This open access book examines Turkish and Kurdish settlement in Italy, an under-studied "second-best destination" within Europe's stratified mobility regime. Centering a context long overshadowed by Northern European hubs, it shows how border governance, legal status, segmented labour markets, and welfare arrangements combine to shape migrant lives at the margins of the continent's more resourced receiving societies. Drawing on decade-long ethnographic fieldwork and more than 100 interviews with families and second-generation young adults, the book traces trajectories of arrival, through asylum, irregular transit, family reunification, and work networks, and the gradual consolidation of lives in which onward-migration remains a live horizon.

Through the concepts of "learning to stay" and "diasporic marginalities," the analysis moves between intimate family routines and wider transnational social fields. It examines gendered labor, religious and associational infrastructures, and the digital comparisons through which migrants position Italy against more established diasporic centers in Europe. Destinations, the book argues, are structurally produced positions, not chosen endpoints, a reframing that opens new ground for understanding how precarity, aspiration, and belonging are negotiated across mobile lives.

The book speaks to scholars and students in the sociology of migration, diaspora studies, and transnational studies, as well as practitioners working on integration policy, legal precarity, and everyday bordering.

Gül Ince-Beqo is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social and Political Science at the University of Milan, Italy, and an adjunct professor at Eastern Piedmont University, Italy. She has published extensively on migration policy and the role of diaspora networks in shaping migration outcomes. She is currently working on a Horizon-funded project, “FAIR,” on return and alternative-to-return policies.