Introduction

Abstract

In country after country, the topic of immigration is provoking passionate debates over national identity, state sovereignty, and territorial integrity. We see how the unprecedented movement of people within and across national boundaries is severely testing the traditional connection between citizenship and territoriality. While capital, goods, and services now cross national borders easily, and information and ideas flow with far fewer impediments than ever before, human beings still cannot cross borders without scrutiny and, increasingly, resistance. Globalization and technology, on the one hand, enable travel and migration in extraordinary ways and offer new means and tools for mobilizing diasporas and social networks across national boundaries. Immigrants and their children, on the other hand, are being singled out as the source of new and deeper fears in declining welfare states, riven by economic crises and rising inequality. As the massacre in Norway in the summer of 2011, growing right-wing populism in Germany and Greece, and French and Italian fears of waves of refugees pouring in from the “Arab Spring” show, the elusive quest for absolute security, especially in times of great uncertainty and upheaval, invariably targets the “outsider,” one who because of birth or circumstance cannot fully belong or lay claim to a state’s resources.