ABSTRACT
The world economic crisis since 2008 has constituted an important turning point in international migration trends. This process is particularly evident in the southern countries of the European Union (EU). Subject to the greatest consequences of the slump (Alessandrini et al. 2013), these nations are still displaying great difficulties overcoming it in full, and, in terms of migration, have undoubtedly experienced the most significant changes in Europe (Strozza and De Santis 2017a). In the two decades straddling the turn of the century, the four countries considered (Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece) were the main poles in the world attracting international migratory flows (Strozza 2010; Arango and Finotelli 2010), overturning a tradition that for at least a century had them marked as the most important points of departure from the continent (Bonifazi and Strozza 2002). According to some scholars (King and Rybaczuk 1993; King et al. 1997, King 2000; Ribas-Mateos 2004; Peixoto et al. 2012), the result has been the development of the so-called Southern Europe model of immigration, rather different from the one of the ‘old(er)’ European immigration countries. ‘The timing of inflows, the position in the migration cycle, the level and type of labour demand, the socio-economic structures, the public perception and the immigration policies are all significantly different in those contexts’ (Peixoto et al. 2012: 141). The main characteristics of the North-Western Mediterranean model of immigration have been singled out in the similarity in the process of transition from emigration to immigration countries, the considerable variation in the national origin of immigrants with different demographic characteristics, the labour-oriented nature of most inflows with immigrants mainly absorbed into the least protected segments of the labour market, often overqualified for the jobs they perform and overexposed to temporary contracts and unemployment risks, more or less similar migration policies with the common treat of the use of repeated regularization procedures in order to regulate ex post what they were unable to regulate ex ante (Peixoto et al. 2012). Supported by research during the 1990s and early 2000s, this model could be considered dynamic. 199According to Baldwin-Edwards (2012), Northern Mediterranean countries have accumulated more experience and techniques for the management of migration. Furthermore, an issue that merits further investigation is the effect of the 2008 economic recession on migration trends (Martin 2009).
