Introduction

Chapter 5 in this volume details a Southern European ‘model of immigration’ across Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece with five empirical similarities and five structural or causal patterns. This line of theoretical thinking continues a tradition attempting to identify, variously, an immigration policy regime (Baldwin-Edwards 1991, 1997), immigrants’ location within a ‘southern’ capitalist economy (King & Konzhodic 1995; King & Black 1997; Baldwin-Edwards & Arango 1999) or within southern societies (Iosofides & King 1999) or more generally a ‘southern model’ of immigration (Baldwin-Edwards 1999; King 2000). It is perhaps ironic that as one of the participants in these earlier analytic developments, I should now advocate scepticism about the utility or even validity of such a model. To this end, I adopt a critique of the specifications of the framework advocated by João Peixoto et al. in the previous chapter. I also suggest some missing variables that, in my view, should be central to such an explanatory framework. The inclusion of these variables not only reveals major differences across the Southern European region, but also casts doubt on some of the empirical assumptions underlying the common framework. I conclude with some thoughts on the relevance of the important hypotheses advanced by Joaquín Arango in chapter 2.

The explanatory framework

This section examines each of the five structural commonalities that make up the framework proposed for the common Southern European pattern.

Evolution of migration flows into the four countries

As countries of emigration in the post-war period, it is indeed true that all four had a ‘migration turnaround’, as originally identified in the model proposed by Russell King, Anthony Fielding and Richard Black (1997). What is not so clear is a similarity of migration flows. The ISOPLAN estimates of immigrant presence in the late 1980s had already put Greece as the leading per capita recipient at 2.8 per cent of total population, followed by Italy at 2.6 per cent and Spain at 2.0 per cent (Werth & Korner 1991). The year 1991 saw massive irregular inflows from Albania into Greece and, to a much lesser extent, Italy. It was not until the turn of the century that comparable flows arrived in the other countries; yet, Greece was the last of the four actually to pass an immigration law (1991) and to initiate regularisation of irregular immigrants (1997).