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This chapter contributes to the discussion about newly identified trends in intra-European migration. It concerns the complexity of migration movements, higher differentiation of the migratory causes, and the increased involvement of female migrants. Specifically, it focuses on an analysis of the migration of Czech care givers to Austria who make use of the Austrian 24 h system of care for elderly people. The system is based on a two-week rotation of care givers that enables migrant workers to move regularly between their home in Czechia and their work in Austria. We call this movement, which lies somewhere between migration and commuting – “”. There are three main factors that contribute to creating this specific mobility mode: geographical proximity (between the two given countries), a repeated and stable short stay and return model, and a very busy working scheme that prevents workers from integrating into Austrian society. Obviously, this type of movement has some transnational features related to economic domain/integration – namely circulation and remittances.

Until recently, despite the fact that the country had received many immigrants since the initial years of the Republic, migration literature treated Turkey as a country of emigration. Turkey’s position in the international migration system, and thus, in the migration literature, has changed only recently to a country of transit and immigration. In this regard, the literature on international migration in Turkey is still very limited and either focused on mobility of specific groups, or on general historical trends. In this frame, focusing on current trends and implications of Central and Eastern European (CEE) migration in Turkey is a novel task. However, as the collection and distribution of international migration data have been generally neglected and a large portion of international migration in Turkey is on irregular basis, this is a challenging task. In addition to the limited data availability, the heavy internal and external migrant population also complicates migration research and blurs the distinction between the implications of CEE migration and migration in general.

This book shows that intra-European movement not only raises various practical social and governance issues, but also deepens important theoretical and conceptual issues. This includes fundamental questions concerning the conceptualization within migration studies about its core object of analysis; when can something be considered as migration? In this book this concerns in particular whether to conceptualize intra-European movement as ‘migration’ or ‘mobility’; can those who move in the EU be considered ‘migrants’ in a sociological sense or should they be conceptualized merely as mobile EU citizens making use of their right to free movement? The contestation of this very basic conceptualization reveals not only the political character of some of concepts used in this research field, but also the need for more cross-disciplinary work in the conceptualization of migration, here in particular between sociology and political sciences.

The IMAGINATION project and its varied outputs represent the fruition of a research agenda that ought to be substantially shifting the mainstream paradigm of research on international migration. The new European migrations heralded by European economic integration, in particular the Eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007, represent a challenge to assumptions about immigration and citizenship, framed as they are by a legal-institutional transformation of the notion of international migration within and across the European regional territory. This chapter summarises the key analytical issues regarding recent intra-EU migrations and mobilities from East to West and their challenge to methodological nationalism in migration research. The realities of this migration clearly fall short of normative hopes of European integration and non-discrimination by nationality within the EU, but the transformative effects of this migration on society and politics cannot be doubted. The case of the UK and the Brexit votes is raised as one example, pointing towards the need for studies to also pay attention to provincial locations and not only major cities. At stake is the potential failure of the European free movement experiment, in which the fate of East European migrations has been the crucial test case.