ABSTRACT
The European Union’s enlargement in 2004 and 2007 was one of the most important political innovations of the early twenty-first century. The accession of ten new Member States led to a considerable increase in labour migration. Millions of Central and Eastern Europeans went to Western Europe for work. The scale of these migration flows was unanticipated (Black et al. 2010). That was true of the migration flows to the Netherlands too. According to estimates, between 260,000 and 305,000 Central and Eastern Europeans were living in the Netherlands in 2008 (Van der Heijden et al. 2011). These estimates include Central and Eastern European labour migrants who were not registered in the Municipal Personal Records Database. Many labour migrants in fact do not register, even though they live and work in the Netherlands. These undocumented people can make it very difficult for local councils because they have no idea how many Central and Eastern Europeans reside within their boundaries, or who they are.
