Why do Europeans Migrate to Berlin? SocialStructural Differences ...

22 Verwiebe
the paper, principally through the analyses. Social reasons for migration
to Berlin are more common among women (predominantly from Italy
and Poland), among individuals with vocational training at the secondary
level and among Europeans from the middle or lower class. Economic
reasons for migration are found more frequently among male
Europeans and among those who are integrated into networks of their
respective nationalities. The age group between 21 and 29 years (especially
from Italy and Great Britain), the highly educated and those without
higher education degrees (most of all from Poland and France),
those who have been mobile since the mid-1990s within Europe (especially
from France and Italy), as well as those from a higher social class
all migrate more often for cultural reasons than other social status
groups.
Finally, in terms of future research, it would be useful to consider the
relevance of the results presented here for the migration of other
national groups to other European countries as well. How do the reasons
for migration of Spanish or German migrants in London differ
from those of British or French migrants in Berlin for example? It seems
equally important to study more intensively the motives for migration
and the migration patterns of individuals from the new EU states, the
so-called accession countries, because it is very likely that migration
from these countries will increase in the coming years, which will probably
change migration patterns within Europe and the social fabric of the
European Union as a whole. For such an enterprise it would be very
useful to have access to more extensive data, with more respondents per
participating nationality and additional independent social status variables,
which would allow one to take into account more aspects of
European migration than has been possible in this modest study.
NOTES
1. For an overview of important aspects of family and marriage-related migration,
cf. e.g. JEMS, Volume 30 (2).
2. According to Kofman (2004: 247f.), four factors have militated against taking
the family unit as an object of analysis in migration studies: 1. Economic
theory neglects the family because the activities that take place
within it cannot be measured in monetary terms. 2. The second factor is the
view that transactions occur between the individual and the state, and on
the individual level the principal agent for those transactions is assumed to
be the male head of household. 3. The third factor is based on the
dichotomy between the economic and the social in which the economic
Ó 2011 The Author
International Migration Ó 2011 IOM