Search

This paper compares and contrasts the discourses and practices of intra-EU migration in France and the UK. In both, emigration and immigration are significant and contemporary facts of national life; in each, traditional patterns are being challenged; and in both cases, scare-mongering in this regard has been a dominant feature of recent discourse. In particular, the free movement of people associated with the 2004 and 2007 (but especially 2004) enlargements of the EU posed specific policy challenges to political leaders and local communities alike. In France, the phenomenon contributed to the rejection of the EU’s Constitutional Treaty; in the UK, the government failed first to predict the numbers of economic migrants from East Europe, and then to count them once they had arrived. Both countries, finally, are experiencing significant cross-Channel mobility: a microcosm of intra-EU migration per se. France is for sale, it would appear (cheap houses), while the French are for hire (cheap labour). These stereotypes should tell us something about the range of political discourses we can expect when exploring the characteristics of intra-EU mobility, and the relations between movement on the one hand, and public policy on the other. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]