. The aim is to identify policy discourses on deservingness articulated in relation to intra-EU migrants from four member states in Eastern Europe, to detect mechanisms that generate these discourses and to reveal how they relate to welfare chauvinism. The article uncovers contesting logics that move policy experts toward welfare-chauvinist assumptions, which might contribute to the discursive welfare exclusion of EU migrants.

Psycho-social wellbeing has been difficult to define for social sciences as it stands now. In migration research, studies usually rely on belonging, social interactions, or structural problems which migrants encounter upon arrival. All these approaches provide relevant insights, but struggle to address the more individual and psycho-social aspects of the migration process and subsequent adaptation period. This article proposes to shift the focus away from the internal world of the migrant, which is challenging for most social sciences to measure, and instead consider their outward actions. To this end, we introduce the concept of actionability, a term which is to be understood as an individual’s ability to formulate and execute long-term plans based on their perceived needs, desires, and concerns. The idea of actionability allows us to assess how migrants interact with their environment and can formulate and successfully execute plans. By using 37 interviews with highly skilled Estonian migrants in UK, the article suggests that actionability is tightly connected to reflexive modes, developed by Archer, and that certain reflexive types have predictable patterns in how they react to the migration experience.

This article draws on the idea that welfare systems and institutions are based on normative assumptions about justice, solidarity, and responsibility. Even though the literature on welfare deservingness has highlighted the connection between ideas of solidarity and the support to, for instance, people with different ethnic backgrounds, there is very little research on the interconnections of different welfare state models and ideas on how migration should be governed. This article suggests that there is a link between the welfare state models suggested by Esping‐Anderssen and different discourses on migrant welfare deservingness. The article explores the interlinkages of three welfare state models—liberal, socialdemocratic, and continental‐corporative—and four discourses on welfare deservingness of migrants in respect to social welfare—labourist, ethno‐cultural, residential, and welfarist (see Carmel & Sojka, 2020). It is suggested that the normative foundations embedded in different welfare systems lead to dissimilar ways of approaching migrants and migration.

This chapter describes how the Estonian state’s diaspora policy has moved away from being purely culture-centred towards a more business-focused initiative. The policy has undergone few changes during the last decade and still does not focus on social protection. The state does offer basic social protection and consular services by agreement with a few countries, such as the Russian Federation. The lack of Estonian state provided social protection to nationals abroad is counteracted, in some countries, by localized national organizations which the Estonian state may or may not fund. However, an important shift is taking place in the provision of Estonian language courses and cultural programmes to support returnees and their non-Estonian family members. 

The aim of this chapter is to analyse how formal welfare management among mobile Estonian EU citizens working in Sweden is shaped in an interplay with regulatory and discursive conditions. The chapter reveals low rates of, and interest in, accessing social support in Sweden among the interviewed EU movers. This is discussed in relation to an interplay of the complex and procedural Swedish welfare system, how this system is experienced by mobile individuals, and to the discursive expectations by the Estonian welfare system. In light of the results, the chapter argues that an important and overlooked aspect in analysing EU movers’ formal welfare management is the discursive expectations of welfare systems – expectations on who should be entitled to welfare and how a welfare claimant should behave.

Migration literature has traditionally distinguished between different motivations of migration, such as labour, family and newly also lifestyle migration, never fully exploring the background of these motivations. This article suggests that these different motivations may be explained by different modes of reflexivity as distinguished by Margaret Archer. Linking modes of reflexivity with migration motivations addresses two problems in current migration literature. First, it provides for practical application of reflexivity in explaining migration motivations, which has been missing so far. Second, the article advocates using psycho-social approach as opposed to more commonly adapted ethnical or class based explanations in understanding migration behavior, hence avoiding the potential trap of falling into the trap of methodological nationalism or classism. Through the interview with highly-skilled Estonian migrants it is shown that the reasons of migration among highly skilled are versatile and cannot be explained solely by their class background.

This paper examines recent migration from three little-studied European Union (EU) countries, the Baltic states, focusing on early-career graduates who move to London. It looks at how these young migrants explain the reasons for their move, their work and living experiences in London, and their plans for the future, based on 78 interviews with individual migrants. A key objective of this paper is to rejuvenate the core–periphery structural framework through the theoretical lens of London as an ‘escalator’ region for career development. We add a necessary nuance on how the time dimension is crucial in understanding how an escalator region functions – both in terms of macro-events such as EU enlargement or economic crisis, and for life-course events such as career advancement or family formation. Our findings indicate that these educated young adults from the EU’s north-eastern periphery migrate for a combination of economic, career, lifestyle and personal-development reasons. They are ambivalent about their futures and when, and whether, they will return-migrate.