Making Waves - Migration to and from East Central Europe (2012-2016) (Transitions Online Book 14)

In 2015, over one million migrants and asylum seekers made their way into the European Union via the Mediterranean. Some countries struggled to cope with the influx, with a sharp dividing line often appearing between Western European countries and their counterparts in Central Europe, who have fought bitterly against mandatory quotas. While the recent crisis has dominated headlines, migration has been a topic high on the agenda in Central and Eastern Europe for years, as, for example, Balkan asylum seekers have sought refuge in the EU and economic migrants from the Baltics and Poland moved to the United Kingdom in search of better-paid jobs. Farther to the east, hundreds of thousands of people from the countries of the former Soviet Union continue to flock to Russia, one of the largest migrant destinations in the world – a fact often overlooked with all the attention paid to the crisis facing the EU. In this compilation of migration-related content from TOL, we go back a few years to look for early indicators of the current problems and take readers up to the present challenges awaiting migrants in our coverage region.