Regional Concentration of Migrants in Europe

This article analyses the regional (NUTS 2 level) concentration of migrants in the EU 15 using recent data from the European Labour Force Survey. The largest local clusters of migrants in the EU 15 are found in the Île-de-France as well as in Inner and Outer London. The settlement structure of migrants is markedly different relative to natives: 23.9 percent of all migrants would have to change their region of residence in order to achieve a uniform distribution of migrants across EU-15 countries. Migrants from the eight CEE EU countries show a lower degree of concentration than those from Bulgaria and Romania or the candidate countries, while they are more regionally concentrated than migrants from other countries. The biggest local clusters of migrants from the new EU countries can be observed in the Greater London area and in Vienna. Looking at individual sending countries, Polish migrants show the least tendency to cluster regionally. Furthermore, we find that among low-skilled migrants those with primary education are much more concentrated than migrants with secondary or tertiary education, which confirms earlier findings.