Diasporic Marginalities and the Second-Best Destination

Exploring Migration from Turkey to Italy

This open access book examines Turkish and Kurdish settlement in Italy, an under-studied “second-best destination” within Europe’s stratified mobility regime. Centering a context long overshadowed by Northern European hubs, it shows how border governance, legal status, segmented labour markets, and welfare arrangements combine to shape migrant lives at the margins of the continent’s more resourced receiving societies. Drawing on decade-long ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 interviews with families and second-generation young adults, the book traces trajectories of arrival, through asylum, irregular transit, family reunification, and work networks, and the gradual consolidation of lives in which onward-migration remains a live horizon.

Through the concepts of “learning to stay” and “diasporic marginalities,” the analysis moves between intimate family routines and wider transnational so