This Special Issue (SI) explores the enduring relationship between race and migration, arguing that race remains a central—yet often underexamined—analytical category in migration studies. Although overtly racialized migration policies have declined since the mid-20th century, racial dynamics continue to shape mobility regimes, access to rights, and perceptions of migrants across global contexts. This SI highlights how contemporary migration is structured by a “global mobility divide,” where racial hierarchies influence who can move, how they move, and how they are received. With interdisciplinary contributions, the SI examines several migration experiences, including forced displacement and labor migration across diverse geographical contexts; and methodologies, from participatory research to media analysis, uncovering how racialization operates at interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels. Collectively, the contributions challenge fragmented approaches within migration studies and call for a more integrated framework that centers race, advancing scholarship by demonstrating how racial politics shape migrants’ lived experiences.

In recent years, the number of migrant deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic coasts has risen steadily. The arrival of small boats with migrants on board on the Spanish and Italian coasts has received a lot of media attention, and European Governments are investing more than in the past to stop unauthorized arrivals on their shores. Certain narratives from governments and officials of international organizations attribute these deaths to “smugglers” and the dangerous routes they take. However, this article provides evidence that the higher mortality rates are the result of changes in border controls following bilateral agreements between the European Union and Morocco after 2018. By analyzing data from official statistics, microdata, and data provided by NGOs up to 2024, it shows how the increase in the mortality rate of migrants in the Western Mediterranean is the result of changes in the management of sea rescues, the militarization and externalization of the border, and the way in which migrants attempting to cross the sea are taking more dangerous routes than in the past.

Who is deemed deathworthy, and how is this status produced? What discourses, affects, and histories enable the industrialization of premature Black death while rendering it largely invisible? Rooted in a decolonial queer feminist epistemological framework, this article examines how discursive and affective strategies in U.K. print media and immigration policies during the European “refugee crisis” (2013–2016) justified routine death-making at sea. Conceptualizing Blackness as a relational political and epistemological tool, the article reveals how media and state actors—drawing on racialized mythologies of young single Black men and appeals to imperial nostalgia—constructed these men as objects of panic, disgust, resentment, and fear. Applying collocation analysis and visualization techniques, the article theorizes “affective-racialized networks”—discursive formations that circulate and accumulate affective meanings across space and time, shaping public perception and legitimizing policies of deterrence, externalization, and active abandonment. These networks sustained the routinized deaths of Black migrant men at sea, reinforcing Europe’s imperial border regimes. By foregrounding the mutual constitution of race, affect, and temporality, this study expands migration scholarship’s engagement with race, demonstrating how racial logics operate beyond geopolitical and temporal boundaries through transnational circuits of meaning, power, and governance. The article argues that centering Blackness and affect is essential to understanding how racialization functions and how Black deaths are rendered normative within global bordering practices.

This study examines biased media portrayals of refugees, focusing on the contrast between Ukrainian and MENA refugees. It proposes a “politics-media cycle of reinforcement” where political agendas influence media narratives, and vice versa. This cycle amplifies racial bias, impacting how refugees are perceived. The research employs a comparative content analysis of Western media and political rhetoric. Findings reveal a stark difference: Ukrainians are seen as deserving victims, while MENA refugees face negative stereotypes. Interviews with media professionals and analysts support these conclusions. The study exposes racialized “othering” that marginalizes specific refugee groups. It confirms a more sympathetic portrayal of Ukrainians, likely due to political and racial factors. This research highlights the need for a more balanced and empathetic approach to all refugees.

Are people more inclined to help strangers when they’ve experienced similar hardships? People who have experienced displacement could be tremendous allies to the newly displaced, but they are relatively understudied. This study explores how people who have experienced wartime displacement respond to refugees fleeing new violence. I prime Serbs who experienced wartime displacement with either (1) their experience of displacement or (2) their ethnic identity. I then measure their altruism toward Syrian refugees traveling the Balkan route. Compared to participants who were reminded of their ethnic identity, participants who were reminded of their displacement were no more generous toward displaced Syrians. In fact, participants who experienced displacement, as well as wartime violence, were more generous toward the refugees when they were reminded of their ethnic identity. These results suggest that shared hardship alone may not necessarily enhance refugee inclusion. The results further suggest that interventions may benefit from calling out the differences between hosts and refugees—in this case, on the dimension of ethnicity. These findings caution humanitarians to construct their interventions with care.

