The making of an immigration model: inflows, impacts and policies in Southern Europe

INTRODUCTION The comparative analysis of immigration experiences in Southern European countries – considering under this designation Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain – is not a novel exercise. Since the early 1990s, the many similarities of timing and other characteristics of immigration in these countries led to the frequent gathering of researchers and policymakers, from Southern European and other countries, to discuss the theme. During a period that culminated in the turn of the century, several articles, books and special editions of journals were released (see, among others, King and Rybaczuk, 1993; Iosifides and King, 1996; Baganha, 1997; Baldwin-Edwards, 1997; King and Black, 1997; Baldwin-Edwards and Arango, 1999; King, Lazaridis and Tsardanidis, 2000; King, 2002; VV.AA., 2004; Ritaine, 2005; and, more recently, King and Thomson, 2008). Many of these references went so far as to designate these new immigration experiences as a “Southern European model of immigration” (King, 2000), which differed in several ways from the model that predominated in other European host countries during the second half of the 20th century, when the Fordist type of capitalism was dominant. From the late 1990s on, the interest in drawing comparative analysis between the Southern European countries diminished. This is somehow surprising, since the bulk of the inflows to Southern Europe occurred mostly after the late 1990s. Indeed, the framework and underlying immigration factors remained as much the same as before. But during the new century inflows changed some of their characteristics, several new policies were enacted and the overall outcomes of migration, including immigrant’s integration, varied. It seems clear that an updating of those former comparative exercises is currently in need. The IDEA project provided the framework for carrying such an exercise. This report results from the common work carried out by the IDEA Southern European research teams since the middle stages of the project. The group benefited from the overall discussions of the project, intended to provide a comparison between Western, Northern, Southern and Eastern European experiences. Further work was based on the updated reports in each of the countries and comparisons along a pre-established template. This common work culminated in a productive workshop held in Lisbon in January 2009, where the first version of the current report was discussed. Compared to previous comparative exercises on Southern Europe, this report may be considered innovative on two main grounds. First, it updates information existing in previous studies, pertaining to flows, underlying factors, policies, impacts and outcomes. Second, it benefited from the use of the IDEA common framework. One of the main theoretical guiding lines of the project is that the explanation of the “dependent variables”, namely inflows (including immigrants’ demographic characteristics and labour market insertion), policies, impacts and integration outcomes, needs to come across a set of “independent variables”. Among others, the latter include the international context during the formative years (“the generation effect”), the degree of recentness of immigration experiences (the “age effect”), the type of labour demand, the socio-economic regime and the dominant perceptions and attitudes. The current report draws on these variables to describe and explain the Southern experiences, stressing its many commonalities but also some national differences. The next sections are organized as follows. First, the historical background of immigration in Southern Europe will be set, showing evidence of the specificity of both generation and age effects and alluding to the main explanatory factors. Second, a detailed analysis of flows and stocks of foreign immigration will be done. Third, resulting from the centrality of the labour demand variables for explaining immigration in this context, a section will be devoted to labour market mechanisms and immigrants’ labour incorporation. Fourth, the endemic presence of irregular migration in these countries will be described, together with its explanatory factors (including the informal economy and inadequate regulations) and policy attempts to regulate it (ex-post). Next, different aspects of immigration policy will be examined. The fifth section is devoted to labour migration policies; the sixth examines control policies; and the seventh integration and citizenship policies. As it will be seen, in a short time span several policy instruments were enacted in all Southern European countries, confirming at the same time the tentative character of many policies and the need for new approaches, compared to previous European immigration experiences. The eighth section will focus on three types of impacts: demographic, economic and social, particularly reactions from public opinion. Finally, some conclusive remarks will be set, trying to learn from the comparative material and the insights allowed by the IDEA framework. [pp. 4-5]