The REMINDER project produces a suite of written materials and activities to disseminate project results. Here you can access the latest literature reviews, reports, working papers and policy briefings.
Literature reviews – overview of significant literature published in the area of research
Working papers – elaboration of conceptual and empirical findings
Policy analysis – in-depth analysis papers of key policy areas
Existing evidence suggests that perceptions of immigrants’ welfare impacts vary widely between Europeans in ways that do not reflect the realities of those impacts for their country. Are misperceptions more widespread among people with lower levels of knowledge of EU institutions and immigration-related facts, or do people knowingly express misperceptions to signal their ideological position on the issue of immigration? In this report, researchers draw on survey data across seven EU countries to explore to what extent political knowledge or ideological predispositions are more defining for people’s evaluations of the welfare impacts of EU immigrants.
The European Economic Area (EEA) is the world’s biggest laboratory on labour migration. It provides a test case of what happens when people can move to take up job and business opportunities with almost zero costs under different economic and social conditions. The past 15 years have seen a series of natural experiments confront the […]
Free movement of persons has brought important benefits to the European Union—promoting economic growth, allowing for better matching of labour demand and supply, enhancing individual opportunities, and nurturing a sense of community. Beneath the surface, however, a major imbalance casts some doubts over the regime’s long-term sustainability. In the years following eastern EU enlargement—in particular, […]
This report showcases key findings from across the REMINDER project and offers policy options that could be used to make free movement operate more smoothly and offer greater benefits to a greater number of people.
This report presents latest findings on Europeans’ perceptions of the welfare impacts of EU and non-EU immigrants. The authors investigate to what extent Europeans think that EU immigrants receive more in benefits than the native-born, and whether perceptions are more positive or negative when it comes to EU or non-EU immigrants’ impacts. The research relies […]
Media is likely to play a role in forming people’s attitudes toward political topics such as intra-EU migration. Education is perceived as one of the most important factors moderating media influence. In this study, researchers conducted a panel analysis in seven European countries to investigate whether and how people’s level of education affects the extent […]
This document summarises seven key findings from Work Package 3 of the REMINDER project. Work Package 3 explored the drivers of EU mobility using a desk-based literature review, individual migrant interviews, focus groups, primary quantitative data analysis, and secondary quantitative data analysis. The analysis was based on work conducted in Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and […]
This paper provides an overview and discussion of the main databases available to aid understanding of migration within the European Union. The paper maps existing data sources and evaluates them for their usefulness and quality in supporting intra-EU migration research. In addition to a desk review of sources, European migration data experts were interviewed for […]
Migration has been dominating media and political discourses in Europe in recent years. Previous studies have mainly mapped migration discourses in traditional media or conventional channels of party communication, often in a single country. Migration-related party communication on social network sites has been largely neglected. This study analyses migration discourses in the Facebook accounts of […]
Communication scientists have made rapid advances in the computer-assisted analysis of large quantities of media data, but research has focused on monolingual corpora and most often on English-language text. This study works toward the application of computer-assisted analysis in the framework of multilingual media content.
Research using computer-assisted multi-lingual text analysis is still relatively sparse, and methods tend to focus on West-European languages only. This working paper provides a review of the state-of-the-art of research in multi-language computer-assisted methodologies, with a focus on so-called ‘dictionary approaches’.
This report summarises the key findings of Work Package 8, which explored discourses of EU mobility in political, social, and mass media communications. The analyses were based on data from social and traditional media outlets in Spain, the UK, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Poland, Hungary and Romania, and the researchers made use of a range of […]
This report combines findings from Work Packages 8 and 11 of the REMINDER project, concerning media coverage and journalistic attitudes and practices in Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Poland, Hungary and Romania. Based on these findings, the authors formulate recommendations regarding migration reporting for practitioners.