This study investigates the impact of historical and ideological continuities in Turkey’s migration policies on contemporary attitudes toward Syrian refugees. It examines how ethnic homogenization and discrimination, rooted in the foundation of the Turkish Republic, continue to shape public perceptions and policy frameworks. The research is based on qualitative methodologies, including 41 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted between July and December 2021 with Syrian refugees and Turkish community members residing in Altındağ, Mamak, and Ümitköy districts of Ankara. Participants were purposively selected to provide diverse perspectives on social integration and identity formation. The findings reveal a shift from initial acceptance under religious solidarity to increasing exclusion, driven by nationalist rhetoric. Despite official claims of promoting multiculturalism, Turkish policies and societal attitudes often reinforce prejudices, fostering a socio-political environment where racial and ethnic biases persist.

The ways in which welfare state programs structure people’s lives have been a central focus of research on policy feedback. While there is rich literature in the USA about racialized experiences with the state, we know little about how immigration history intersects with racial background in moderating experiences with the state nor have there been many studies in other liberal welfare regimes outside the USA. Our study aims to fill this gap by exploring how citizenship status over generations intersects with racial background in structuring interactions with welfare state programs in Canada. Analyzing data from Democracy Checkup surveys spanning from 2020 to 2023, we focus on how needs, capabilities, and experiences may structure government contact and the extent to which these factors explain differences across citizenship and racial categories. We document a recurring difference in the amount of contact among racialized respondents—non-citizens and third-generation citizens—that cannot be explained by either need or capability. Interestingly, our findings suggest that while the greater contact among racialized non-citizens is evaluated more positively in terms of procedure, third-generation racialized citizens generally evaluate their higher contact more poorly. These findings point to the importance of understanding racialized experiences with the state through the lens of citizenship.

This paper examines the complex political-economic processes that shape contemporary forced displacement from Guatemala to the U.S. The study was driven by the following research question: How does capitalism and the historical context of forced migration in Guatemala relate to the creation and development of migrant-led organizations in the U.S. and the various types of leadership and political participation? Examining the political economy of Guatemalan migration to the Greater Los Angeles region and the activities of migrants and community organizations, I argue that neoliberal capitalism not only provokes the displacement of Guatemalan migrants as a social class of people from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, but it has also contributed to the emergence of distinct political Guatemalan diaspora organizations in the U.S. at the community, national, and transnational level. Furthermore, due to historical social relations in Guatemala, organizations have emerged in Southern California along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. Moreover, activism emerges within destination countries because exploitation and exclusion take on distinct forms beyond the specific economic and political forces that generate displacement in migrants’ origin countries. As such, these organizations have made significant contributions by safeguarding the human rights of Guatemalan migrants in the U.S. and have emerged based on the differences and inequalities faced by indigenous communities compared to non-indigenous (mestizo/ladino) groups as they and their organizations endure processes of “exclusionary inclusion” in the U.S.

Racism permeates societies globally, including within Germany’s educational system. Specifically, people from the SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa) region experience anti-Muslim racism. This study explores how racially minoritized parents subjected to the asylum system navigate racist discourse within societal and institutional structures, focusing on their strategies of resistance and accommodation. Guided by a social constructionist epistemology, interviews were conducted with 11 parents migrating from regions and countries with a majority of Muslim residents. Utilizing reflexive thematic analysis, four themes were constructed: Language as an exclusion and excuse mechanism, Meaning-making of being racialized, Good Migrant, and Going the extra mile. The analysis highlights the dialectical tension parents experience as they navigate racist discourse within social and institutional structures. Parents resisted by challenging school practices, defending “cultural norms”, and advocating for their children’s educational opportunities. Simultaneously, they strategically accommodated by stressing gratefulness, assimilation, and praising German systems. This research illuminates how racially minoritized parents navigate oppressive systems and racist discourse, emphasizing the interplay between resistance and accommodation. It underscores the importance of recognizing informal resistance within societal constraints, offering a nuanced perspective through the resistance and accommodation framework. Additionally, it informs policy and social responses to migration by elucidating racialization and oppression dynamics.

