Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the basic frame of the migration and refugee dissensus in Europe and describes the background to the migration and refugee debates. It addresses the processes that transformed the asylum issue into the ‘European refugee crisis’. The book presents various instruments of European Union integration policy, with the aim of locating the contradictions at conceptual and implementation levels and identifies spaces for progressive and emancipatory politics. It considers the operation of the migration dissensus and politics of hate in the development of anti-immigrant populism and ascent of the ‘new’ far-Right in Europe. The book explores anti-immigration politics in Europe and beyond, by connecting these to class, social processes and insecurity. It outlines the proliferation of states of exception and emergency in Europe as regimes suspending rights.