Immigration to the European Alps: a new topic on the European agenda

Migration is a global phenomenon; reasons for migrating are manifold, as are migration's impacts on the receiving regions. The European Alps are located in the middle of a broad migration route from Africa and the Middle East (Altai-Consulting and IMPACT-Initiatives 2017). There are several reasons to look at migration to the Alps.

For a long time, socioeconomic and demographic studies of mountain regions both in Europe and elsewhere emphasized outmigration from high elevations to large lowland cities and degradation of peripheral mountain areas (Bätzing et al 1996). Since the 2000s, there has been an increasing emphasis on the opposite trend (Steinicke et al 2012; Bartaletti 2013; Corrado et al 2014; New inhabitants 2014; Löffler et al 2016); these studies focused mainly on immigration of wealthy people. Recently migration of poor people has attracted attention (Dematteis 2010; Dematteis 2011; Membretti 2015; Membretti and Viazzo 2017; Membretti et al 2017; Perlik et al 2019). Therefore, we can distinguish between 3 groups of migrants relevant for mountain areas: migrants by choice, migrants by necessity, and migrants by force.

The significance of immigration to mountain areas

Most studies on labor and forced migration have focused on lowland urban areas. However, there is a growing body of work focusing on mountain areas in Europe (eg Corrado 2012, 2015; Cretton et al 2012; Dematteis 2011; Membretti 2015; di Gioa and Dematteis 2017) and especially Asia. The latter, however, deals mainly with mountain-to-lowland migration and the impacts of this outmigration on land use and ecosystems (eg Allan 1987; Olimova and Olimov 2007; Sherpa 2007; Thieme 2008; Benz 2016; Thieme and Ghimire 2016) as well as on the livelihoods of those who remain in increasingly empty villages (eg Speck 2017).

Although large cities and metropolitan areas are nearly permanently hubs of immigration, this is the case in mountain or rural areas only occasionally, especially in periods of crisis such as after World War II. Migration usually involves an encounter between social groups that are highly mobile and a local, sedentary population whose power strongly depends on regional embeddedness. This can trigger conflicts, but it also offers the host region new knowledge and opportunities. This is particularly true for mountain areas with a relatively low population, where mutual dependencies and social control are many times greater than in cities. Residents in sparsely populated regions cannot avoid each other; reliability and trust are very important. At the same time, immigrants with external knowledge may compete with local residents for jobs, social services, space, and influence, which challenges the existing hierarchy.

Pierre Bourdieu (2002) describes such a situation when he comments on the transformation of the rural French Béarn region in the 1960s: observing young men and women in the rural dance hall, he noticed that nonlocal male dance partners were considered the most attractive and prestigious by unmarried women. These men's reputed general agility held the promise of a higher status than rooted men's local knowledge, or, in other words: The general ousted the local. Mobile people who come from outside are often better skilled. In a dynamic world, they are more successful and may outcompete the people who were the masters of the territory for many centuries. For the newcomers, however, ignorance of existing structures makes their unstable living situation even more difficult. People who come to the mountains driven by poverty or as refugees are even more disadvantaged, because they lack certain opportunities they would have in urban agglomerations (compatriots, social services) and face a local population that has no recent experience with displaced people.

Mountain areas are structurally disadvantaged in their economic development due to their smaller populations and a lack of urban (ie high-performance) economies. Compared to densely populated lowland areas, they lack the multitude of social interactions that are important in regional development (Storper 1995). Such potential interactions represent economies of scale or, spatially speaking, economies of agglomeration. In the age of global communication, face-to-face meetings have become even more important because they are limited to high-end services and decision making, which further advantages the metropolitan regions.

