The New European Migration Laboratory: East Europeans in West European Cities

The IMAGINATION project and its varied outputs represent the fruition of a research agenda that ought to be substantially shifting the mainstream paradigm of research on international migration. The new European migrations heralded by European economic integration, in particular the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007, represent a challenge to assumptions about immigration and citizenship, framed as they are by a legal-institutional transformation of the notion of international migration within and across the European regional territory. This chapter summarises the key analytical issues regarding recent intra-EU migrations and mobilities from East to West and their challenge to methodological nationalism in migration research. The realities of this migration clearly fall short of normative hopes of European integration and non-discrimination by nationality within the EU, but the transformative effects of this migration on society and politics cannot be doubted. The case of the UK and the Brexit votes is raised as one example, pointing towards the need for studies to also pay attention to provincial locations and not only major cities. At stake is the potential failure of the European free movement experiment, in which the fate of East European migrations has been the crucial test case.