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Migration constitutes a hugely important political issue and policy challenge for the European Union. As such, it is the subject of many and various political, social, economic and cultural conflicts in the EU. The challenge, however, is not reducible to an internal affair, confined to the geographical and political space of the EU and its member states. Rather, it also has important external and global ramifications. EU migration governance jockeys for global influence and pursues migration as leverage in both bilateral and multilateral agreements with countries, groups of countries and organizations around the world. The Mediterranean region, Turkey and the African Union are cases in point, as is the EU’s policy efforts within the area of migration and development towards the Global South. This course seeks to understand these internal and external migration dynamics and logics, both from a contemporary and historical perspective. To do so, we set out from a complex conceptualization of “EU migration policy”, one that bridges the commonly invoked analytical and empirical separation between the external and internal dimensions of EU migration policy. As such, we scrutinize both the external dimension of EU migration policy – as in labor migration from non-EU countries, asylum policy, and policy to prevent “illegal” or irregular immigration – on the one side, and the internal dimension – as in labor migration, or “free movement”, within the EU area and the politics of migrant integration – on the other. By conceiving of these dimensions as analytically inseparable, this, what we may term, integrated approach allows us to get a more complete picture of the causes and consequences of EU migration policy. Equally important, it also enables us to come to grips with the dynamics of the political and economic driving forces that are at work in the formation and execution of oftentimes contradictory migration policies.