The decline of the nationally defined welfare states—the post-Fordist turn—since the 1980s (Boyer 1990, 2018) has intensified the competition between regions and increased the weight of agglomeration economies especially in terms of inhabitants, jobs, and shaping power. Mountain and rural regions are forced to increase their own responsibility for developing new and well-performing value chains (Perlik 2019), which may also increase the number of inhabitants. In the logic of economic competition, from the point of view of mountain people, however, the immigrants who arrive are often the “wrong” ones because they have limited resources to help mountain areas to improve their marginalized position. An example of a regional disparity between urban and rural regions is the health status of the population, even in rich countries (Feller et al 2018).

However, peripheral settlements should be maintained to avoid large spatial cleavages and to meet the goals of sustainable development, as expressed in regional development policies (eg for Switzerland ARE 2018 and Conseil fédéral suisse 2012). Consequently, peripheral regions should be stabilized by strengthening relations between local actors based on shared values and mutual trust, thus enabling the region to build strong institutions and to acquire new external knowledge. One may cite as proponents, among many others, the pioneers of innovation-oriented regional research, the GREMI (Groupe de recherche européen sur les milieux innovateurs) network. A critique of this position mentions the latent underestimation of the dangers of such a close embeddedness: trust may become a lock-in factor, so that existing social practices are no longer questioned and there is no incentive for innovation, as Grabher (1993) described for the industrial Ruhr area in Germany based on Granovetter's (1973) pioneering work.

Contrary to the approach of agglomeration economies, the social anthropologist Francesco Remotti (2011: 281−301) argues that innovation and cultural creativity (although obviously benefiting from the encounters between different cultures and societies, and sometimes even by the resulting frictions) would “need space to express themselves.” Space provided by an impoverished culture or a weak social structure would therefore be more likely to favor development than space in a “thick” culture or a strong social structure (Remotti 2011). This hypothesis is based on demographic processes in the western Alps, where in several cases heavy depopulation has been described as allowing newly arrived persons to take advantage of a new “emptiness.” They were able to start entrepreneurial activities in both the economic and cultural fields (Viazzo and Zanini 2014), an observation also made by Cognard (2006) in the French Alps. Thus, demographic weakness and depopulation might paradoxically provide an advantage by opening wider “creative spaces.” A similar argument about the new qualities of “Alpine fallows” in Switzerland was made by Diener et al (2006)—and was highly contested by the concerned population. This hypothesis strengthens the widespread, if often superficial, idea that precisely because they are sparsely populated, the Alps lend themselves particularly well to hosting new inhabitants, and as a corollary, that the new inhabitants almost automatically bring the areas they move to back to life by stimulating sociocultural and economic innovations (Membretti and Viazzo 2017: 96).

Both positions—that agglomeration economies favor regional embeddedness and that emptiness opens up new options—have their blind spots. The approach of embeddedness conceals the strong integration of regional value chains into the world market, thus showing a lack of external knowledge. The approach of emptiness as facilitator follows the concept of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1942) with a subsequent vacuum. It neglects the significance of established institutions, governance regimes, and regional knowledge (which has been called “institutional thickness”; see Amin and Thrift 1994) for regional development. It also neglects the difficulty of rebuilding communities once such institutions are destroyed. The renaissance of the Ruhr area depended on the persistence of old institutions (Hassink 2007), those structures that Grabher (1993) had criticized. Furthermore this position also disregards the interest of the remaining population in continuing their work and social practices. Moreover, abandoned settlement areas are—as “Alpine fallows”—always objects of conflicting interests, maybe for new investment, cultural activity, or ecologic conservation (Diener et al 2006).

