Abstract :
[en] More and more work and residential cross-border mobilities are observed in border regions. The Greater Region, consisting of Luxembourg, Lorraine (France), Wallonia (Belgium), Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany), is one of the borderlands that is mostly affected by those cross-border mobilities. Inside this geographic space, around 213,000 people live and work in two different countries. The majority of cross-border workers commute from a neighbouring country to Luxembourg, where they constitute 44% of the salaried population in 2013. Beside work cross-border mobilities also residential cross-border mobilities become more and more important in the Greater Region. Associated with this is e.g. the move of a non-negligible number of former Luxembourgish residents into the Belgian, French or German borderlands. Most of them still maintain their job in Luxembourg meaning they commute from their place of residence to the Grand Duchy on weekdays.
This paper aims on examining the development of the phenomenon of residential cross-border mobilities focusing on people who left Luxembourg and moved into the neighbouring countries but still work in the Grand Duchy. The period of time that the analysis takes into consideration is the last twenty years.
In the 1990s, the majority of residential cross-border mobilities were oriented towards Luxembourg. But in recent years, the trend has changed into the direction of the neighbouring countries. Therefore, recently some Belgian, French and German villages are impacted by these trends in migration flows. These impacts concern e.g. housing prices, practice of languages, schooling as well as social integration of allochthonous and autochthonous population. It is followed by a discussion focusing on the one hand on the effects arising from these trends for the Greater Region and on the other hand analysing social, economic, and environmental issues municipalities are faced with. Furthermore the paper addresses the problem whether these residential cross-border mobilities could be seen as a strengthening (re-bordering) or a weakening (de-bordering) of the function of borders.
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