Freedom of movement of persons - the building block of European growth. CHALLENGE EUROPE Issue 22 - Challenges and new beginnings: Priorities for the EU's new leadership, September 2014.

The European integration project is founded on values and principles which are simple, equal, and advantageous for all. Freedom of movement of persons is one of the main cornerstones of EU success. It is a fundamental, cherished right of EU citizens. Thanks to this liberty, European citizenship is real, concrete and attractive. Moreover, it spurs economic growth and technological development. But because freedom of movement has become an obvious feature of our day-to-day lives, some of us tend to underestimate its consequences. Important recent developments mean that we must renew our commitment to defend this building-block of a Europe whole and free.

EU Borders and Their Controls: Preventing unwanted movement of people in Europe? CEPS Essay No. 6, 14 November 2013

his Essay attempts to take a step back from the tragic event in the first week of October 2013, when a boat capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa and some 300 persons drowned seeking safe harbour. It sets out to examine the issue of EU border controls from the perspectives of the technologies, new and old, building on a variety of scholarly disciplines to understand what is happening to border controls on the movement of persons in the EU and why the results are so deadly. The Essay opens with an overview of what actually happens at the EU’s external borders. It then moves on to assess the old and new set of border control technologies that are deployed at the EU external borders, and how new technologies such as those based on automated controls and biometrics, are transforming the classical principles of European border controls. It then covers the reasons why people are refused admission at the EU’s external borders and the extent to which new border and surveillance technologies would assist in the effective controls in light of EU border law. Conclusions are finally offered on the articulation between the facts of EU border controls on persons and the claims and proposals for new technologies that are emerging from the EU institutions.

No Move without Free Movement: The EU-Swiss controversy over quotas for free movement of persons. CEPS Policy Brief No. 331, 23 April 2015

The focus of this Policy Brief is the Swiss referendum of 2014 against ‘mass immigration’ in Switzerland. It identifies the challenges that a quota on EU citizens’ free movement rights to Switzerland would pose to EU-Swiss relations, considering: i) the value of freedom of movement in the EU and its indivisibility from the internal market and other economic freedoms; ii) the specificity of the EU legal system following the Lisbon Treaty that established democratic and judicial accountability mechanisms; iii) the lack of supranational judicial oversight of the EU-Switzerland agreements framework; and iv) the existence of the so-called guillotine mechanism, according to which the termination of the Free Movement Agreement would entail the automatic termination of the other agreements with the EU. The authors set out a number of options and consider their implications for EU-Swiss relations.

Free Movement of Persons: The Mirage of Social Security Schemes. Bruges European Economic Research Papers (BEER) 34/2015

The purpose of this paper is to address the issue of social security benefits that jobseekers, nationals of other Member State, residing in another Member States are in title to, as well as the economic implications of free movement of persons and labour market access. Consequently, it aims to disentangle between labour mobility welfare effects and “benefit tourism” looking in particular at the United Kingdom social security system and analysing the policy framework currently in place that governs the free movement of people across the European Union Member States.

La place des emotions dans les campagnes du Front national et du Mouvement democrate pour les elections europeennes der 2014 = The place of emotions in the campaigns of the National Front and democrat movement for the 2014 European elections. Bruges Political Research Papers 43/2015.

No abstract.

The Impact of Language Opacity and Proficiency on Reading Strategies in Bilinguals: An Eye Movement Study

Reading strategies vary across languages according to orthographic depth - the complexity of the grapheme in relation to phoneme conversion rules - notably at the level of eye movement patterns. We recently demonstrated that a group of early bilinguals, who learned both languages equally under the age of seven, presented a first fixation location (FFL) closer to the beginning of words when reading in German as compared with French. Since German is known to be orthographically more transparent than French, this suggested that different strategies were being engaged depending on the orthographic depth of the used language. Opaque languages induce a global reading strategy, and transparent languages force a local/serial strategy. Thus, pseudo-words were processed using a local strategy in both languages, suggesting that the link between word forms and their lexical representation may also play a role in selecting a specific strategy. In order to test whether corresponding effects appear in late bilinguals with low proficiency in their second language (L2), we present a new study in which we recorded eye movements while two groups of late German-French and French-German bilinguals read aloud isolated French and German words and pseudo-words. Since, a transparent reading strategy is local and serial, with a high number of fixations per stimuli, and the level of the bilingual participants' L2 is low, the impact of language opacity should be observed in L1. We therefore predicted a global reading strategy if the bilinguals' L1 was French (FFL close to the middle of the stimuli with fewer fixations per stimuli) and a local and serial reading strategy if it was German. Thus, the L2 of each group, as well as pseudo-words, should also require a local and serial reading strategy. Our results confirmed these hypotheses, suggesting that global word processing is only achieved by bilinguals with an opaque L1 when reading in an opaque language; the low level in the L2 gives way to a local and serial reading strategy. These findings stress the fact that reading behavior is influenced not only by the linguistic mode but also by top-down factors, such as readers' proficiency.