In the current political moment, a combination of liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism has become the dominant state model for much of the world. The democracy/neoliberal consensus emerged from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decline of state socialism in the latter half of the 20th century. These changes enabled the thickening of geopolitical relationships and globalisation processes, which were supported by new legal and technical arrangements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico, or the expansion of the European Union's (EU’s) sphere and scale of influence. Until the advent of the global financial crisis, this consensus appeared to hold. As the crisis developed, though, the problems with neoliberal capitalism became increasingly obvious: people lost homes when mortgages were foreclosed; they lost work when unemployment levels soared; and they lost income when wage rates were cut. States were reluctant to recognise the role of neoliberal policies in this crisis, even though Peck (2012: 630) insists that periodic returns to crisis are caused by the failure of ‘successive waves of neoliberal reform to generate sustainable economic, social or environmental development’. Instead, most states responded by introducing austerity measures, which included a contraction of public sector spending. This had a disproportionate effect on those people who were already struggling to get by.

For many commentators, states had played a central role in the intensity of the global financial crisis because of their lack of regulation of markets and capital in their support of neoliberal capitalism. Yet, rather than directly address this issue, politicians and political parties sought other explanations for the economic difficulties that their citizens were experiencing. In particular, the attention shifted to the role of migrants in many Western liberal democracies. In states such as the UK and the US, among others, politicians and pundits increasingly began to link economic woes to the presence of migrants, despite little in the way of evidence supporting this link. Migration and migrants became a target for those who sought to divert attention from broader economic, political and social dysfunction, and for those who sought to understand the difficulties that they were experiencing in their everyday lives.