Work and shelter in the mountains

Societies have always faced the dilemma whether to accept or reject newcomers (Viazzo 1989; Siddle 1997; Furter et al 2009; Head-König 2011; Holenstein et al 2018; Ojala-Fulwood 2018). Sometimes they have actively tried to attract certain groups because of their work ethic or special skills. Historic examples include the French Huguenots and the Danube Swabians, who settled in response to incentives offered by regional aristocrats, sometimes on low mountains like the Polish Beskides. In the Alps, the Walser, who had specialized pastoral skills, were invited by the ruling power to settle the highest elevations in the hope that they would guarantee control of these high-elevation valleys. During the Spanish Civil War, people fled in (or through) the Pyrenees (Fittko 1991; Boya-Busquet and Cerarols-Ramirez 2015). At the end of World War II, many European countries had to integrate East–West migration flows as a consequence of expulsion and displacement, especially the exodus of Sudeten German people to Bavaria (Weidinger and Kordel 2019). The upheavals of 1956 in Hungary and of 1968 in Czechoslovakia again provoked large migratory movements in Europe. In the 1960s, rural regions attempted to attract foreign companies to establish manufacturing industries to absorb the agricultural workforce.

The Alpine population has long experience with in- and outmigration. In former centuries the Alps underwent many waves of temporary or permanent outmigration. It has been argued for Switzerland that the poor performance of small land parcels in mountain areas forced these farmers to outmigrate, while the large lowland plots favored sedentarism, thus making it the rule and migration the exception, although for large parts of the country and society it was rather the opposite (Holenstein et al 2018).

Thus, experience of immigration exists in the Alps but is repeatedly forgotten by the dominant defining power of established sedentary practices. Indeed, experience with earlier waves of outmigration or immigration wanes in people's minds over time. This is the context within which migration of a perceived new kind and scale is raising concerns.

Recent refugees from Africa and the Middle East often aim for northern Europe. In recent months, the restrictive refugee policies of European states have resulted in people getting stuck in Italy. The ridges of the Alps have again become a fortified border (Perlik et al 2019). As mentioned above we can assume that only a few refugees consciously choose a mountain region as their preferred destination. So people arriving in Italy move to the low mountains of the Apennines because of proximity to their landing point after being stranded at the national border; they may move to villages in the foothills of the Alps by chance or may be moved there according to the redistribution principles of national or regional legislation. Today about 30% of refugees in Italy are hosted in mountain municipalities (Figure 1).

FIGURE 1 

Ratio of migrants to local residents by community in Italy, 2017. About 30% of migrants by necessity and by force in Italy are hosted in mountain areas, mostly in the Apennine Mountains. (Map by Alberto Di Gioa, courtesy of Dematteis et al 2018)

Even if the degree of municipal autonomy is high in certain Alpine areas and decisions are usually taken locally, when it comes to refugees, national law defines who is accepted and who is expelled. What our review of the state of the art allows us to conclude is that within the 7 Alpine countries there are at least 4 categories of forced migrants: those who have received a status as recognized refugee, those who are awaiting a decision on their application, those whose application has been rejected but who cannot be expelled because of conflict in their home country, and those whose application has been rejected and who are waiting to be expelled. The question is, what social relations can be established between the local residents and the newcomers?

Between welcoming and rejection

Local residents usually do not decide whether to accept or reject newcomers in an unreflected way—except in crisis situations. Their decisions are based on individual or societal strategies to master their lives. Acceptance and rejection reflect individual experiences and regional history, prevailing norms and values (religion, social movements, historical periods of poverty), and the region's recent position in the urban and regional hierarchy as well as its anticipated future position. For example, analyses after the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom (Great Britain's 2016 decision to abandon its membership in the European Union) showed a seemingly paradoxical pattern. It seemed paradoxical because “remain” or “leave” votes were not linked with voters' current social positions. Instead, their votes were clearly linked with an anticipated economic growth or decline in their region after the referendum. In London, the “remain” majority included the poor and lower-middle-class citizens, while in the deindustrialized Midlands, even the upper-middle class voted “leave” (O'Reilly et al 2016; Rodriguez-Posé 2018). In the case of the typical taxi driver in London, “remain” votes reflected an expectation to participate in the continuing wealth of London's financial sector within the European Union. In the case of the local elites of the Midlands, “leave” votes were based on the fear that accompanies the decline of the industrial milieu.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the importance of such regional industrial milieus was comprehensively described. Especially for Italy, Switzerland, and France, the economic resistance to deindustrialization of industrial districts (also in the mountains) was explained by their historical trajectory and the social capital of their regional production systems based on trust and shared values (Garofoli 1993; Maillat et al 1993; OECD 1997; Courlet 2008). Nevertheless they underwent deindustrialization since the 1990s. Industrial milieus have been weakened, combined with job losses and often a decline in population. The concentration of population, jobs, and decision-making functions in metropolitan regions results in dwindling public support for rural and mountain regions. With the changed paradigms in regional policies in many countries these regions have to operate in international markets with their own, innovative value chains (SECO 2017), or they risk being regarded as low-potential space (Müller-Jentsch 2017). They need loyal and active residents, which is difficult (but not impossible) when many residents are there only part time. Immigration (with a permanent perspective) would therefore be in the interest of mountain regions, but it also involves a risk for the locals, who may lose existing positions of power in the local hierarchy. Inclusion of foreigners requires trusting them, and trust is not always easy to give. Moreover, local entrepreneurial actors want immigration of highly qualified people; poor refugees do not fit this profile.

