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This article focuses on the structuring capacities of mobility strategies that are oriented towards, and seek to challenge, institutional borders. Positioned within the debate on the role of context in the ‘new’ economic geographies, and tempted to adopt elements of the Marxist-inspired strategic-relational approach to the geographical study of institutions, it emphasizes the creative entrepreneurial ability of mobile and immobile actors to influence prevailing border contexts. It further aims to continue work on the ‘primitive’ mobility typical of the early years of post-Iron Curtain economic restructuring by discussing two timely cases. The first is that of the larger bazaars, or open-air markets, in the Polish city region of Lodz. The functioning of these bazaars very much depends on the openness of Poland's eastern border, since many buyers and sellers come from such countries as Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. The prospect of Poland's admission to the Schengen area has had major consequences for its eastern border, and hence for the visa circumvention strategies of the protagonists in the bazaar economy. The second case concerns Polish migrant workers in the Dutch-German Lower Rhine border region. Until recently, the Netherlands denied free movement of labour to citizens of new EU member states, and Germany still does. However, due to a strong demand for cheap migrant labour in the region, Polish workers are able to enter thanks to circumvention strategies at the margins of accounting and labour law. It is argued that the local strategies oriented towards Schengen and the restrictions on free movement are far from ‘primitive’. Instead, they imply creative, sophisticated legal and negotiating techniques of a kind that may indeed have structuring effects.
