Paths of Legal Integration and Migrant Social Networks: the cases of Filipina and Romanian female domestic workers in Italy

Immigrants’ integration has been often conceptualised as a linear process of entrance in a societal mainstream, while abandoning co-ethnic networks and transnational allegiances. Even though some streams of research have pointed out the emerging of different forms of integration, combining both traits of assimilation (especially in the economic sphere) and of ethnicisation, there is still little evidence on the kind of relevant networks underpinning migrants integration trajectories. In this chapter I intend to look at migrants’ social networks from the perspective of the integration process, with a particular attention to the dimension of access to legal status. I analyse 158 life histories of immigrant women employed in the domestic and care sector in Italy who belong to two different national groups, i.e. Filipinas and Romanians to reconstruct “from below” their paths of access to permanent legal status and shed light on the types of networks which are mobilised in this process. My main hypothesis is that these latter are shaped by the interplay of immigrant women migratory projects with two different, yet strictly intertwinned, opportunity structures: the general institutional opportunity structure and the group specific opportunity structure.