Joaquin Arango - Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe

IMMIGRANTS AND THE INFORMAL ECONOMY IN SOUTHERN EUROPE

Books of Related Interest

The Politics of Immigration in Western Europe
Martin Baldwin-Edwards and Martin A Schain (eds.)

Southern European Welfare States
Between Crisis and Reform
Martin Rhodes (ed.)

Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics
Martin Rhodes and Martin Bull (eds.)

The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership
Political and Economic Perspectives
Richard Gillespie (ed.)

The State in Western Europe
Retreat or Redefinition
Wolfgang C. Mller and Vincent Wright

Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe

Editors
Martin Baldwin-Edwards
Joaquin Arango

First published 1999 by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS
Published 2014 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Copyright 1999 Taylor & Francis

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Immigrants and the Informal economy in Southern Europe
1. Europe, Southern Emigration and immigration 2. Europe, Southern Economic conditions
I. Baldwin-Edwards, Martin II. Arango, Joaquin
304.84

ISBN 978-0-714-64925-2 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Immigrants and the informal economy in Southern Europe / editors, Martin Baldwin-Edwards, Joaquin Arango.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7146-4925-2 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-7146-4484-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Europe, SouthernEmigration and immigrationEconomic aspects.
2. Europe, SouthernEmigration and immigrationGovernment policy.
3. ImmigrantsEurope, Southern. 4. Alien laborEurope, Southern.
5. Illegal aliensEurope, Southern. 6. Informal sector
(Economics)Europe, Southern. I. Baldwin-Edwards, Martin, 1956
II. Arango, Joaquin.

This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on Immigrants and the Informal Economy in Southern Europe of South European Society & Politics, 3/3 (Winter 1998) ISSN 1360-8746, published by Frank Cass.

MARTIN BALDWIN-EDWARDS

It is now more than a decade since Gildas Simon pointed out, in the first major study of immigration into southern Europe, that there were an estimated 2 million aliens in the region predominantly clandestine, with a wide range of nationalities and explicitly connected with the growing underground economy (Simon 1987:287). He also noted the paucity of national policies to deal with these matters. A year later, a major study was commissioned by the EC and undertaken by ISOPLAN. Their study considered the figure for 1988 to be more like 3 million immigrants across southern Europe, and in its wealth of detail it provided much-needed data necessary for even the beginnings of analysis. In their concluding section (CEC 1991:113129) they construct several scenarios, making a forecast (based on extrapolation from the late 1980s) that by 2000 there would be 2 million legal and an equal number of clandestine extra-EU immigrants resident in southern Europe.

Much has happened since these early writings. The collapse of the East European regimes has led to migratory flows most notably from Albania into Greece and Italy. The flow of Kurds from Turkey and Iraq continues in fits and starts, whilst regional conflicts in Africa and elsewhere have provided other unwilling migrants. We have not even mentioned Yugoslavia . Yet, even with these unexpected sources of emigration, it appears that the total number of non-EU immigrants across southern Europe is under 3 million and unlikely to increase significantly in the near future.

It is our aim in this volume to make an interim assessment of the evolution of the immigration phenomenon, along with a comparative analysis of how southern European governments have so far responded, and the results of such responses.

A casual observer might expect that the immigration phenomenon in southern Europe would be broadly analogous to that previously observed in the North. One could hardly be more wrong! In fact, the case can be made that adoption of restrictive immigration practices via the EU and Schengen (see Baldwin-Edwards 1997) has been a major cause of wrong policy in southern Europe at odds with domestic economic needs and socio-political tendencies. Worse, as we shall see, that such imported policies may have been counter-productive by substituting illegal immigration for legally controlled flows. Of course, none of the countries under study had any immigration infrastructure at the start of mass immigration flows; thus we are faced with a counterfactual problem of what each country might have done in the absence of European integration.

Turning to the specificities of immigration patterns into southern Europe, we can identify several characteristics, as shown in Table 1.

Thus we can see that there is little obvious comparison between the new immigration and the traditional Gastarbeiter recruitment or post-colonial flows.1 Whereas the migrants to northern Europe were either recruited or condoned by the state, and entered regular employment with substantial legal protection, this is far from the case in southern Europe. Despite the lack of official recruitment, immigrants into southern European countries seem to occupy jobs which would not otherwise be filled by natives (Malheiros, Veiga, Reyneri (this volume); Iosifides 1997). This is despite high or even very high unemployment rates in all but Portugal. The range of nationalities is extraordinarily wide, especially in Italy (see Zincone, this volume), as is the level of education. Vastly different levels of education are observed, with some national groups such as Filipina with a rate of around 50 per cent university-educated (Iosifides 1997:34) whilst others, such as Albanians, are predominantly unskilled or semi-skilled. Gender specialization too is evident, although relatively understudied (Chell 1997; Baldwin-Edwards and Safilios-Rothschild 1999).