Between Integration and Dissociation: Intra-European Immigrants’ Life Experiences in Romania

Abstract

Increasingly visible migrant communities that coexist within transnational spaces (Vertovec, 2009) are part of a contemporary world marked by a changing political approach to immigration, in which integration is the key word. The vagueness of the term (Schinkel, 2017) is compensated by the potential benefits derived from its usage. Given its multidimensionality (Harder et al., 2018; Voicu & Vlase, 2014), integration allows observing a liquid migration. The term was developed in relation to intra-European migration (Engbersen, 2018), to stress the encapsulation of such spatial movement into a more complex set of social changes, and to stress the flexibility of migration itself. Such fluidity implies a series of temporary states in the personal life, that is appropriate for the case of high-skilled intra-European migrants.