This article investigates in comparative perspective different accounts of the motivations for migration offered by Bulgarian, Romanian, Italian and Spanish nationals living in another EU country, or planning to move. In-depth interviews yield a range of accounts for the decision to leave the home-country, from narrowly defined economic motivations, professional and ‘qualitative’ labour market considerations, to desires for cultural/lifestyle exploration. Both individual and country-level factors are mobilised in motivational accounts, which are also set against the backdrop of major external shocks, such as the 2007 enlargement of the European Union and the 2008 global financial crisis. Findings highlight the need to consider the interplay between macro and individual-level factors—that is, perceptions of cultural, economic, political and societal structures as well as individual characteristics—in studying migratory behaviour. Moreover, the findings to a certain extent support the distinction between the ‘classic’ labour migration behaviour of Bulgarian and Romanian respondents and the ‘new European mobilities’ of Italian and Spanish participants, who emphasise more the overlapping professional, affective, cultural and quality of life considerations that shape the decision to move. However, convergence across groups may be expected in the future as East-West movers become more socialised into ‘new’ cultures of European mobility and as South–North migration patterns increasingly reinforce some of the ‘periphery-core’ dynamics of contemporary intra-EU mobility.

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In the aftermath of the Euro debt crisis, negative stereotypes about Southern Europeans were (re)activated across Northern European countries. Because these stereotypes make explicit reference to productivity-relevant traits, they have the potential to influence employers’ hiring decisions. We draw on a sub-sample of the Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets discrimination study (GEMM) to investigate the responses of over 3500 firms based in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway to identical (fictitious) young applicants born to Greek, Spanish, Italian and native-born parents. Using French descendants as a placebo treatment and sub-Saharan African descendants as a benchmark treatment, we find severe levels of hiring discrimination against Southern European descendants in both Norway and the Netherlands, but not in Germany. Discrimination in Norway seems largely driven by employers’ preferences for applicants of native descent, while in the Netherlands discrimination seems specifically targeted against Greek and Spanish descendants. Dutch employers’ propensity to penalize these two groups seems driven by information deficits.

This article addresses the idea of belonging in Europe from the perspective of postcolonial migrants settling in EU societies. It draws on over one hundred in-depth interviews with Algerian, Ecuadorian, and Indian individuals settled mainly in and around the cities of London, Madrid, and Paris. Rather than investigating migrants’ orientations to Europe through a narrow interest in self-identification (feeling vs. not feeling European), it delves into individual migration narratives for evidence of how Europe is imagined (if it is imagined at all) during the migration process and its relation to other physical and symbolic sites. As a frame for interpreting individual migration narratives, I introduce the concept of ‘migratory rupture’, a dialectical experience of both the disorienting and creative aspects of migration.  In excavating some of the reflexive processes involved in constructing symbolic geographies of attachment, I find that regardless of the scales of comparison used to articulate place affiliation across different contexts, e.g. whether small-scale (neighbourhoods or city districts) or larger-scale (supranational or de-territorialized categories), symbolic geographies allow migrants to view their transnational life experience on a single, coherent plane and express a form of global consciousness.