Humanities and Social Sciences

Central and Eastern European Migration Review

Content

Central and Eastern European Migration Review | 2022 | vol. 11 | No 2

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Abstract

This introductory paper sets the scene for the special issue. It describes the rationale for the collection – which has to do with the multiple geopolitical, economic and health-related events of the past 30 years – and summarises some of the overarching changes in East–West migration dynamics within and beyond Europe over this period. However, this introductory article and the nine papers that follow also challenge and nuance the predominant East–West framing of recent intra-European migration. They identify numerous other trends: return migration and immigration into CEE countries, intra-CEE migrations and a range of issues relating to the impacts of migration on children and youth.
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Authors and Affiliations

Russell King
1
ORCID: ORCID
Laura Moroşanu
2
ORCID: ORCID
Mari-Liis Jakobson
3
ORCID: ORCID
Garbi Schmidt
4
ORCID: ORCID
Md Farid Miah
1
ORCID: ORCID
Raivo Vetik
3
ORCID: ORCID
Jenny Money
5

  1. Department of Geography, University of Sussex, UK
  2. Department of Sociology, University of Sussex, UK
  3. School of Governance, Law and Society, Tallinn University, Estonia
  4. Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark
  5. Freelance; Visiting Researcher, University of Sussex, UK
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Abstract

Qualitative migration researchers today often use one or more of three concepts – mobility, transnationalism and integration – to make sense of the complexities of contemporary migrants’ lives. Collectively, researchers identify these as the three fundamental characteristics of migranthood. Being a migrant is about, for example, planning return visits, maintaining (or not maintaining) relations with people in the sending country or being preoccupied with learning to speak the receiving-society majority language. Qualitative interviewing suggests that each migrant is uniquely situated along various mobility, transnational and integration continuums. Migrants have many social identities as well as migranthood and the existence of these other, intersecting, social identities (such as social class, lifestage and gender) helps to determine their location on the continuums: for example, how often they are mobile and how much they can be mobile. The article draws on interviews in Poland with Ukrainians and Polish return migrants to show how (former) migrants conceptualise shared Ukrainian-Polish migranthood along these three continuums.
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Authors and Affiliations

Anne White
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), UK
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Abstract

Dynamic changes and the increasing diversity of migrant societies support small-scale enclave businesses in Poland. Female migrants from Belarus and Ukraine appear to have found their niche in the beauty and cosmetology sector. Nevertheless, their entrepreneurship goes beyond the enclave market. Specialists provide services to migrant communities and simultaneously target Polish clients to ensure the success of their ventures. This article presents the results of qualitative research based on 13 in-depth interviews with Ukrainian and Belarusian beauty specialists. I focus on these businesswomen’s narratives about their entrepreneurial trajectories. My aim is to explore how they use and extend their social relationships in order to acquire entrepreneurial agency. Entrepreneurship can be understood as a socially embedded practice. I apply an intersectionality approach to investigate the complexity of socially constructed identities and the dimensions of individual entrepreneurial agency. Incorporating a mixed embeddedness approach, I examine the impact of structural factors on entrepreneurial activity and the importance of social networks for women’s self-realisation as independent beauty specialists.
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Authors and Affiliations

Kseniya Homel
1

  1. Institute of Applied Social Science, Faculty of Applied Social Science and Resocialization, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw, Poland
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Abstract

Migrants’ property ownership in their countries of origin is often understood through the prism of return: both intended and actual return mobilities. Applying a transnational optic, this article unpacks the relationships between migrants’ property ownership ‘back home’ and their reflections on future moves and stays, not limited to possible return. We draw on 80 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020 with Polish and Romanian migrants living in Barcelona and Oslo. They left their homeland, sometimes following domestic migration or international migration to other countries, before arriving in Spain and Norway. Based on these case studies of East–West migration within Europe, we contribute to work recognising the ongoing complex and diversified nature of mobilities in Europe. First, we detail what migrants’ property ownership looks like in practice – forms of ownership, types of property, location. Second, we focus on how owning property in Poland or Romania intersects with migrants’ considerations about moving or staying in the future, beyond return. Considerations about future (im)mobility shed light on transnational relationships, as these evolve over time and across space. Furthermore, we find that transnational property ownership in their countries of origin reveals much about migrants’ relations with people and places ‘back home’ and reflects the known non-linearity of migration stories. Overall, however, transnational property ownership is a poor predictor of both return plans and intentions.
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Authors and Affiliations

Davide Bertelli
1
ORCID: ORCID
Marta Bivand Erdal
2
ORCID: ORCID
Anatolie Coşciug
3
ORCID: ORCID
Angelina Kussy
4
ORCID: ORCID
Gabriella Mikiewicz
5
Kacper Szulecki
6
ORCID: ORCID
Corina Tulbure
7
ORCID: ORCID

  1. VID Specialized University, Norway
  2. Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway
  3. “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Romania
  4. Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
  5. University of Oldenburg, Germany
  6. Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), Norway
  7. GRECS, University of Barcelona, Spain
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Abstract

This article contributes to the growing debate on reintegration and the positioning of returnees in their home societies. Increasingly, studies focus on returnees’ agency in reintegration processes, their practices of mobility in return and their use of social capital and financial and social remittances acquired abroad. Much less analysed is how ethnicity influences such processes of return and experiences of reintegration. In this paper we examine how returnees belonging to different ethnic groups – Germans, Romanians and Roma – reintegrate in a Romanian multi-ethnic context with marked ethnic inequality and lasting segregation. Fieldwork was carried out in a town that has undergone massive changes in the past 30 years due to the combined effects of foreign direct investment and international migration. Economically, the town changed from a poor and decaying context, to one that was poor but developing and finally to one experiencing strong development. Using a modes-of-integration perspective and analysing returnees’ reintegration and mobilities, we show how return evolved as an ethnicised process in different contexts of reception.
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Authors and Affiliations

