Abstract

When it comes to migrant integration and related policies, Southern European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) are generally portrayed as falling behind other EU traditional immigration countries. In this article, we challenge these assumptions by analysing whether Southern European countries have different and less developed migrant integration policies compared to the other EU15 countries, and how they reacted to the 2008 Great Recession and the so-called 2014-2016 European refugee crisis. To this end, we employ the MIPEX (Migrant Integration Policy Index) dataset on migrant integration policies, including data for EU15 over the period 2010-2019. Our findings show that Southern European countries do not share a common model of integration. Furthermore, their integration policies are not systematically less developed or more fragile than those of the older immigration countries. Only Greece performs significantly worse than the rest of EU15, while Portugal appears to be one of the European countries with the most advanced integration policies. These are long-standing trends, as the situation of the analysed countries has not changed dramatically over the last 10 years (2010-2019), despite the 2008 Great Recession and the European refugee crisis. Overall, our findings reveal that, despite the lack of distinctive policy models around integration, integration policies of the Southern European states are not penalised by the absence of a public philosophy concerning migrant integration.