Monitoring the Impact of Migration from the New EU Member Countries on the Labour Market in a Regime of Labour Mobility. Accompanying Consulting and Analysis

As of 1 May 2011, citizens of the ten countries that acceded the EU on 1 May 2004 were granted unrestricted access to the Austrian labour market. For Austria, this constituted a major change in its migration regime because it liberalised the work take-up of a category of migrants that comprises some 15 percent of overall migration into Austria. In the first three months after the new mobility regime was in place, some 18,000 workers and about 16,000 dependently employed persons from the 10 new EU member countries migrated to Austria. At the same time, migration by workers from other countries declined. Accordingly, additional net immigration by non-national workers was 17,230 in these three months. In terms of the size of the labour market, migration rates of more than 1 percent of the dependently employed were reported by Burgenland in a regional view, and by construction, hotels and restaurants and the primary sector in a sectoral view. The concentration is even stronger when we look at the figures sectorally and broken down by the Länder.