The Power of Cross‐Border Labour Market Immobility

In this paper we critically address and interrogate the issue of cross‐border labour mobility in the European Union. Despite fifteen years of policy stimulation, cross‐border labour movements are still exceptions and not the dominant pattern. It is argued that it is a further understanding of the concept of immobility more than mobility that should be at the core of the research on cross‐border labour markets. It is the critical awareness of the power of immobility that may help to contextualise and understand the non‐existence of a flourishing and fluid international labour market. It is postulated that the bordering of our orientation and (id)entity is preventing the existence of a large‐scale cross‐border or transnational labour market in the European Union. The social border produces a difference in the imagination of belonging and as such it produces an attitude of indifference towards the market on what is perceived as the ‘Other side’. The avoidance of uncertainty and wish to border oneself and identify with an existing socio‐spatial category then become important motivators for non‐action. This idea runs counter to the Cartesian worldview of human action, which has found its present translation in the rational agent in mainstream economics, which still motivates European Union labour market policy‐making. What is suggested here is the inclusion of the attitude of nationally habitualised indifference that may help to explain why most workers do not even consider seeking work across the border.