Introduction

Abstract

As it so often happens in academic publishing and in life, the aim of this book is manyfold. As it may be guessed by its subtitle, it addresses the variety of institutional and non-institutional responses to the contemporary movement of people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, to, within and out of Europe. As it was mainly conceived, written, and edited in what today seems a distant past – that of the prepandemic era (meaning the sanitary, social, political, and economic effects of the propagation of the Coronavirus SARSCOV2 among the world human population) -, it doesn’t cover the changes, some durable, some not, that the viral disease has had in both Europe-related migratory fluxes and in the multiplicity of reactions to it. It is still too soon to gauge its importance and pregnancy: what parts will be but a conjectural blip and what will stay with us for the long-term, which pre-pandemic currents and conditions will be accentuated, and which will wane, what shapes the new normalcy will take and what past features will resurface, and when. In the last pages of this book, we shall return to these issues in the manner of an afterword.