This paper, co-authored by two adult academics and three young researchers aged 11 to 16, investigates the authors’ collective experiences in a participatory research project about growing up multilingual with Chinese heritage and migration background, where race and racism emerged as key themes. Drawing on critical dialectical pluralism and the concept of “reflexivities of discomfort,” we explore how co-constructing research with children and young people can enrich the research process. Despite the intricate and often opaque nature of discussing racism, especially anti-Asian racism, with children from migration backgrounds, this study advocates for participatory research as a critical tool for uncovering these complexities, paving the way for more open and meaningful conversations. In collaboration with young researchers, we reevaluate the role of research and researchers in discussing racism, (de)construct children as experts of their racialized experiences, and imagine the future of researching racism with children through what we call “collective reflexivity”—a practice of open discussions that highlight young people’s positionalities, experiences, and insights. Through practices that protect individuality and value personal experience, our work makes a methodological contribution by offering “collective reflexivity” and co-authorship as a pathway that ensures children are not viewed as “representatives,” but valued for their positionalities, encouraging more engaged and critical conversations on race and racism with them.

This article examines the everyday experiences of the Egyptian minority in Milan, Italy, focusing on challenges arising from the lack of formal recognition for their religious affiliations—Islam and Coptic Orthodoxy—which are central to their ethnic identity. Drawing on Talal Asad’s notion of recognition, Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres’ coloniality framework, it critiques how European policies conflate secularization with security, marginalizing non-European communities. Italy’s legal system highlights this tension: while de jure constitutional protections guarantee religious freedom, de facto bureaucratic and political barriers exclude minority faiths from equal standing. Egyptian migrants must navigate this imbalance, where theoretical rights rarely translate into practical access, forcing them to continually adapt their religious and ethnic identities in a marginalizing society. The article shows how religious invisibility sustains marginalization, contrasting Europe’s multicultural ideals with exclusionary practices. It reveals how colonial legacies shape migrant experiences and restrict rights.

This cross-national study examines how ethnic resources shape access to financial capital among first-generation Punjabi-Pakistani immigrant entrepreneurs in the precious metals industries of Manchester (UK) and Dubai (UAE). Based on 50 semi-structured interviews (August 2022–July 2023) and analyzed through Template Analysis, the findings show that while co-ethnic social capital is widely mobilized across both contexts, significant intra-ethnic variations emerge between Khandani (lineage-based) and non-Khandani entrepreneurs. Khandani entrepreneurs rapidly accumulate start-up capital by leveraging their reputational credibility and transnational embeddedness, securing preferential access to large-scale financing through Rotating Credit Associations (kameti). By contrast, non-Khandani entrepreneurs face delayed entry, relying on modest loans from kin and co-ethnic migrants, with limited capacity to scale. The study highlights how lineage-based prestige intersects with broader kinship networks (Biraderi), producing differentiated trajectories of immigrant entrepreneurship. By foregrounding intra-ethnic stratification, this research extends debates on ethnic resources and mixed embeddedness, demonstrating that not all co-ethnic capital is equally accessible, and that transnational contexts reproduce rather than neutralize status hierarchies.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend toward the formalization of circular migration. This formalization is perceived as a mutually beneficial win-win arrangement: host countries secure labor, source countries establish a reliable system of remittances that contribute to development, and migrants are positioned as individuals attaining access to secure and better employment. Labor contractors have been made important in this context, as they play a role in forming linkages, managing a steady supply of workers, managing bureaucratic procedures, training workers, and becoming a buffer between labor and capital. While the dominant debate has been on blaming the labor contractors for the exploitation of migrant workers and creating precarious forms of work, this paper uses racialization theory to locate their role against the backdrop of enforcing return, fragmented labor management, upward capital concentration, and downward labor outsourcing. Using the case of Thai migrant workers who work seasonally in the berry farms of Sweden, it highlights a fundamental contradiction in the current regime of transient servitude: migrant worker is desired, yet the individuals embodying it are not. In so doing, an array of contractual and extra-contractual mechanisms is employed, which reinforces deeply racialized ideologies, stereotypes, and institutions. The use of labor contractors is one such mechanism. Utilizing racialization theory, the thesis identifies enforced return of migrants and the pursuit of an ideal worker as crucial components in the formalization of transnational circular migration. Deportation, rather than being an ultimate objective of enforcing return, serves to deepen the inherent vulnerability experienced by workers who grapple with the understanding that their deportability is an intrinsic aspect of their existence. This reinforcement further amplifies deeply entrenched racialized forms of insecurity, where laborers form a permanent labor force of the temporarily employed. To ensure that migrant workers are at the forefront of recruitment for specific types of low-paying and precarious work, employers strategically employ racialized narratives, portraying them as invaluable assets by emphasizing their perceived strong “work ethic” and reliability. This depiction elevates them to the status of “good workers,” surpassing the local labor alternative. It underscores that capital’s demand extends beyond a mere requirement for labor power; it necessitates labor power that can be exploited.

