Paths and spaces of policy innovation in migrant reception and integration in Southern Europe

Abstract

Migration to Southern Europe has for a long time been marked by a distinctive pattern combining migrants’ weak legal status with economic and social marginality. Non-European workers could easily find informal and low-qualified jobs in the agriculture sector, constructions, or the care sector. Yet, improving this initial disadvantaged position has always proved very difficult: ‘wanted but not welcomed’, migrants in Southern European countries have always faced challenges when seeking to obtain permanent residence status or citizenship or recognition as full members of the receiving societies. In the last decades, the massive arrivals of humanitarian migrants from areas of political crisis around the world have considerably changed the original pattern, in particular by downplaying economic utility considerations and labour market needs and bringing to the fore issues of reception and welcoming. These more recent ‘unwanted migrants’ have not necessarily also been ‘not welcomed’. During the 2015 European asylum crisis, the reception of migrants in Southern Europe has often represented a laboratory for political and social innovation. In other words, the migration crisis and more recently, new arrivals of Ukrainian war refugees, have acted as catalyst for change in Southern European countries’ migration policies and practices, opening a window of opportunity for social experimentation and the emergence of new paths and spaces of innovation. This panel aims at exploring such paths and spaces and therefore welcomes contributions proposing theoretical-conceptual elaborations and original empirical analyses of innovative practices and policies of migrant reception and integration in Southern Europe including case-studies and comparative – qualitative and quantitative – analyses.

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