This chapter introduces the puzzles, questions, and concepts permeating the book, and provides an organizational map of its causal logic. It delineates the major challenges to the liberal state’s capacity to regulate immigration in an insecure international and domestic security environment. First, it identifies the perceived threats posed by human mobility and immigration. Second, the chapter describes the migration trilemma confronting policymakers whenever market imperatives and liberal immigrant policies are perceived to be in tension with their responsibility to safeguard public safety. Third, it reconceptualizes the regulatory politics of immigration within a context of various issue paradigms and threat perceptions. It offers a neo-institutional analytical framework linking diverse policy-making logics, actors, and norms within which these empirical developments can be explained over time. It proposes these dynamics illuminate the relationship between threat context and immigration regulation, and delimits the normative parameters of policy whenever security concerns preoccupy the public’s thinking.

Since 2015 and in response to the so-called migration crisis, the European Union (EU) has adopted several budget amendments, and created new funds in the field of migration. The chapter analyses these changes in the EU funding landscape from a border drawing perspective. After showing that funds have been extensively used by EU institution as a response to the so-called migration crisis, the chapter attempts to answer the following research question: does the evolution of the EU funding landscape in response to the migration crisis illustrate a mainly inclusive or mainly exclusive border drawing dynamic? To do so, the chapter starts by describing the various areas and objectives of the EU migration policy that funding decisions could be intended to support, classifying them as areas with a mainly inclusive purpose and areas with a mainly exclusive purpose. Then, it gives an overview of the changes in the EU’s funding patterns since the outbreak of the migration crisis in 2015. Finally, it examines these changes from a border drawing perspective, reaching the conclusion that EU funding decisions taken after the migration crisis have responded to a mainly exclusive dynamic.

The United Nations (UN) charter did not include voluntary contributions because some feared it would undermine multilateralism. Since the 1990s, UN agencies have increasingly been financed through earmarked contributions from a diverse set of donors. A growing body of literature examines the relationship between funding and global governance. This chapter examines the role that money has played in the origin and evolution of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) as a case study of earmarking in the wider UN system. The chapter uses a new dataset of earmarked contributions to IOM to examine thematic and temporal patterns in the contributions of main donors. Contributions have largely focused on issues relating to migration management that reflect the specific interests of donors, lending weight to the argument that the earmarking of financing has allowed bilateral interests to dominate multilateral responses. On the other hand, earmarked funding has also allowed the international community to extend protection to displaced populations not covered by the refugee convention as well as to push forward migration, often a contentious issue, at the international level.