The European Union stands at a crossroads. Its founding promises of peace, convergence, and multilateralism are increasingly strained by debt, migration, sovereignty, and militarization. The introduction to this Special Issue begins with the question: who is the EU for? To stretch this question analytically we move beyond conventional debates on globalization and sovereignty foregrounding the colonial and racialized conditions that shape European integration. Colonialism, we argue, remains operative, structuring the production of race, racism, and anti-Blackness within and beyond Europe. Drawing on radical traditions of thought on colonialism and anti-Blackness, critical political economy, postcolonial theory, and institutional analysis, the introduction reframes the analytic of who the EU is for by showing how the Union’s commitment to universal values coexists with practices that reproduce hierarchies of life and death. We argue that the EU operates as a form of global power that mobilizes race and racism as constitutive mechanisms of legitimacy, authority, mobility, and value. Contemporary militarization, through defense integration, rearmament, and strategic autonomy, intensifies these dynamics by recoding racial hierarchies as security imperatives. Competing responses, from right-wing sovereign internationalism to left critiques of neoliberalism, rarely confront Europe’s colonial and racialized constitutive role in sustaining global inequalities. These unresolved contradictions and failures open up urgent questions about how Europe’s political and economic order continues to reproduce global hierarchies of power. It is precisely this tension that the special issue takes up, responding by engaging the intertwined colonial and racist projects in the EU. The contributors collectively frame crisis as a key site through which colonial violence is reconfigured, displaced, and normalized in contemporary EU governance. In so doing, they reposition the EU not as a neutral arbiter of order, but as an active geopolitical site where racialized and imperial forms of power are continuously produced, contested, and reimagined.

In this article, I argue racialized EU externalization interacts with and reinforces the anti-Black racism within Tunisia’s border regime. I analyze EU–Tunisia relations through the lens of racial capitalism, arguing that Tunisia’s cooperation with external actors, including on migration matters, is connected to maintaining models of capitalist accumulation and punishing dissent. The aim of this contemporary cooperation is not to prevent the mobility of migrants entirely, but to limit, control, and exploit it. Both the EU and Tunisia suspend different racialized migrant groups in a situation of irregularity and precarity to create and maintain exploitable labor, while avoiding the political unpopularity of “regularizing” migrants. We are seeing the violent and deadly consequences of intensified racialized border regimes both within Europe, in the context of a contemporary crisis of neoliberalism, and in post-transition Tunisia, faced with its own overlapping social, political, and economic crises. Thus, by exploring the entanglements of racialized bordering practices that operate across the Mediterranean, I go beyond reductive state-by-state analysis, revealing EU externalization as part of a broader project of racialized bordering essential to global racial capitalism.

In this article, we address the role that European bordering and migration policy play in the broader construction of the European project by defining who does and does not belong in Europe. This question, and the policy answers to it, are shaped by a variety of different political and economic interests and factors, such as racialized narratives of border protection, labor market needs, and the securitization of borders. We tackle this question by examining the role that categories and figures of migration—such as the “genuine” and “bogus” asylum seeker, the refugee, and the economic migrant—play in European border policy and how they are changing in the present conjuncture. We argue that a redefinition is taking place of who counts as a “good” and “bad” migrant, which responds to the changing political economy of contemporary European capitalism and is reflected in the growing prominence of the dichotomy of “legal” and “illegal” migration. This, we argue, reconfigures the existing categories of economic migrant and asylum seeker and speaks to the emergence of new forms of racialized disposability at Europe’s borders. We do this by developing a critical political economy perspective that builds on our previous work and draws on the literature on racial capitalism and the concept of disposability.

