Migration, Labor Markets, and Integration of Migrants: An Overview for Europe

For more than two centuries most countries of Western Europe have primarily been countries of emigration. During the last 60 years, all countries of Western Europe have gradually become destinations for international migrants and asylum seekers. Today all West European countries and several new member states of the European Union (EU) have a positive migration balance. And it is very likely that sooner or later this will also be the case in other new EU member states and today’s candidate countries. This paper discusses the size of Europe’s migrant population, its demographic structure, and the socio-economic position of migrants. The European Labour Force Survey (LFS) as well as Eurostat, OECD and UN migration data are used as the main databases. In most sections of the paper the geographic unit of analysis is EU15 as the so-called “old ” EU Member States are home or host some 94 percent of all migrants and some 97 percent of all legal foreign residents living in EU27. But general information on stocks of international migrants and recent migration flows are given for all countries of Western, Central and South-Eastern Europe. In this paper the criterion “place of birth ” is used to distinguish between foreign-bor