In Search of a Good Life in a Southern European Country: The New Italian Migration to Athens and Valencia.

Abstract

One of the main migration flows from southern Europe is the so-called ‘new emigration’ from southern Europe towards other developed countries, mainly in North Europe. Nevertheless, we still don’t know very much about the internal flows in the area. The main aims of this paper are to contribute to a better understanding of these processes and to find common pathways, discussing – in a comparative perspective – the first results of two inquiries conducted on Italians living in Attica (Greece) and Valencia (Spain). The two studies have been carried out with a qualitative method mixing the techniques of participatory observation in virtual and real communities and in-depth interviews. The main result of the comparison is that both migration flows go beyond the idea of a new emigration from Southern Europe predominantly caused by a lack of good jobs. Other factors and motives seem to be at stake today in these pathways of mobility: the cost of living, the safety of public spaces, the good weather or the geographical proximity to the origin areas, among others. Those factors do not replace the relevance of economic migration motives, but certainly put forward the complexity of these emerging intra-southern European countries migration flows, underlining the multidimensional factors pushing them.