4. Changing Logics of Migration: Immigrant Threat to National Sovereignty?

This chapter discusses the changing logics of migration and the varying and unequal politicization of different waves of immigration in postwar Western Europe. It argues that it is national institutional contexts, historical narratives, and self-conceptions that condition approaches to immigration but also that the ability to regulate immigration is perhaps the most important symbolic marker of sovereignty. The tightening of immigration policies as much as the new toughness, increasing criminalization and externalization of asylum is shown to function as a powerful—perhaps even indispensable—tool for the reassertion of national sovereignty and the reproduction of territorial notions of the state vis-à-vis globalization. The chapter, therefore, presents an altered, if not new, perspective on migration politics in Western Europe but also theoretically reflects on important conceptual issues that emerge from the political dislocations the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015/2016 effected.