Revisiting the EU's New Mobility Regime: The Impact of Mobility and Policies on Labour Market Hierarchies within and across the EU

This paper is the introductory chapter for a special issue investigating the current status of the new EU mobility regime (Favell 2008b) more than 15 years after the first Eastward enlargement. Our main claim is that the EU mobility is shaped by and has created multiple hierarchies across the EU and within EU countries. The EU migration regime has grown more complex and diversified (Faist, 2013), but underneath the complexity there are still strong hierarchies structuring patterns and consequences of mobility. We therefore propose the concept of ‘hierarchized mobility’ to grasp the complex, yet unequal mobility opportunities of workers within the EU. We further argue that we should study both socioeconomic factors and regulation to understand this hierarchized mobility. On the one hand, enduring hierarchies between national labour markets shape EU labour mobility and transform hierarchies between national labour markets into hierarchies within national labour markets (Felbo-Kolding et al. 2019). On the other hand, both national and EU policies regulate and shape mobility and the hierarchies it creates (Scholten and van Ostaijen 2018). The interaction between EU rules that shape different categories of mobile workers and national social and labour market regulation can both counteract or strengthen the trend towards hierarchized mobility.