Movement+HJHL

Movement By: Hee Jae

__** Migration Trend in Europe **__ With over one million migrants a year, Europe is "the" destination for migrants worldwide. Countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea such as Spain, Italy, and Malta are most affected. Under the 2003 Dublin II Regulation, the first country in which an asylum seeker lands is solely responsible for examining that person’s asylum application. Predictably, this has placed greater strains on countries closest to Africa, the source of the vast majority of immigrants. In 2006, Spain received at least 636,000 migrants, representing almost half of the EU’s total and 122,500 more than the number of migrants arriving in Germany, France, Italy, and Britain combined. Authorities on Spain's Canary Islands alone caught almost thirty thousand Africans trying to enter in 2006. Malta, located only two hundred miles from Libya’s coastline, has seen up to two hundred immigrants a week, and the Italian island of Lampedusa has also been affected. Non-European countries along the migration route such as Morocco have been strained by mass migration to Europe.

__ Push & Pull Factors __ [[image:europe-population-change.jpg width="394" height="323" align="right" caption="http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1982"]]
Currently, doctors, engineers and other professionals from Central and Eastern Europe are leaving their home countries for Western Europe and foreign regions in search of higher salaries and improved working conditions. In Romania, the medical profession is being hit the hardest. Doctors are emigrating to Great Britain, France, and the United States because doctors in more developed and economically stable nations earn 20 times as much as they would in Romania (130 euros per month). Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary are especially having problems with manpower shortages; it lacks approximately 3000 doctors and are recently losing 500 to 600 doctors each year. As a result, there are over 100,000 unifilled positions. The rapid increase of jobs in Central and Eastern Europe is instigating a huge migration of immigrants from Asia and Africa as European companies resort to workers from Southeast Asia and parts of Africa to fill up the empty positions and restore manpower once again. Relative to population size, two of Europe's smallest countries — Luxembourg (37.4 percent) and Liechtenstein (33.9 percent) — had the largest stock of immigrants, followed by Switzerland (22.9 percent), the Baltic states of Latvia (19.5 percent) and Estonia (15.4 percent), Austria (15.1 percent), Ireland (14.1 percent), Cyprus (13.9 percent), Sweden (12.4 percent), and Germany (12.3 percent).

Sources

"Europe and Central Asia - Migration and Remittances: Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union." //The World Bank//. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2009. .

"Migration Information Source - Europe: Population and Migration in 2005." //Migration Information Source//. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2009. .