National borders inside the European Union are open contact zones of transnational everyday lives. The Schengen Agreement ensures the free movement of EU ci-tizens, leading to new forms of international migration and illustrating the European integration process on the local level. Migrants move to the neighbouring country to live or work there. Cross-border residential property and labour markets develop a transnationalisation of everyday lives between neighbouring countries. With the case study region of the municipality of Perl in the German federal state of Saarland and the municipality Amt Löcknitz-Penkun in the German federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania the article deals with these cross-border everyday lives. On the one side of the national state borders there is a booming region (Luxembourg or Szczecin) and on the other side there is a structural weak rural German region. This substantially influences these processes. Both case study regions show dealings with these cross-border phenomena and spatial implications.