30, emphasis in original).įavell’s book stopped short of a thorough-going analysis of the effects of the 20 enlargements, and it was published just before the financial crisis struck in late 2008. It started with West Europeans – from France, Spain, Denmark, Germany, Italy – and in the new millennium extended, with enlargement around the corner, to a new wave of East Europeans (Favell, 2008, p. And for all groups, thoughts about the future are marked by uncertainty and ambiguity.Ī quiet and unstoppable European invasion… has taken place in the latter half of the 1990s… London became increasingly the target of mobile young continental Europeans, in fact, the prime destination of European free movement for this particular generation. For all three groups, the chance to live in a large, multicultural, cosmopolitan city is a great attraction. Like the Italians, their moves are economically driven whereas, for the Germans, migration is more related to lifestyle and life-stage. Latvian graduates are from a different European periphery, the Eastern one, post-socialist and post-Soviet. They find employment opportunities in London which are unavailable to them in Italy. Italian graduates migrate from a relatively peripheral Southern European country where, especially in Southern Italy, employment and career prospects have long been difficult, and have become more so in the wake of the financial crisis. German graduates move from one economically prosperous country to another they traverse shallow economic and cultural boundaries. Each of the three nationalities represents a different geo-economic positioning within Europe. The dataset analysed consists of 95 in-depth biographical interviews and the paper’s main objective is to tease out the narrative similarities and differences between the three groups interviewed. Conceptually the paper links three domains: the theory of core–periphery structures within Europe the notion of London as both a global city and a ‘Eurocity’ and the trope of ‘crisis’.
This paper compares the motivations and characteristics of the recent migration to London of young-adult graduates from Germany, Italy and Latvia.
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