Conclusion: Rethinking Migration, Settlement, and Diaspora from Europe’s Margins

This concluding chapter draws together the book’s argument about how migrants from Turkey come to settle in Italy when their aspirations so often lie elsewhere. Returning to the three core concepts developed across the book, it shows how second-best destinations are structurally produced as restrictions intensify in core European states, how learning to stay names the continuous and collective competence through which provisional presence becomes durable without becoming secure, and how diasporic marginalities capture the relational condition of communities positioned at the edges of both national society and wider European diasporic fields. The chapter consolidates the book’s theoretical contributions, engaging diaspora studies, the aspiration-ability framework, and gendered analyses of family reunification and social reproduction, while arguing that peripheral location is constitutive of what diasporic life looks and feels like. It then turns to empirical openings that warrant further study, including humanitarian visa pathways improvised in response to the 2023 earthquake in Turkey, the growing presence of second-generation and student populations, and the prospect of comparative work across Southern Europe. The chapter closes by reflecting on what second-best means for migrants themselves, for whom Italy becomes familiar without becoming ideal, and by arguing that as Northern European states continue to tighten borders, second-best destinations are likely to proliferate, making their dynamics increasingly central to understanding European and global migration.