The social question is back. Yet today's social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. It finds its expression in movements of people, seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is of a cross-border nature not only because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states,
staying in touch with family and friends, receiving or sending financial remittances in transnational social spaces. And, as in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting the social
question as a public concern. In earlier periods class differences dominated conflicts. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold differences, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter diversities that have sharpened in situations of immigration and emigration over the past decades.