Migration Processes in Central and Eastern Europe - Multiple Choices

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Construction of Borders and Practices of Labour Migration
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A variable degree in household dependency,
stimulated by the shortage of money on the Romanian side
and the shortage of labour, accompanied by the development
of “post-industrial lifestyles” among the former Serbian
guest workers who came back from Germany, should be
noted. Finally, the stories of my informants are very useful
in illustrating the relations of dependence between different
expanding informal labour markets: the Austrian and
Serbian on one hand, Serbian and Romanian, on the other.
To put it simply, I will use the words of a day labourer:
“We live on the Serbs, and the Serbs do the same from the
Austrians”.
1 This paper is an abridged and revised version of Radu, Cosmin:
“We are all tourists”. Informal Labour Markets and Socioeconomic
Practices on Romania-Serbia border in different mobility regimes,
in: Bacas, J.L. and W. Kavanagh (Eds.), Asymmetry and Proximity
in Border Encounters. Oxford: Berghahn Books (forthcoming
in 2006).
2 Wallace and Stola (2000) offer an analysis of Central Europe
as a buffer zone and of East-Central-West migration processes.
They introduce concepts such as “temporary”, “incomplete”
or “transnational migration”.
3 By embeddedness I understand “the extent to which an actor
is 'anchored' in a particular territory or place. Economic actors
become embedded there in the sense that they absorb, and in some
cases become constrained by, the economic activities and social
dynamics that already exist in those places” (Hess 2004: 177).
According to Martin Hess the applications of the concept
of “embeddedness” need to be scaled geographically, following
the economic geographical research tradition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
•• Berg, E. (2000). Border crossing in manifest perceptions
and actual needs. In M. van der Velde and H. van Houtum
(Eds.), European Research in Regional Science: Borders,
regions and people (Volume 10). London: Pion Ltd.
•• Hess, M. (2004). Spatial relationships? Towards
a reconceptualization of embeddedness. Progress
in Human Geography 28 (2), 165-186.
•• Konstantinov, Y., Kressel, G.M. and T. Thuen (1998).
Outclassed by former outcasts: Petty trading in Varna.
American Ethnologist 25 (4), 729-745.
•• Neef, R. (2002). Observations on the concept and forms
of the informal economy in Eastern Europe, 1-27. In
R. Neef, and M. Stänculescu (Eds.), The social impact of
informal economies in Eastern Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate.
•• Wallace, C. and D. Stola (Eds.) (2001). Patterns
of migration in Central Europe. Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
•• Wallace, C. (2002). Opening and closing borders:
Migration and mobility in East-Central Europe.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28 (4), 603-625.
19
Cosmin Radu
The author is a PhD student of University
of Bucharest, Faculty of Sociology. His work
as a PhD student is focused on Romania and the
small-scale cross-border labour and trade with
Serbia, Ukraine, and the Republic of Moldova.
He can be contacted at: yotile@yahoo.com.
Migration Processes in Central and Eastern Europe: Unpacking the Diversity