ABSTRACT
The European migrant crisis has thus resulted in an unprecedented salience of immigration across every corner of the Old Continent, opening new opportunities for political entrepreneurs to mobilize over the issue. The eurozone crisis highlighted the institutional shortcomings of the project built upon monetary union and the contagion effect ‘also revealed that EMU rules were unable to ensure sustainable budgetary positions and prevent national fiscal policies from imparting adverse spillovers to other countries and to the union as a whole’. The number of asylum applicants is not dispersed equally across Europe, with some countries presenting considerably higher numbers than the EU average. In Italy and Spain, the impact of the economic crisis was severe, and it was accompanied by the implementation of sharp austerity programmes. The chapter also presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book.