Work Package 8 of the REMINDER project has used computer-assisted techniques to examine some 1.5 million news articles across seven languages. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of different methodological strategies for conducting such analysis across multiple languages. The authors give a general overview of the intricacies of computer-assisted text analysis of multilingual data, and […]
This study seeks to identify divergences between discourses of migration in European media (immigration and emigration) and objective reality. The research seeks to expand upon existing knowledge of the production processes behind news about migration (general migration and intra-EU migration) by analysing the degree to which both the salience and the framing of news about […]
This paper aims to complement existing understandings of public discourses about European migration by focusing on social media, specifically Facebook. The researchers investigate the Facebook status posts of 1,590 political actors in Spain, the UK, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Poland from 2015-2017. Applying innovative, automated procedures to a large scale text corpus, this study focuses […]
This paper investigates the discursive representation of migrants in European media, illustrating the social inequalities and structures of discrimination against migrant minorities inherent to the migration discourse and (re)produced through language use. The authors take a mixed-methods approach, combining computational and critical approaches to media texts. The focus is on the concepts of linguistic modifiers […]
This paper analyses the determinants of public attitudes to the “free movement” of workers in the European Union. The authors add to the small but growing research literature on this issue by focusing on how the characteristics of national welfare institutions affect public attitudes to intra-EU labour mobility. More specifically, the paper explores the role […]
This paper analyses how national welfare institutions and normative attitudes to welfare vary across EU/EFTA countries, and how national welfare institutions are linked to welfare attitudes, a long-standing question of comparative welfare state research. Our focus in this paper is on the concept of ‘reciprocity’ in welfare institutions and welfare attitudes, an important, and, we […]
This document summarises the results of several studies exploring the link between the minimum wage and earnings of EU migrant workers in different EU countries. The results reveal important differences about the relationship of minimum wage change and the earnings of these migrants. For instance, there was a positive increase in the hourly wage of […]
Political tensions surrounding freedom of movement within the EU often arise with respect to the principle that mobile workers should have equal access to the welfare benefits of the host country. There is often a presumption that providing access to social protection programs will lead to an increase in costs. In this paper, the authors […]
This report uses semi-automated computational analysis to examine media coverage of migration across a range of European countries for the period of 2003-2017.
Despite the growing body of literature on the labour market impacts of immigration, evidence remains mixed and inconclusive, and additional case studies are necessary to clarify when and why impacts are positive or negative for native populations. In this report, the authors explore the impact of immigration on the likelihood of natives claiming unemployment benefits in Germany — the country which is, by some standards, the main migrant receiving country in Europe.
As barriers to labour mobility within the EU have been lifted for migrants from Central and Eastern Europe, repeat and circular migration have become more common. However, not much is known about who is involved in this form of mobility. In the case of Poland, a significant number of those who migrated during the post-accession period have since returned, but research on how this migration effects re-integration into the Polish labour market has so far been limited. This paper aims to build a better understanding of this issue, based on census and Labour Force Survey data, and Central Statistical Office estimates.
This paper summarises three studies on selected sending countries and border regions of the EU undertaken for Work Package 6. The first study analysed the perceived impacts of, and policy responses to, care-work mobility in two sending countries: Romania and Slovakia. The second study analysed the perceived impacts of cross-border practices in the Austrian-Hungarian and Austrian-Slovak […]
Surprisingly little is known about why people migrate within the EU. While existing studies in the area have tended to focus on migration for reasons of employment, there is a growing push to understand the diversity of migrational factors, for example factors relating to family or education. This working paper seeks to build a better understanding of what drives contemporary migration flows, and of the factors shaping the migration decisions of individuals within the EU.
This working paper aims to map the patterns and dynamics of migration within the EU of individuals of EU28 origin as well as those from outside the region. The descriptive analysis is based on existing data, largely drawn from Eurostat’s online database on population statistics. This data allows the mapping of intra EU-migration patterns and dynamics during the last four years. As well as analysing EU28-wide stocks and flows, the paper zooms in to explore intra-EU migration for five of the key migration countries within the EU28: Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.