In this logic of intensified regional competition, it is a strategic disadvantage to have fewer human resources due to a sparse population. Fewer face-to-face interactions and a less diversified labor market also reduce the dissemination of regional knowledge. And in rural areas, it takes much more effort to integrate new people and to address their problems, especially in the case of refugees (eg physical and mental illnesses, experiences of trauma) than is the case in urban milieus, where welfare and therapeutic institutions are better developed. The approach of economies of agglomeration (Marshall 1920) can be carried over to mountain areas. For mountain areas lacking agglomeration effects, supply of services is critical. With a rising demand and number of cases, services become more productive and better. Therefore agglomeration effects play a role in every location decision in entrepreneurial or community affairs (eg regarding closure of an industrial site, a regional hospital or primary schools). Today even more important is the density and the potential of social interactions (Storper 1995). Therefore agglomeration effects play a role for individual decision making (Ferrario and Price 2014). For migrants, rural and mountain areas offer less potential, as the number of interactions is not as large as in a city. And for small communities, one might think that they would be happy to attract more people. However, the lacking agglomeration effects work differently: because of the size of these communities, individuals are much more mutually dependent and cannot avoid each other. For them several questions arise: will the newcomers be reliable neighbors ready for developing personal relations or friendship, will considerable personal efforts in these relations with many uncertainties be necessary, and might a personal relation actually be useless? Furthermore, it is probable that one's own practices and convictions have to be abandoned during this integration process. The risk of making a wrong decision is considerable, including the risk of abused confidence: images promoted by the media and political parties present newcomers as potential offenders (young men who do not yet know the social practices of the hosting country), disguised terrorists, or people who are as poor as they seem. These images correspond to a true substance where social and economic difficulties are increasingly being shifted from society to the individual or local level. Migrants who do not fit the logic of individual and societal competitiveness are perceived as disturbing and therefore to be excluded.

On the other hand, broad solidarity has been shown by civil society and by old and new NGOs, even in small villages. To mention 2 historic examples: In 1973 after the Pinochet putsch, the Swiss government tried, for political reasons, to limit the number of refugees from Chile to 250. Swiss volunteers, coordinated by the chaplain Cornelius Koch from the small Verzasca valley in the southern Alps, helped to organize the entry of about 2000 people who were hosted privately, including in the mountains. The coordinated action became known as the Freiplatz-Aktion (Campaign for free places–for refugees). In 1991, 7 Kurdish families were protected against expulsion in the pilgrimage site Flüeli Ranft in central Switzerland, in an effort coordinated by a teacher in the village. We can interpret these early examples of a “welcoming culture” as a sign that the collective European experience of postwar poverty and East–West migration flows had not been completely buried under isolationist self-interest.

