Intra-EU Labour Migration and Attitudes Towards the Welfare State 107 The indicator for CEE labour migration has been created using the EU-LFS, a large-scale household sample survey. I use information on country of birth and labour force status to identify labour migrants from Central and Eastern European countries and have created a time series indicator for the years 2004-2016 (Fenwick, 2021). For this article, however, I utilise the data from 2015 in our analysis. I constructed the variable as a percentage of the labour force for theoretical reasons as the chapter focuses on the effect of recent intra-EU mobility on labour market insecurity and by constructing this indicator as a percentage of the labour force then this is more clearly expressed. There are some limitations to the created indicator; in particular, the data for Germany relies on citizenship as Germany has anonymised country of birth data for the EU-LFS4. Other restrictions are as a result of limitations of the EU-LFS and household survey data in general, such as the underrepresentation and non-response of migrants. Volume of migration varies quite considerably from country to country. In several countries, Central and Eastern European labour migration is on the rise and each year makes up a larger proportion of the labour force. The United Kingdom especially has seen a large increase in labour migration from Central and Eastern European member states. A likely reason is because the UK was one of only three EU countries that decided to not impose labour market restrictions (the 2-3-2 rule) on citizens from the 2004 EU enlargement countries and the language is widely spoken across other European nations making the job market more accessible. Finally, I augment the individual level data with a number of indicators to describe the macro context of the countries included in our sample. These are listed below in Table 5.1. Table 5.1: Independent Variables Variable Measure N Mean SD Source Mobility CEE labour mobility Labour migrants from EU–13 countries as a percentage of the labour force, 2015 EU-LFS (2017) Foreign-born Foreign-born as a percentage of the population OECD (2017b) Demographic Age Age of respondent, calculated ESS (2016) Gender (Dummy) Gender of respondent (Female = 1) ESS (2016) Foreign-born Respondent is born outside of the reporting country ESS (2016) 4 The drawbacks of which are discussed in Fenwick 2021.
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