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EUROCORES conference to gain new insights into European migration

Europe is a magnet for migrants, both legal and illegal. Europeans themselves are mobile, moving to all parts of the continent to make the most of job opportunities, to retire to the Sun or to enhance their education. Therefore migration issues are often hotly debated - their cultural impact, their economic effect and the demands they make on social systems are all controversial.

On December 6-8, the European Science Foundation is gathering experts on all aspects of European immigration to discuss the issues it raises at the conference New Migration Dynamics: Regular and Irregular Activities on the European Labour Market, which will be held at the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis.

Part of the debate will be focusing on illegal immigrants -- illegal immigration into Germany, the Czech Republic, and Brussels, where the capital of Europe has some of the continent’s most marginalised workers. A further theme will be people-trafficking and the sex trade, a flourishing abuse of immigrants across Europe.

Delegates at the conference will look at the effects of migration on
emigrants’ countries of origin as well as on the countries they go to. Poland, for example, has sent senior politicians to the UK to try to tempt young people who have emigrated to return home and help the domestic economy, and migration has also affected countries outside Europe, such as Morocco, which have close ties to former colonial powers.

The conference will discuss and analyse ways in which European countries are building better border controls to limit migration even while migrants are becoming accepted as economically essential to developed nations. It will also touch on major industries such as farming which have become dependent upon migrant labour because of extreme commercial pressures, and which often offer very precarious and ill-paid jobs to migrants who have few rights.

Here and elsewhere migrants have formed a new social stratum even below the unskilled working class, with lower wages and fewer rights than even the poorest indigenous workers.

The conference is generated from the EUROCORES Programme for European Collaborative Research Projects (ECRP). ECRP is a response to the continuing demand from the scientific community in the countries of the SOC (formerly SCSS)’s Member Organisations for funding to support responsive-mode, investigator-driven Collaborative Research Projects within all fields of social science in Europe.

For more information about the conference  www.unice.fr/migractivities/index-EN.html

For more information on ECRP 

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