The decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall have presented new opportunities and challenges for the free movement of people. On the one hand, the fall reunited families and opened up exchange and study programmes for young people. But it also gave rise to informal, irregular and exploitative labour migration. With Europe once again facing a immigration crisis, there are vital lessons to be learned from the post-Wall period.
While European nations welcomed the fall of the Berlin Wall, they were unprepared for the immigration flows that followed. This included refugees from the Yugoslav wars (approximately 800,000); co-ethnic migrations from the former Soviet Union to Germany (over 3 million), Greece (200,000), Poland and Finland (10,000s); and labour migrants from central and eastern Europe to both western and southern Europe. By the late 2000s, 4.8 million had resettled in central Europe.
Southern European countries in particular became hosts of significant immigrant populations in the early 1990s. Their governments were mostly in denial about this shift; they seemed to think that immigration pressures would be a short-lived. As such, they attempted to regulate immigration through border controls and rigid immigration requirements.
