This article makes a case for bringing religion back into the analysis and by suggesting that
migration should be reconceptualised, with a significant part of that reconceptualization
consistent with restoring agency to a migrant, the value added of this article is threefold. At the
diagnostic level, the argument developed offers an insight into the reasons underlying the
inability of the EU to address the challenge of migration effectively. At the explanatory level,
this article makes a case that national leaders in the European Council are unable to establish a
new integrative narrative of European integration. Migration serves as a handy opportunity to
offer European audiences a vision of the Union, a largely inaccurate image of reality that feeds
into the imaginations and expectations of large segments of the electorate. At the conceptual
level, the argument developed makes a case for the reconceptualization of migration as
transcending those binary oppositions characteristic of borders and the controls that delineate
borders: the present-day EU has been transformed into a migration hub on a continental scale,
thereby aggravating the density problem of too many diverse peoples in too limited a connected
space. In order to understand migration, this article posits that it is necessary to restore the
migrant question, including, most significantly, the agency of the migrant to the analysis.