This volume results from a project that was formulated by a group of IMISCOE researchers who deal with, as the very title of this book states, international migration and its regulation. The reports contained herein arose from some general observations and subsequent questions about the nature of migration processes in relation to government interventions in those processes. First, we ground these reports with a number of common understandings. Migration has gone from being a veritable non-issue in European politics to being one of high political preoccupation. In Western Europe, this development began as shortly ago as the 1970s, while it was even more recent in Southern and Central Europe, into one of high politics. States are consequently investing more and more resources into limiting unsolicited immigration such as illegal migrants, asylum seekers, and controlling migration overall. The extent to which states succeed in doing so appears to have limits (though we do not otherwise know what the effect of non-intervention would be). Interventions often seem to produce unexpected and perverse outcomes. To this end, governments increasingly resort to measures that stem from traditional control-oriented policy fields such as justice, home affairs and defence. In view of the European situation as we see it, we thus must ask: why is this happening? And can we expect further investment in these particular measures to be effective in reaching their aim?

While it could not be the ambition of this project to find comprehensive answers to important questions such as these, our foremost purpose was to assess the European situation and then take the necessary first steps towards a possible follow-up stage in which we could more closely come upon some answers. Stocktaking and discussions took place at a number of meetings held between 2004 and 2007, each of which was generously hosted by a local IMISCOE partner institute in Vienna, Coimbra, Osnabrück, Istanbul and Rome.

We wish to thank all those who participated in these meetings, sharing their papers and ventilating ideas for a refreshing exchange of information. Above all, we would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their dedicated work on the country chapters and for their patience in seeing this project long in the works come to fruition.