MIGRATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION IN TIMES OF SYNDEMIC

The debates over migration and, to a lesser extent, migration policy have intensified on the European agenda in recent decades. At both national and European Union levels, many voices have striven to identify the challenges affecting migration today. Today, the debate is constructed from the extremes: some, using increasingly belligerent messages, seek to eliminate movement to the EU, while others call for its untrammelled liberalisation. This is the context in which the COVID-19 pandemic entered the debate. This paper aims to contextualise this new landscape: in human mobility and migration terms a syndemic seems to be forming of control and restrictions to which the COVID-19 pandemic has been added.