Reluctant Circularities: The interplay between integration, return and circular migration within the Albanian migration to Italy

Abstract

The findings of the METOIKOS research project do not corroborate a politicised celebration of the circularisation of migration as a win-win situation for both countries of origin and destination. The majority of migrants interviewed in this research were reluctantly and ambivalently oscillating between Albania and Italy. For most, circulating is a way to achieve the migratory flexibility they need to negotiate their livelihoods between societies and labour markets characterised by the different opportunities, predicaments and degrees of socioeconomic and political instability. Most Albanian migrants do not choose to circulate, but accept to do so in order to secure the sustainability of projects of settlement abroad and/or return home which are still not completed or which became unsustainable in the context of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. For younger people and women, particularly if they are studying, oscillating between Albania and Italy is both a way to reconcile the contradictory moral worlds brought together by their diasporic trajectories and a way to gain the socio-cultural capital to bypass widespread dynamics of corruption and preferential access to the labour market in Albania.