Migration law in international law and European Union law

Migratio in Latin means displacement or (e)migration. Migration is a population movement, a process of people moving for permanent or temporary resettlement, either within a state or between states. Scholarly literature often uses the term “international mobility”, which entails movement across international borders for any length of time. 

The Duden dictionary of foreign words defines migration as “the movement of individuals or groups of individuals in a geographical or social sense, combined with a change of place of residence”. According to the PWN dictionary of foreign words, migration is a “demographic passage or mechanical (physical) movement of a population; a component and a basic (besides circulation) form of spatial mobility; territorial movements related to a relatively permanent change of place of residence”. Under the most simplified definition, “a migrant is an individual who arrives to or departs from a specific place other than by birth or death.” 

Definitions of migration emphasize the legal, political, territorial, temporal and social aspects of the phenomenon. Migration is a process marked by all of those, which is why the law’s only role in this case is to govern the functions and the legal status of a migrant in the host country. By the simplest definition accepted in the literature, a migrant is an individual who ventures a permanent, voluntary or forced, passage with a view to settling in a new place, where such factors are taken into account as the decisive reasons for the individual’s venture, their overcoming the natural inertia and leaving their existing family and ethnic milieus, and the influence it may have on political and economic processes in their home country.

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