The author describes how steps taken by the institutions to tackle migratory flows are connoted by essentially repressive mindsets that seem to be in breach of fundamental human rights, following an emergency logic that, on the one hand, is in practice incapable of controlling a phenomenon that is becoming structural in the process of globalisation and, on the other, obstructs adequate theoretical elaboration of the problems and thus knowledge of the varied phenomenology of migratory flows, making it difficult to prepare suitable tools for their legal and social regulation.