Remus Gabriel Anghel
1
ORCID: ORCID
Ovidiu Oltean
2
ORCID: ORCID
Alina Petronela Silian
3
ORCID: ORCID

  1. Department of Sociology, Faculty of Political Sciences, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, and Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Romania
  2. Department of Political Sciences, Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences, Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
  3. Doctoral School of Sociology, Faculty of Sociology and Social Work, Babeș-Bolyai University and National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania
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Abstract

Whilst the extant scholarship offers a detailed exploration of why return migrants enter self-employment or engage in business initiatives in general, we know relatively little about their involvement in transnational economic activities which connect the previous destination coun-try with the origin one and how they compare to other kinds of entrepreneurial venture in this vein. This article aims to understand these motivations by using insights from 50 semi-structured interviews conducted with traders of used cars imported in Romania, a mass phe-nomenon in the Central and Eastern European area and beyond. An important result of this research is that entrepreneurs have to consider a multitude of factors in multiple locations when entering the used-car business. The article also suggests that entrepreneurial motivations among used-car traders are not fixed but, rather, can and do change over time.
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Authors and Affiliations

Anatolie Coşciug
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Romania
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Abstract

Parental work migration can pose important risks for adolescents, such as joining inappropriate peer-groups, poor results in education or school drop-out. It can also facilitate positive changes in young people’s behaviour, as many become aware of the sacrifices their parents make to provide them with a better lifestyle and education and behave responsibly in return. Given that the literature highlights both negative and positive transformations related to parents’ migration, our aim is to address the impact of migration on adolescents left behind in rural Romania from their own perspective. We focus on teenagers’ experiences of separation from their mother, father or both, in different situations (family life, communication and rela-tionships, caring and concern for others, school achievements, future migration plans). Young people’s agency – their capacity to self-educate and organise themselves to perform well at school and in everyday activities following parental migration – is less studied in Romania. Thus, in addition to making the reality of these adolescents better known, our approach provides information that can be turned into policy solutions aimed at improving their life quality.
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Authors and Affiliations

Georgiana Udrea
1
ORCID: ORCID
Gabriela Guiu
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. College of Communication and Public Relations, National University of Political Studies and Public Administration, Romania
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Abstract

This article addresses issues of mobility and place-making among CEE-born young people who migrated from Poland and Romania to Sweden as children (up to the age of 18). Previous research on intra-EU mobility in other destinations posits this group as 1.5-generation migrants who, due to their mobility at a formative age, experience duality and in-betweenness – with specific effects on their social and familial lives. Inspired by this research, our article examines how mobility to Sweden at a young age (re)shapes young peoples’ connection to and meaning-making of places post-migration. Drawing on two-step qualitative interviews with 18 adolescents and young adults from Poland and Romania, as well as on drawings and photographs as part of the visual materials produced by the participants, the article makes two contributions. First, it integrates the scholarship on children and youth mobility, translocalism and place-making but also deepens these conceptualisations by underlining the role of memories and feelings in young people’s place-making processes. Second, the article suggests that visual methodology is a valuable tool with which to capture the embodied and the material practices of translocal place-making over time. Our findings reveal that most of these young people continue to strongly associate with places from their childhood and country of origin. For some, these places symbolise ongoing transnational practices of visits and daily communication while, for others, these are imaginary places of safety and a right place to be. The findings also highlight the importance of memories and feelings in creating transnational connectivity between the countries of origin and Sweden, as well as in developing coping strategies against the social exclusion and misrecognition which some young people may experience in their new living spaces.
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Authors and Affiliations

Oksana Shmulyar Gréen
1
ORCID: ORCID
Charlotte Melander
1
ORCID: ORCID
Ingrid Höjer
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. University of Gothenburg, Sweden
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Abstract

The topic of intra-European youth mobility has been under investigation for some time. This contribution discusses a particular youth migration, that of the children of immigrants who leave Italy to move to Northern Europe. What are the motivations behind this de facto migration? How much do discrimination processes count in the decision to move abroad and under what conditions and for what reasons do people leave Italy? This paper – based on my extensive qualitative research on young people of foreign origin, born and/or raised in Italy – discusses the opportunities and limits of these young people’s coping strategies in the face of difficulties in inclusion and entry into the labour market. It does this based on the broader research project, by taking into account the mobility ideas, drivers and relationships between mobile youth and their (ethnic or not) social networks.
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Authors and Affiliations

Roberta Ricucci
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. University of Turin, Italy
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Abstract

For a migrant, returning to his or her homeland after living abroad can be much anticipated, yet also daunting, especially if return includes other family members who may have little insight into the cultural traditions and life approaches of the homeland. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative evidence from interviews and a survey of both Latvian nationals living abroad and returnees to Latvia, the anxieties concerning first-generation family return with (mostly) second-generation children are unravelled – particularly the challenges faced by the children. The paper explores the difference between an imagined family return to the homeland and the lived experience. Anxieties especially concern children’s readiness for school – lack of home-country language skills, curriculum disparities and the often unsympathetic attitude of teaching staff towards returnee pupils. Preparation in advance, a resilient mindset and an avoidance of comparisons with the host country are found to reduce return anxiety for both parents and children and to ease (re)integration into the homeland setting. Home-country government initiatives offering support measures to returnees also help to mitigate the challenges of return.
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Authors and Affiliations

Daina Grosa
1
ORCID: ORCID

  1. Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia, Latvia, and School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK

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