Remigration of “new” Spaniards since the economic crisis: the interplay between citizenship and precarity among Colombian-Spanish families moving to Northern Europe

Abstract

Following the recent economic crisis, there is renewed interest in intra-European mobilities, including new South-to-North flows. The focus has been on quantifying such flows and identifying the economic and labour-market causes, especially in the case of young Spaniards moving North. By contrast, less attention has been afforded to the remigration of naturalized third-country migrants exercising their rights to free mobility. Based on quantitative-qualitative fieldwork with Colombian migrants in Europe carried out over the last fifteen years (including some 150 interviews and two surveys), this article analyses how naturalization has allowed Colombian-Spanish families to remigrate to other EU countries (the UK and Belgium) as a main strategy to survive the impacts of the crisis. However, rather than experiencing upward social mobility within a “global hierarchy of citizenships” these “new” Spaniards face renewed precarious lives in a context of “(re)peripherilised” South–North flows, where so-called EU free mobility becomes instead precarious intra-EU migrations.