Ten years after the post-accession migration wave from EU 8 to the UK: what can we learn from the largest intra-EU migration experiment?

When the eight post-communist central and Eastern European countries entered the EU in 2004, only three countries of the “old” EU 15 did not impose transitional measures and opened their labour market. Among them, the United Kingdom and Ireland became particularly popular destinations of labour migrants from the EU 8 countries. Our research suggests that the widely diverging wage levels in the EU 8 countries are good at explaining their different post-2004 per capita migration flows to the UK—ranging from Slovenia (highest wages among the newcomers) to Lithuania (lowest wages in EU 8) during the whole 2004 to 2014 period. Despite providing a satisfactory explanation for per capita immigration from the EU 8, the neoclassical approach cannot explain the large differences between migrants from different countries in regard to the length of stay in the host country (measured by the ratio between migrant stock and migrant inflow). Our analysis explains this phenomenon by the availability of and reliance on migrant networks.