Purpose of this chapter

This book makes extensive use of two basic concepts: migration transition and the migration cycle. Expounded within its framework, the central premise of those concepts is such that, over time and under specific circumstances, individual European countries transform their migration status from one of emigration to one of immigration. This change in migration status has been termed the ‘migration transition’.

As explained in the Introduction of this volume, the ‘migration cycle’ in its more general sense involves three distinct, consecutive phases: the first occurs when a country is overwhelmed by the outflow of its inhabitants, while the proportion of foreign nationals in the total population continues to be marginal; the second begins when the migration transition takes place; and the third begins when immigration systematically predominates over emigration and foreigners constitute a considerable proportion of the population. The central part of the cycle, the migration transition, also involves distinct parts (i.e. stages), which can be distinguished according to a given country's degree of maturity in terms of its immigration pattern or regime (see chapter 2 in this volume). A sequence of the stages – from immature to mature immigration country – makes up the ‘migration cycle’ (or rather ‘immigration cycle’) in a narrower sense.

The main hypothesis underlying the analyses included in the present volume was that each European country finds itself in a specific stage of the immigration cycle. Consequently, countries included in the project were divided into three groups: the most advanced (‘old’), the moderately advanced (‘new’) and the least advanced (‘future’). As will be shown in part 3 of this chapter, of all countries analysed in depth in the present volume, Austria belongs to the first group (‘old’); Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain to the second group (‘new’); and the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to the third group (‘future’). Similarly, Ruby Gropas and Anna Triandafyllidou (2007) describe five types of European countries made distinct by their migration patterns: old host countries, recent host countries, countries in transition, small island countries and non-immigrant countries. Leaving aside ‘small islands’ (which include, according to Gropas and Triandafyllidou, Cyprus and Malta – and I would add Iceland here), this typology, apart from the three groups distinguished by the authors of this book, accounts for nonimmigration status, the status attributed to the Baltic States, Slovakia and Slovenia.