38 Chapter 3 3.1 Introduction Migration has long been a prominent feature of European integration (Castles, de Haas, & Miller, 2014) and in today’s European Union (EU), around 17 million citizens have chosen to make another EU country their home (Eurostat, 2017a). The free movement of people is a fundamental principle of the EU, enshrined under Article 45 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (Eurostat, 2017a). Under EU law, citizens of EU member states and of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) are able to reside and participate in the labour market of another EU or EFTA country1 on an equal footing with natives (Cappelen & Midtbø, 2016; Schmidt, Blauberger, & Martinsen, 2018). This aims to ensure that EU2 labour migrants have equal access to employment, working conditions, and various social and tax advantages. However, successive EU enlargements have increased the economic heterogeneity within the single market and created challenges for Member States seeking to reconcile their national labour markets with the protection of rights for all EU citizens. In view of that, the free movement of people has become increasingly politicised and controversial, which is problematic for future European integration. Despite the depth of the political debate on freedom of movement and its economic importance, there is a lack of readily available, detailed, and accurate data for cross-country comparison. While this may seem surprising at first, there are several real-world challenges that face the collection of migration data which in practice means that the currently available data has a number of limitations. For example, there is still considerable variation in the way countries choose to identify and define international migrants for statistical purposes, which affects the comparability of aggregate national migration statistics (Fassmann, 2009). International organisations, such as Eurostat and the OECD, aim to present internationally standardised and harmonised statistics, but despite attempts to ensure members use internationally accepted definitions and collection methods, this is not always the case in reality. High quality migration data is essential for facilitating more complex migration research because when more precise research questions are considered, then more precise definitions of the population under study are required. Additionally, more comprehensive research can be used to better understand intra-EU migration and enable national and supra-national governments to deliver effective, evidence-based migration policies. Recently, there have been increasing efforts to construct unique and original datasets on migration that fill certain research gaps and enable authors to answer 1 From this point on, for simplicity, the abbreviation ‘EU’ will also be used to refer to and include the EFTA countries. 2 Who are often referred to as EU mobile citizens in official documents rather than ‘immigrants’ or ‘migrants’.
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