After the fall of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the expectation arose in Western Europe that differences in affluence between East and West would make enormous migration flows inevitable. This expectation was strengthened by political and ethnic tensions in Central and Eastern Europe. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Financial Times predicted that 7 million people may leave the former Soviet Union (see Codagnone 1998). Another British newspaper, The Guardian, referred to a meeting of former Russian politicians where a figure of as high as 25 million emigrants from the former Soviet Union to the West was mentioned (see Tränhardt 1996). Academic voices were more mixed. Some, such as Van de Kaa, concluded that there was indeed a huge migration potential in the former USSR and its satellites following the fall of communism, and formed the view that ‘the main direction streams in Europe during the next decade or so [would] be from East to West’ (Van de Kaa 1993: 91). In contrast, others predicted much lower numbers (see Fassmann & Munz 1994: 534; also Heisler 1992: 611).

Initially, it was the latter view that proved to be correct. The millions of migrants expected to arrive from the former USSR never arrived. Migration from the former Yugoslavia to the countries of the European Union was more substantial, much of it in the form of forced population movements, but these still represented only a small proportion of the many millions of people driven to flight by the conflict in their country. According to Sassen (1997: 150), the question is not why so many people came to the West from countries that were once part of the USSR or the Yugoslavian Federation. Rather, the question is why – given the poverty and the unstable political situation in much of the region – so many more people did not take the step of emigrating to the EU. One answer lies in the restrictive immigration policies pursued by Western European countries since 1989. Fassmann and Munz (1994: 535) spoke of a cordon sanitaire erected to protect Western Europe from Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries and the Balkans.