Conclusion 121 statistics focus on national-level trends, but there is a lack of regional-level data, so areas that receive disproportionate numbers of migrants find that this more granulated information is obscured by the aggregate statistics. Similarly, there is a lack of disaggregated immigration data based on the type of movement, such as labour migration, family reunification, students, etc. For the EU, and despite the high economic importance and increasing political salience of intra-EU labour mobility, high quality and detailed data on stocks and flows of this particular movement is lacking, hindering research on this subject. I highlight that, despite the EU’s principle of free movement, inconsistencies in data collection and reporting across member states hinder accurate measurement of intra-EU labour migration. As such, Chapter 3 aims to fill this specific gap and details the creation of indicators for intra-EU labour mobility for 16 European countries, from 2004 to 2016, using the EU-LFS. Moreover, through untangling pre-2004 member states from post-2004 member states, this chapter maps the different trends between the two groups of labour migrants, showing that labour mobility from the pre-2004 expansion member states remains stable (no major increases or decreases in stocks of migrants), while the stock of labour migrants from post-2004 expansion member states has been steadily increasing over the time period. This data is essential for contributing to improving the availability of more specific migration statistics, as well as understanding labour market dynamics within the EU for the evaluation and development of EU and national labour migration policy. However, this chapter still emphasises the need for harmonised definitions and methodologies across EU countries to improve the reliability of EU migration statistics. Chapter 4 utilises the data developed in the previous chapter and looks at the implications that more specific indicators of immigration have on welfare state effort. The theoretical section of the Chapter outlines two theories from the globalisation literature and applies them in the context of migration. First, the embedded liberalism theory argued initially by Ruggie (1982) that for elites to maintain an open international economic order, governments need to provide a certain level of social protection to safeguard citizens from the risks brought about by globalisation. Whereas the efficacy hypothesis argues that due to fiscal pressures arising from globalisation, governments seek to reduce welfare state effort in order to reduce the fiscal burden and stay competitive globally. We argue that both these theories are applicable to increasingly open borders as governments must make choices whether to support citizens from increased competition on the labour market, which could lead to either reduced wages, a higher likelihood of unemployment, and more difficulty becoming employed, or if immigrants are a (perceived) burden on the welfare state, then the decision might be to retrench the welfare state to ease budgetary pressure.
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