Becoming receiving countries : Southern Europe and international migrations

After having long been places of origin for large migration flows, the southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain), beginning from the 1970s, started to attract large flows of immigrants from abroad. In the last two decades they have become one of the most important areas of destination for international migration in the world. This article sets out the essential features of this transformation and the reasons for it, with reference to the labor market and changes in South-European societies; the ways in which it occurs, focusing on the repeated measures to regularize unauthorized immigrants; the problems that are emerging, relating to the difficulties of promoting migrant workers, who are usually relegated to the hardest and least desirable jobs; the condition of females; the formation of transnational families; political conflicts about the acceptance of immigration, that has become in recent years a prominent issue in internal politics and electoral campaigns