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5 - Immigrants, Markets and Policies in Southern Europe: The Making of an Immigration Model?
- Edited by Marek Okolski
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- Book:
- European Immigrations
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 03 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2012, pp 107-148
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Summary
Introduction
Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain have in common two long episodes of strong emigration – during the first period of globalisation and after World War II – and they now share comparable types of foreign immigration. During the first period of globalisation, in the second half of the nineteenth century and before World War I, these countries made an important contribution to intra-European migration and to settlement migration in North America and South America. After World War II, they were among the main suppliers of the growing economies of Western and Northern Europe. Currently, they are experiencing a significant inflow of foreigners. In a relatively short time span, Southern Europe underwent its migration transition, becoming one of the most important areas of attraction on the continent (Bonifazi 2008). According to the available statistics, the number of foreign immigrants in this area can be estimated as ranging from between 950,000 and 1.3 million in 1991 to between 8 million and 10 million in the period 2006-2007. This is a seven- to eight-fold increase in just fifteen years.
Despite some dissimilarities that stem from the different histories of these countries, their diverse social and economic characteristics and their specific cultural and colonial links to other geographical areas, many reasons for the growth of foreign immigration were similar across all four of them. It is worth mentioning several notable economic trends in recent decades: the improvement in living standards and educational levels of the native youth, both of which increased labour expectations; the persistence of significant informal economies and of segmentation processes in the labour markets; the effects of low fertility rates on labour supply; and the overall limitations of Mediterranean welfare systems, which are largely unable to provide for their populations’ evolving needs, including those attributable to the ageing process. Furthermore, the political and economic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) intensified the push forces into this area. While the gradual incorporation of most of those countries into the European Union migration system resulted in a relaxing of visa policies, labour migration from that area had been de facto tolerated even before the EU enlargement. This increased availability of foreign workers matched the growing needs of Southern European labour markets.
2 - Early Starters and Latecomers: Comparing Countries of Immigration and Immigration Regimes in Europe
- Edited by Marek Okolski
-
- Book:
- European Immigrations
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 03 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2012, pp 45-64
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
In recent decades, Europe has become one of the major immigrationreceiving regions in the world. No other region receives more immigrants in absolute terms, although not in relation to population size. Put in historical perspective, this represents an epochal change, since Europeans tended to predominate in international migration flows until the 1960s. Taken as a whole, it can be said that Europe's migration transition – i.e. its transformation from a primarily sending region to a primarily receiving one – took place in the two decades that followed the end of World War II, albeit a handful of countries had experienced it well before. This fact notwithstanding, the present configuration of Europe as an immigration-receiving region is better understood as the outcome of a gradual accumulation of national migration transitions, some of which are still in process. Further national transitions can be expected in the coming years.
In the specialised literature, Europe is often referred to as an international migration system. Since the 1990s, the notion of migration systems has gained momentum. The idea of applying system analysis to the study of migration is no doubt an appealing concept, one that emphasises the bidirectionality that exists between groups of countries that exchange migration flows alongside other exchanges. It was effectively applied by the geographer Akin Mabogunje in a seminal study of international migration flows in Western Africa (Mabogunje 1970) and later promoted by Mary Kritz, Lin Lean Lim and Hania Zlotnik at the beginning of the 1990s (Kritz, Lim & Zlotnik 1992). At present, however, it is still richer in undelivered promises than in tangible results. It suffers from considerable ambiguity, as its central premise is used with a diversity of meanings that are seldom made clear. In its most common application, it pertains to groups of more or less contiguous or proximate receiving countries that have important elements in common – thereby excluding the countries where the bulk of immigrants originate, as the initial and more orthodox version of the notion would have it (Zlotnik 1992). In so doing, it does not go far beyond what geographers used to term ‘migration regions’.
Defined in this limited way, Europe is one of the four major systems in the contemporary world, together with North America, the Persian Gulf and the Asia Pacific region (Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino & Taylor 1998).