The European Union is constantly expanding. Because of the opening of the labor markets in 2004, hundreds of thousands of Eastern European workers, including a large number of skilled migrants, moved across national borders to seek employment in the old EU countries. The mechanisms governing this mass movement, and, in general, the mobility of skilled labor, are not fully understood. Beyond economic reasons, little is known about the factors that motivate young, educated professionals to move abroad or to return. This dissertation investigates the non-economic factors that influence the flows of skilled labor, using the geographical perspective of multi-scalar analysis.

This dissertation used semi-structured interviews with migrants as the principal method of research, as well as data from an internet survey, and secondary data on immigration from the British Accession Monitoring Reports. 60 interviews with Polish migrants were completed, and the survey yielded 139 responses. Analysis of these data has revealed that recent university graduates and young professionals from Poland base their migration decisions on their embodied experiences of the city, their perceptions of the immediate work environment, and their family planning strategies. This dissertation consequently supplements the income-centered analysis of migration motivations with factors focusing on the everyday life experiences of the migrants. It also shows that, within the new European Union, individual-choice model are as relevant for explaining migration as state-centric theories.