Nine “Truths” about Central European Migrants or "Who they are and how they fare?"

by Lucia Kurekova

Not much attention has been given to unraveling the backgrounds of the EU8 migrants in Britain and Ireland, the two countries which attracted the most labor from the new accession states. While the magnitude of flows from EU8 and the disputes about the impact of these flows on the labor markets of host countries has generated much new research, the investigations remain to work with aggregate categories. This in essence means that most of the knowledge we have about who the Central European migrants are and how they fare at the labor markets exists in the aggregate form for all EU8 countries together. Hence, while we cannot really establish whether or how are the Czech migrants different from the Slovak migrants, here is what we know about them as a group from the transition economies so far:


1. A great majority of all EU8 migrants are between the age of 18 and 35.

2. Male migrants slightly prevail over female migrants.

3. Nearly two thirds of migrants, when registering, claim that they do not intend to stay (in the UK) longer than 3 months.

4. Most frequent sectors of employment for EU8 migrants (in the UK economy) are: administration; hospitality and catering; agriculture; manufacturing; and food/fish/meat processing.

5. EU8 migrants earn the least relative to other migrant groups (in the UK).

6. EU8 migrants are on average the most educated relative to other migrant groups (in the UK).

7. EU8 migrants have not been entering the host country economy in order to succumb to the welfare system.

8. The social and wage mobility of EU8 migrants seems to be so far very low.

9. The success of EU8 migrants is strongly defined by the knowledge of English language.


If you come from any of the EU8 countries or happen to be living in one of the host countries, these facts are perhaps not much of a surprise to you (if they are, please let me know). Nevertheless, all together - as they are and if we are to believe them - they seem to point to a number of failures. Among other things, they raise a series of questions about the quality of education in ex-transition economies, about the ability of home governments and markets to provide opportunities which would allow freshly educated teachers to teach in Presov (eastern Slovakia) rather than serve beer in Cardiff as well as about the ability of host governments and markets to use ‘well’ the human capital they have at hand. Still, the story is clearly more complicated and definitely more interesting once we look behind the dry numbers and facts. For that I recommend the post of my guest writer, Colm Kelly from Ireland.

Data based on:
Accession Monitoring Report. May 2004 – June 2008. A Joint Online Report by the Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue & Customs and Communities and Local Government, June 2008.

Pollard, Naomi, Maria Latorre and Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah. “Floodgates or turnstiles? Post-enlargement migration flows to (and from) the UK.” Institute for Public Policy Research. April 2008.

Drinkwater, Stephen, John Eade and Michal Garapich. “Earnings nad Migration Strategies of Polish and Other Post-Enlargement Migrants to the UK”. Paper prepared for the presentation at the European Ecnomics and Finance Society Annual Conference, Sofia, May 31 – June 3, 2007.