Debates about the fiscal impacts of intra-EU migration have often focused on the consequences of granting migrant workers unrestricted access to the welfare programs of the host country. This working paper compares different welfare regimes across Europe, and studies how the net fiscal impact of EU migrant households differs across these regimes. The authors do not find any evidence to support the common idea that migrants generate greater fiscal burdens in more generous welfare states.
There has been increasing recent debate on whether and to what extent certain sectors of the immigrant population, e.g. undocumented immigrant and mobile EU workers, should get access to welfare benefits and public services. This paper explores a reform that was introduced in Spain in 2012 in order to shed light on this issue.
This working paper provides an overview and descriptive analysis of key indicators of national labour markets and welfare states in the European Union. The discussion of labour market indicators uses standard variables and “off-the-shelf” data provided by Eurostat and the OECD, and the overview of national welfare states draws on a range of indicators specifically coded for the REMINDER project and compiled into a new dataset called “Social Protection in Europe Database”. The working paper supports two different work packages within REMINDER by providing institutional and other indicators to be used in subsequent analyses.
Wealthier Western European countries employ care workers from Eastern European countries to satisfy the increasing need for care of their ageing populations. This paper examines the perceived impacts of care work mobility and institutional responses in Romania and Slovakia.
Along the borders between the “old“ and the ”new” EU, where sizeable differences in income and economic development persist, cross-border commuting and other forms of economically based cross-border relations have become increasingly relevant. This working paper analyses the perceptions of experts and civil servants of the effects of Eastern European enlargement in the Austrian-Hungarian and the Austrian-Slovak border regions with a particular focus on the labour market and the education sector.
This is the last in a series of three papers looking at the practices of media in the reporting of migration and intra-EU mobility in a set of EU member states: Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
The paper explores to what extent European citizens distinguish between immigration from within and outside Europe, and looks at whether specific concerns related to the effects of immigration on welfare and public finances play a role in these differences.
To understand public opinion about immigration in Europe, one has to understand the media’s role in it. We present a literature review on research on media discourse on immigration and their effects. Despite differences in the way immigration and migrant groups are represented in European media, we can observe common patterns. Migrants are generally under-represented […]
The Member States of the European Union (EU) have been engaged in highly divisive debates about whether and how to reform the rules for the ‘free movement’ of EU workers and their access to national welfare states. While some countries have argued for new restrictions on EU workers’ access to welfare benefits, many others have […]
This working paper provides a theoretical framework for an institutional analysis of why some EU Member States have called for more restricted access for EU workers to welfare benefits whilst others have not.
This working paper looks at European citizens’ normative attitudes on the welfare state and work, European identity/citizenship and the EU, immigration and free movement.
This paper presents findings on how the media cover issues of mobility and migration in four Central/Eastern European countries, including in Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovenia.
The paper aims to develop a clearer understanding of the commercial, institutional, practical, and technical factors that affect news production and shape media narratives and frames around EU mobility.
This paper of work package 9 analyses public opinion on free movement in Europe, specifically looking at geographical differences between EU countries. The authors find that attitudes toward free movement are most positive in Eastern European countries (Hungary, Poland, most positive in Romania). In contrast, the UK is the only country with overall negative attitudes […]
This paper provides an overview of the main databases available to understand mobility within the EU. It maps existing data sources and evaluates their usefulness and quality.
This working paper from work package 4 is the first large cross-country estimation of the fiscal effects of migration of EU citizens within the EEA (European Economic Area). The vast majority of EEA countries – 21 out of 29 – saw positive net fiscal impacts during 2004-2015, receiving more in taxes and other contributions from […]
This literature review of work package 3 provides an overview of the existing empirical literature that helps understand the factors and considerations driving mobility within the European Union. First, cross-national studies are considered to grasp the overall picture; second, an in-depth analysis of five focus countries – Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy, and Spain […]
Work package 9 provides an overview of how various facets of news representations of EU mobility affect the perception of and attitudes toward EU mobility and related concepts.
