Introduction

In recent decades, Europe has become one of the major immigrationreceiving regions in the world. No other region receives more immigrants in absolute terms, although not in relation to population size. Put in historical perspective, this represents an epochal change, since Europeans tended to predominate in international migration flows until the 1960s. Taken as a whole, it can be said that Europe's migration transition – i.e. its transformation from a primarily sending region to a primarily receiving one – took place in the two decades that followed the end of World War II, albeit a handful of countries had experienced it well before. This fact notwithstanding, the present configuration of Europe as an immigration-receiving region is better understood as the outcome of a gradual accumulation of national migration transitions, some of which are still in process. Further national transitions can be expected in the coming years.

In the specialised literature, Europe is often referred to as an international migration system. Since the 1990s, the notion of migration systems has gained momentum. The idea of applying system analysis to the study of migration is no doubt an appealing concept, one that emphasises the bidirectionality that exists between groups of countries that exchange migration flows alongside other exchanges. It was effectively applied by the geographer Akin Mabogunje in a seminal study of international migration flows in Western Africa (Mabogunje 1970) and later promoted by Mary Kritz, Lin Lean Lim and Hania Zlotnik at the beginning of the 1990s (Kritz, Lim & Zlotnik 1992). At present, however, it is still richer in undelivered promises than in tangible results. It suffers from considerable ambiguity, as its central premise is used with a diversity of meanings that are seldom made clear. In its most common application, it pertains to groups of more or less contiguous or proximate receiving countries that have important elements in common – thereby excluding the countries where the bulk of immigrants originate, as the initial and more orthodox version of the notion would have it (Zlotnik 1992). In so doing, it does not go far beyond what geographers used to term ‘migration regions’.

Defined in this limited way, Europe is one of the four major systems in the contemporary world, together with North America, the Persian Gulf and the Asia Pacific region (Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino & Taylor 1998).