Transnational Migration, Citizenship and the Circulation of Rights and Responsibilities (TRANSMIC) is a project funded under the FP7-PEOPLE-2013-ITN call and is part of the Marie Curie Actions — Initial Training Networks funding scheme (Project number – 608417).
The TRANSMIC research training programme aimed to examine the concept of transnational migration from a theoretical and empirical multi-disciplinary perspective and to provide policy insights into promoting “rights-based mobility”. It analysed how the mobility of people meshes with the (im)mobility of rights and obligations and explored the links between migration, citizenship, development and transnational migration patterns by pooling expertise beyond the national and European level. Along with these scientific objectives, TRANSMIC also contributed to the establishment of an interdisciplinary consortium on transnational migration, which delivered a comprehensive academic training programme for PhD and post-doc researchers coupled with professional skills elements such as secondments and workshops.
Several of the research projects contributed to the understanding of the policy and legal aspects of transnational migration in the context of the multi-faceted external migration policy of the EU, as well as its repercussions on migrants’ rights. The PhD project conducted by Zvezda Vankova (ESR1) concluded that the EU’s approach to circular migration has been driven by selectivity based on the skills and the qualifications of migrants and it only allows the most desirable migrants – the highly-qualified – with the possibility to engage in rights-based circular migration. It also demonstrated that the circular migration approaches at the national level differ between countries due to various factors and this leads to different outcomes for the rights of migrant workers and very often to discrepancies between the predetermined models by policymakers and the migrants’ realities.
