Intergenerational contact of European migrants - A case study of Belgium

This paper focuses on European migrants in Belgium. Although European migrants represent a growing share of the new immigrants in Belgium and have been at the hearth of EU mobility policies for many years now, this group has been studied scarcely. Very little is known on European families and the impact of European mobility and transnationality on these families. The current paper aims to provide a first insight into the family relations of Europeans in Belgium. More specifically, it focuses on the intergenerational contact between migrants and their mothers. The central question is to what extent intergenerational contact differs in European transnational families compared to Belgian families as well as to non-European transnational families. Complementary to earlier work this study uses a quantitative approach, using the Belgian Generations and Gender Survey data of wave 1. The data on contact with the mother, both face-to-face as well as by telephone, are used in multivariate ordinal regression models.