Not only for work: Italian migrants in the Athens area

Abstract

According to the official Italian administrative data, the community of Italians living in Athens went on growing over the years, including the last decade. What are the drivers of Italian immigration in a less-developed country than Italy, a country which recently has also experienced a more serious crisis than the Italian one? To answer this question, we followed a research strategy based on in-depth interviews to Italians living in the Athens area. After reviewing the features of the Italian community and those of the group of interviewees, we focus on the respondents who found a job in Athens, both as independent workers and as employees. Our results show that a great number of drivers are at work in producing a migration flow from Italy to Greece. They support the idea that contemporary international migration (more specifically, intra-European migration) cannot be fully understood by relying exclusively on an economic approach.

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“…They may be seen as the other pole of this recent migratory flow: individuals who see themselves as active agents in a path of labor and personal mobility that is conceived from the outset as a path of international migration. Some of them set out to live authentic global lives -an attitude we can find both among younger people, who are oriented primarily toward accumulating life and work experiences abroad (Delli Paoli and Maddaloni 2021), and among those in their thirties who choose a career as a manager in an international organization or transnational company, or even set out to find even relatively deskilled employment in the transnational segment of the labor market (Maddaloni and Moffa 2021). We leave it to future research to ascertain the extent to which ongoing disruptions in the international order -in particular, the persistence of the COVID-19 epidemic and war events in Eastern Europe -are producing changes in this complex migration pattern.…”

“…Regarding the sampling process, in each research a first approach to Italian migrants was made through social media (more specifically, through blogs, Facebook pages, WhatsApp groups, etc.) (De Rosa and Maddaloni 2020, Maddaloni and Moffa 2021, Maddaloni 2022. Starting from these contacts, we used the snowball sampling technique and carried out several semi-structured interviews with Italians living in the target areas.…”

“…In fact, Italians in Bogota are employed as entrepreneurs, managers, academics, professionals, even teachers in Italian schools. In contrast, the occupational profile of Italians interviewed in Madrid and Athens is more heterogeneous (Maddaloni 2019a, De Rosa and Maddaloni 2020, Maddaloni and Moffa 2021. It includes not only many of the professional roles mentioned above, but also cooks, pizza makers, people coming from Italy for an international internship, and (in Athens) employees of transnational service companies and people currently looking for a job opportunity.…”

“…Also, it should be noted that the colloquial nature of the interviews inevitably results in a somewhat imprecise language. Finally, it should be noted that some quotes have appeared in previous works (Maddaloni 2019b, De Rosa and Maddaloni 2020, Maddaloni and Moffa 2021, Delli Paoli and Maddaloni 2021, Maddaloni 2022. [laughs].…”

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

“…The aim of this paper is to present some results of two research projects, on Italian communities abroad conducted independently during 2017 and 2018. More specifically, one research was focused on the Italian diaspora in Athens, Greece (Maddaloni, 2019;Maddaloni & Moffa, 2020), whilst the other one investigated the more recent and still growing Italian emigration to the city of Valencia, Spain .…”