Another motivation today may be found in a new understanding of social responsibility; knowledge about global social, political, and spatial injustice (Soja 2010); and an even better understanding of how global disparities are linked. Consciously or unconsciously, there might be a third reason shared by younger people who see a chance that welcome initiatives may help to make a community more open-minded and that encounters with foreign cultures will bring more social life to their community—beyond the traditional clubs and associations.

The debate on the degree of desirability of immigration (and on what profile immigrants should have) is part of an old debate in the European mountain discourse: Can mountain-specific regional production systems (agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism) be continued on the basis of existing local knowledge and social capital alone? If so, regional embeddedness improves the quality of production while newcomers (especially those “by choice” for residence purposes) weaken the local production system. This position considers both excessive emigration and immigration as problematic, since it may lead either to the collapse of existing institutions or to a displacement of existing actors and their social practices. The opposing position is that immigration is beneficial because it attracts new knowledge from outside. Such a strategy of encouraging immigration was and is usually applied by large cities—in fact this is the raison d'être of a large city. Rural and mountain regions usually did not adopt this strategy because it was not their economic function (as they were mainly producing for protected domestic markets), they did not have the resources (neither international networking nor attractiveness), and they did not have an interest (the newcomers would have reduced the influence of local actors disproportionally). Now, under the conditions of global market integration and increased regional competition also among less populated regions, the lack of external knowledge has clearly become a handicap.

What mountain populations could win: hosting migrants as a social innovation

If migrants do not want to move into mountain areas for intrinsic reasons, and mountain stakeholders are skeptical of migrants, then promoting such migration appears to be doubly questionable: mountain areas do not have the necessary resources, and migrants will not find appropriate networks that seem to suit their needs. But things are never as they seem.

With the shift from the economic model of growth and redistribution (Fordism) to the model of increased growth and increasing returns (post-Fordism) in the 1980s, the differences in functional hierarchy between regions have deepened, and future options of cities and regions have become more strongly divergent. It has been broadly suggested that lateral valleys at higher altitudes should be abandoned as permanent settlement areas, since it is very expensive to sustain their infrastructure (Müller-Jentsch 2017); a similar position argues in favor of a combination of dense urban development and parks (Diener et al 2006). Both arguments have in common that they see a misallocation of resources (no matter whether financial state-funded subsidies, cultural capital, or ecosystem services). The change of economic model from Fordism to post-Fordism means that mountain regions must legitimate the maintenance of settlements at high altitudes toward the lowlands. The population in mountain areas is well aware, meanwhile, that they have to find new business models and accept new jobs such as landscaping and grounds keeping. One result is that they often try to copy best practices from other contexts, creating new sports, building museums, and organizing arts and other events that are not always in line with a financially or ecologically sustainable perspective.

A culture that welcomes refugees might be an alternative or a supplementary option (Gretter et al 2017). Opening the peripheries to new people would be a social innovation that would provide the needed legitimation that mountain people are part of the whole society and do not follow cherry-picking strategies. If mountain communities succeeded in embedding and tying new arrivals, this would help them overcome the concentration risk of monostructured tourism or part-time residency. Even for these sectors, it might be more fruitful in the long run to invest in training new residents for tourism positions instead of depending on unskilled seasonal staff, who are often young people with no professional motivation and no ambition to stay in the job long term (the type of labor migrants described by Korpela and Ojala-Fulwood 2018).

Permanent integration of immigrants would mitigate the trend in certain parts of the Alps toward part-time residency. In addition, hosting refugees could expand the availability of public services in these locations, which could benefit both long-term residents and new arrivals. It would make it possible to staff even smaller villages with professional staff such as social workers, teachers, and health workers. In the context of national refugee law, mountain communities would be able to demand that these jobs be paid at least partly by state subsidies, as many countries (like Germany) increase social services only if there is a specific financial program for pilot projects or for compensating for new, disproportionately costly tasks.

