ABSTRACT
The term ‘transit migration’ has a long history dating back to the movement of refugees out of German occupied Europe during the Second World War and covering immediate post-colonial arrivals of migrants in important gateway cities, such as Marseille (Temime 1989), but the use to which we refer may be traced to its appearance in policy documents from the early 1990s onwards to refer to largely irregular migration into the European Union (EU), initially across the EU’s Eastern external border (Wallace, Chmouliar & Sidorenko 1996). It is now used, almost exclusively in a European context, to refer to actual or potential irregular migration in the broader vicinity of Europe, to the east, south-east and south (Düvell 2006). Despite two decades of increasingly widespread use and growing signs that notions of ‘transit migration’ are filtering into more academic treatments of migration with relatively little critical analysis (Papadopoulou-Kourkoula 2008), there is no substantial comparative empirical work which examines the use and usefulness of the term in the variety of contexts in which it is used: Central and Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa. This book aims to fill that gap.
