Rethinking European Migration Through Second-Best Destinations

This chapter develops the theoretical framework of the book by introducing three interrelated concepts: (1) second-best destinations, (2) diasporic marginalities, and (3) learning to stay, to analyze how migration from Turkey unfolds at the edges of Europe’s opportunity structures. It argues that destinations are structurally produced positions within a European migration system that unevenly distribute access, protection, and mobility. Southern Europe, and Italy in particular, emerges as a second-best destination through the combined effects of European migration governance, informal labor market structures, and the foreclosure of preferred alternatives in Northern Europe. The chapter proceeds in three movements. It first traces the consolidation of European migration governance, from the Common European Asylum System and the Dublin Regulation through the EU-Turkey Statement of 2016, showing how supranational frameworks systematically positioned Southern European states as enforcement peripheries while limiting their capacity for long-term protection and incorporation. It then examines Italy’s specific trajectory, from late incorporation into European migration circuits through recurrent regularizations and institutionalized informality, to its current position as a space where migrants can remain but rarely thrive. Finally, it maps the aspirational geographies against which Italy is evaluated, reconstructing the historical formation of Turkish and Kurdish diasporic centers in Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden as the symbolic benchmarks that render Italy second-best. Taken together, these three analytical movements establish the structural conditions under which migrants learn to stay, navigating fragmented legal pathways, informal labor markets, and diasporic hierarchies, while remaining oriented toward elsewhere they cannot reach. The chapter concludes by proposing that understanding second-best destinations is essential for grasping the uneven geography of contemporary European migration more broadly.