Migrants on the edge of Europe: Perspectives from Malta, Cyprus and Slovenia

The political and media focus in the run-up to the expansion of the EU, however, was primarily on the potential scale of East-West migration from Central and Eastern Europe, to some extent echoing fears generated in 1986 over an influx of migrants from the then new EU member-states of Spain and Portugal.

Not only did this give the unfavourable impression that Polish, Latvian or Czech citizens, for example, would jump at the chance to emigrate (overlooking how feasible or even desirable such a decision would be for some), but the hyperbole surrounding EU enlargement did not readily lend itself to painting a more accurate picture of who or what made up the ten new member states. In the following account the focus is on three of these countries, Malta, Cyprus and Slovenia, which did not feature in discussions about the potential for mass emigration from the new accession states; the effect of this was to largely ignore the changing migration dynamics taking place along the EU's southern borders, in particular the growing, and in some cases established presence of migrants in those three new member states.