Onward migration from Italy and Greece post-2008. Considerations about future mobility and lived experiences of secondary migrations of Albanian construction workers

Onward migration to and within Europe has recently gained the attention of scholars who have criticized the assumption that international migration consists in a move from the home to a destination country. Most scholars have focused on migrants’ motivations for onward migration, and how onward migrants mobilise their capital to settle in a new destination country. However, little is known about how migrants’ occupation interplays with new mobility. Drawing on empirical material of 61 in-depth interviews with Albanian construction workers in Italy and Greece, I suggest that migrants’ occupation may shape motivations underlying onward mobility, and mobilization of their civic, social and human capital to enable a second move. Focusing on migrant construction workers’ considerations about onward mobility and experiences of onward migration, I show that unemployment is not always the driver of this new move, and that natives’ intra-EU mobility may be interconnected with that of migrants due to the specificities of the construction sector. In addition, I argue that naturalisation of migrants facilitates but it is not prerequisite for the new move, at least at the beginning.