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Briefing paper: Romanian migrants in the UK: how many have arrived and are they different from those who migrated to the EU states?

This paper complements the report titled “Finding housing, making home: Romanian migrants in post-Brexit/post-Covid UK”. The Romanian migration constitutes the latest and last wave of unrestricted EU mobility to the UK. However, although the phenomenon has been prevalent in the last decade, we do not know how many Romanians have arrived to the UK or whether they are in some way different from those who emigrated to the EU states. The briefing addresses these two questions.

• How many? There are definitional challenges across migrant generations, mobility paradigms and legal categories. These make determining the number of migrants problematic. By different sources, the number of Romanians currently in the UK is estimated at between 342,000 to more than 1 million.

• How different? To inspect whether there are differences between the Romanian migrants who opted to come to the UK against those who migrated to the EU states, we compare the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the samples of three online surveys (ours and two others). We observe no major differences between the three samples of Romanian migrants either in the UK or in other European states. However, the online approach attracts the higher educated, those in stronger labour market positions and with longer residence, and the
urbanites.

View the briefing paper here:

 

Date: March 28, 2023 4:52 pm

Author(s): , and

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