Friday, March 14, 2014
Empire (Omni Shoreham)
How do governments cope with the free movement of their citizens? How do politicians adapt to the unprecedented dispersion of constituencies across borders? Do people who depend on the supranational labor market see their country differently? While states have started to acknowledge the migrants’ economic and political significance, incorporation policies are lagging behind. This paper examines the effects of EU-associated free movement of citizens on migrant/returnee incorporation in sending countries. The literature on immigrant inclusion/exclusion and transnationalism has shed light on receiving countries dynamics, but the nature of political ties linking migrants to sending countries remains elusive. We know even less about new forms of migration (e.g. mobility under the aegis of EU citizenship) and the relationship between temporary, high frequency migrants and their states. This paper assesses the recalibration of the state-citizen relationship top-down, by overviewing policy-making and elite discourses, and bottom-up, by summarizing evidence from in-depth interviews with migrants. The project focuses on Poland and Romania, two of the main migrant-sending EU member-states. Findings suggest that government officials prematurely treat intra-EU migrants as non-citizens (immigrants or diaspora), as if crossing the border were a permanent exit. In contrast, migrants see their mobility as banal and temporary. They do not associate “going to work” with emigration and resent being treated as second-class citizens by their own country. Migrants say authorities don’t care, while state officials say migrants are unreasonable. This generates tensions that affect political attitudes and behaviors in high-migration regions.