As financial issues have increasingly affected whether migrants are welcomed or rejected, it is important that social services are equally available to old and new residents. This is the only way to avoid distrust of the government and the refugees. The community of Pettinengo (Box 1) has adopted this principle. At the same time we see that communities in a good financial situation are particularly reluctant to accept refugees for fear of endangering the attractiveness of their community, for example, for tourists (Pehm 2007), while poor communities that spend a great deal of money on refugees are rapidly exposed to increased observation and criticism. These difficulties can only be resolved through financial compensation and a carefully conducted political debate at the national level.

With an open reception of migrants, and the willingness to invest public and personal resources in their integration for a longer stay, communities would show that they have realized that they can no longer manage their sustainability in isolation. This would perhaps mitigate the social and political cleavages that have emerged in recent years between mountain and metropolitan areas (see, for example, the debate about the use of space for second homes; Schuler and Dessemontet 2013). For the refugees, it may at first appear to be a disadvantage to be placed in a peripheral area, but quicker integration in decentralized reception centers with motivated staff and neighbors could perhaps be a better help for them. Of course, skills and sociodemographic status play a role in these considerations. It seems understandable that politicians and decision-makers in rural areas primarily prefer migrants with families and skilled migrants from countries with a better education system. However, regions and enterprises that are able to deal with more difficult situations are said to be more innovative and dynamic in other fields and better off in the long run (Porter 1990). This is a strong argument to host poor people despite the fact that financial benefits are not immediate. Although they are still hypotheses, these arguments are worth researching and testing to see whether they hold true in practice.

The recent migrant flows represent a new situation for Europe's mountain regions. They cannot permanently ignore the need for welcoming immigrants and must develop practices to cope with the challenge. They would probably be best off if they acted proactively rather than defensively. At this point, the topic of migration is overlapping with current research on social innovation (Fourny 2018). “Social innovation” describes new forms of organization and closer cooperation between regional actors in favor of better governance for the benefit of individuals and society. It is still contested whether social innovation in mountain areas should comprise all measures of community cooperation that help regional competitiveness or whether it should focus only on the inclusion of disadvantaged groups (such as refugees). Authors who interpret social innovation in a more transformative sense argue that it should do the latter (eg Andrew and Klein 2010; Moulaert et al 2013; Perlik 2018).

In spatial terms social innovation can therefore be seen as a way to empower marginalized rural areas, enabling them to contribute to the national task of guaranteeing societal wellbeing. This is on the agenda of the European Union's larger research projects (TEPSIE 2014; SIMRA 2016; TRANSIT 2017) that promote civil society and grassroots actions. When we consider communities' responses to displaced people, social innovation may provide a way to see the links between local and global problems, encourage empathy, and thereby receive respect from people outside the mountains. Applying a culture of social innovation at the local level means establishing a welcoming climate that is not just momentarily enthusiastic but follows an intrinsic motivation, for example, a goal such as investing in the future generation. It would show that local communities have realized that they cannot plan for and invest in the future in isolation, as this would result in demographic and cultural stagnation. In many cases, mountain populations are aware of the need to acquire specific skills to make their institutional infrastructure progress; they see people coming from outside as a source of experience, as the examples below illustrate. Under these conditions, mountain communities might regain the solidarity and funding they need from the lowland majority.

Such openness is expressed in active citizenship, which can include welcoming initiatives (Machold et al 2013; Giannetto 2015) and social enterprises (Borzaga and Galera 2014, 2016; Hulgård 2014). They can constitute a link between humanitarian aid and the search for other social models that are based on solidarity, as shown by the examples in the boxes. Beyond its general goal of peace, Pettinengo (Box 1) emphasizes the model of a nonexclusive welfare state. In Cadore (Box 2), civil society involvement at the local level has helped promote integration through education and the creation of highly qualified jobs. Valle Camonica (Box 3) has combined humanitarian objectives and progressive regional development even within a narrow legal framework of national refugee policy.

An agenda for research and policy