EU Movers: How Many Are There, Where Are They, What Do They Do?

Abstract

When the train left Milan station one morning in September 1957, its passengers thought about their mothers, their wives, their children and their mountains disappearing over the horizon behind them. They certainly did not know that one day they would be remembered as the first Europeans who could exercise their right to free movement — albeit in the limited forms envisaged by the ECSC Treaty. In the testimonies collected over time by historians, most of them admitted that they had no idea of where their destination, Belgium, was situated; even less were they aware of the incipient process of European integration. As touchingly recounted by a second-generation Italo-Belgian: ‘The journey was for them but a minor logistical episode, embedded somewhere among poverty, hunger, war, and silicosis. Never in their talk did they claim to be heroic; never did they describe the journey as difficult and decisive’ (Canovi 2011, 10). The night before their departure, they had been examined by a Belgian doctor and, on being deemed fit, had signed a work contract which stipulated their pay and lodging. Like so many before and after them, they travelled without stopovers to Brussels, where they alighted on the platforms allocated to goods trains so that they would not mix with other travellers. From Brussels, they were taken by lorry to the mines where the jobs that they had so long sought awaited them — and for too many of them, also a tragic death in the accidents and disasters that, counting the casualties in the fire at the Marcinelle colliery in 1956, claimed 868 victims between 1946 and 1963 (Rossini 2006).