A longitudinal analysis of arrival infrastructures: The geographic pathways of EU labour migrants in the Netherlands

Abstract

Although traditional migration research focuses predominantly on large cities as ports of entry for migrants, increasingly more migrants start in smaller cities and rural areas. These mobility patterns give access to specific arrival infrastructures with differentiated and often unequal opportunities. Current research has addressed the multiplicity and political nature of arrival infrastructures, but what happens after arrival remains a black box. By building on micro register data, this study employs a longitudinal approach to trace the trajectories of EU labour migrants in the Netherlands across time and space. Our findings indicate that among those who choose to remain in the Netherlands, internal migration is largely characterized by geographical immobility. When people did move to a different type of residential location, it was often to more urbanized places. As mostly migrants with a higher income made these moves, this strengthened the dualization of more precarious migrants in rural areas and more well-off migrants in larger cities.