Abstract
This chapter places the phenomenon of migration in the context of globalisation and argues that the increasing cultural diversity, particularly in urban European locations, heralds a world-wide process through which space and time get redistributed. Migrants share many characteristics with ‘indigenous’ dispossessed people who are being subjected to new and wellestablished forms of displacement and exclusion. The chapter attempts to show that for social work to respond to the challenge of finding appropriate methods for the work with dispossessed migrant populations it needs to place less emphasis on the special requirements of such groups and give greater attention to the mechanisms of exclusion as such, not least because social workers themselves can easily become unwitting instruments of exclusion. The close and uncritical relationship of social services with the nation state is evidence for this and care needs to be taken that this dependence on a nationalist agenda is not repeated at European level