Staying in tents implies much more than just poor housing conditions that violate human rights. It serves as a means of deterring new refugee flows, as if they manage to avoid drowning in the waters of the Aegean Sea, they will live in conditions identical to those of death.

It also prepares the ground for their future placement at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the host society with less favorable career prospects than those of economic migrants in the previous three decades.

A fundamental argument of the book is that this particular way of managing the refugee crisis is not an isolated incident. On the contrary, it is another aspect of neoliberal social policy for the extremely poor. The EU's migration policy is one of the many faces of 'modern' social policy that, by eroding its academic substance, makes inhumane camp practices the new means of social management. The right to life is being negotiated.