ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book includes contributions which neatly analyse the issues concerning the discourse on migration, today characterized by prohibitionist policies and racial criminalization of migrants. It shows elementary mechanism of social control, emerging as being useful, if not indispensable, to the solidity and/or realignment of political cohesion. The book highlights the criminalization of Roma communities: that is, the first victims of neoliberal Europe. The persecution of gypsies and the criminalization of migrants is currently written into a neoliberal/neoconservative political framework based on the asymmetry of power and wealth between actors that are all-powerful, and weak ones who have no rights and/or are reduced to the state of 'non-persons'. The prohibitionist logic of 'Fortress Europe' have caused fewer deaths among migrants who have sought to reach European borders than among those who did not leave and starved or died in wars.
