Introduction

This book offers the first in-depth sociological account of Turkish and Kurdish migration to Italy, a destination that has remained peripheral both within Europe’s migration system and within scholarship long oriented toward Northern European hubs such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Drawing on more than a decade of qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, comprising more than 100 interview participants across multiple research phases, the introduction sets out the book’s central reframing, arguing that migration destinations are not chosen so much as structurally produced, becoming accessible precisely as more desired options foreclose. It develops three interrelated concepts: second-best destinations, the structurally differentiated sites where settlement takes shape under constraint; learning to stay, the pragmatic practices and adjustments through which migrants sustain everyday life amid legal and economic precarity; and diasporic marginalities, the relational condition of being positioned at once at the margins of national society and at the periphery of European diasporic fields oriented elsewhere. Bringing together the aspiration-ability framework with relational approaches to diaspora, the introduction situates Italy as a node in a wider transnational field, where settlement consolidates even as aspirations toward Northern Europe persist. It also reflects on the author’s layered positionality as sworn translator, cultural mediator, and researcher, and the ethical demands of conducting intimate, longitudinal ethnography. The introduction closes by specifying the book’s analytical scope and previewing the chapters that follow.