Processes of Immigration in Rural Europe: The Status Quo, Implications and Development Strategies

European peripheral rural areas have for a long time been seen as areas of out-migration and demographic decline. Accordingly, discourses around the “rural flight” (Beetz 2016) have predominated in scientific and political debates. More recently, however, immigration processes, e.g. lifestyle and leisure oriented movements as well as induced labour or forced migration (asylum seekers) are increasingly affecting areas in Europe that are considered peripheral or rural. In such relatively novel destinations for immigration (cf. new immigrant destinations, McAreavey 2018), an increasing number of migrants arrive and cause various demographic and socio-economic transformation processes (Jentsch and Simard 2009; Bock, Osti, and Ventura 2016). Nowadays, however, migration processes cannot be understood as unidirectional and more or less permanent movements from place A to place B. Instead, more temporary movements currently characterise late modern societies.