Existing studies of EU foreign policy often contrast its normative and geopolitical ambitions while overlooking its colonial entanglements. Although recent scholarship has interrogated the Union’s neo-imperial tendencies, the structuring role of race in external relations remains underexplored. This article introduces the concept of the “Mediterranean colour line” to capture how the EU’s relationship with its Southern Neighbourhood has consistently cast the region as politically marginal, economically extractable, and epistemically devalued. These hierarchies are not incidental: they are central to the reproduction of capitalism within racialized global orders. The European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) provides a key site to examine these dynamics. Through a critical discourse analysis of the 2021 New Agenda for the Mediterranean, the article shows how colonial logics are retooled in the language of reform, resilience, and partnership. By focusing on digital transition and green growth—domains rarely read through race—the analysis demonstrates how racial capitalist governance persists precisely where its effects are most obscured.

Literature on European migration management often locates the emergence of restrictive and hostile migration control in the late twentieth century. While critical scholarship has documented the harms produced by these developments, migration governance is frequently approached through linear narratives of policy development that treat current measures as historically novel and detached from colonial pasts, leaving race, racialization, and coloniality marginal. This article challenges this racial and colonial aphasia by advancing rehistoricization as both a methodological and analytical intervention. It argues that the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum is best understood not as the outcome of a progressive policy trajectory, but of a longer European history of colonial governance that has structured mobility through racialized exclusion, emergency rule, and delegated control. Focusing on the Crisis Regulation and the International Partnerships Pillar, the article rehistoricizes emergency governance and border externalization, tracing their genealogies to colonial practices of exception, containment, and indirect rule. By embedding the Pact within the longue durée of European colonial power, the article shows how measures presented as policy innovation reproduce imperial modalities of governing unwanted mobility, offering a historically grounded framework for understanding EU migration governance as a site of racialized continuity rather than technocratic novelty.

On February 24, 2022, Russia escalated its aggression against Ukraine. In addition to a staggering civilian death toll (i.e., ≥ 14,383), the Russo-Ukrainian War had generated approximately 5,752,670 refugees as of October 31, 2025. While scholarship on the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees has centered on the three largest EU destinations—Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic—Spain has emerged as the fourth major host. Given its unique history as a colonizer and that Spanish news outlets demonstrably dehumanized refugees from the Syrian Civil War, we ask: How have Spanish news outlets textually and photographically portrayed the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees? Conceptually, we entwine Water Metaphors, Off-Whiteness, Orientalism and Sentence-Image. Through a Descriptive Content Analysis and a Visual Framing Approach, we examine the news coverage from El Mundo (n = 97) and El País (n = 119) between February 24 and March 15, 2022. We argue that, although both news outlets employed Water Metaphors that conventionally connote dangerousness (e.g., Avalanche), such meanings were textually and photographically disrupted through non-Orientalist, Off-White re-racializing lenses. Consequently, Spanish news outlets portrayed the Russo-Ukrainian War’s refugees as “Oriental European Others” whose movement was compelled yet “civilized” and whose whitened visibility rendered them absorbable by the “Western European Us”, thereby co-constructing distinctive “Contingent Safe Waters”.

The paper set out to answer how logics of racialisation and racism operate in the EU’s documents on anti-racism particularly in relation to Roma community, arguing that these policies paradoxically reproduce the racialisation they aim to dismantle. While the European Union frames racism—especially antigypsyism—as a matter of societal attitudes, the analysis demonstrates that EU institutions themselves continue to contribute to structural racism through policy language and implementation. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and Critical Romani Studies the paper employs critical discourse analysis to reveal patterns of deflection, denial, and distancing within key EU documents. It shows how Roma are constructed as a racialised “other,” often aligned with other marginalised groups in ways that reinforce exclusion. By foregrounding institutional responsibility, the paper challenges dominant narratives that externalise racism and highlights how EU frameworks sustain racism, ultimately undermining their stated commitment to anti-racism and equality.