Structuring East to West Migration: A Case Study of Central and Eastern European Migrants to Britain

Focusing on Central and Eastern European migration from accession states to England, this
paper seeks to explore how migration has been affected by global level socioeconomic and
political transformations that have occurred as part of wider global integration. The study
explores Central and Eastern European migrant’s experiences of globalisation at a micro level.
The argument in this paper seeks to conceptualised East to West migration as a structuration
process: using the analytical categories of social structure and human agency, and applying the
structuration model to explain the reciprocal influence of migrant’s home and host societal
structures in shaping their activities and goals (Morawska, 2001). The paper also aims to show
that East to West migration is determined by market forces and that EU accession is used as an
enabling structure by the migrants to regularise the already existing process of Central and
Eastern European migration flows.