Still a Place of Hope? Immigration in the Periphery of Southern Europe in an Age of Crisis

The aim of our paper is to analyze the impact of the southern European economic crisis on migration flows and integration of immigrants in two peripheral regions, Campania (Italy) and Extremadura (Spain). Our starting hypothesis was that the current crisis is causing a decline in public policies towards immigrants in regions where the public sector was already rather ineffective. Nevertheless, the crisis is also causing a reduction in migration flows to these same regions. In addition, the relatively unstructured nature of the local economy could act as a vehicle of damping the labor costs and the housing insecurity, both for local residents and immigrants. We worked on quantitative and qualitative data already available on these topics; moreover, we carried out a survey involving a number of key informants on migration at the regional level. However, the findings we obtained confirm our starting hypothesis only partially, also highlighting some differences between these regions.