Social work research on migration is still at a preliminary stage of development in comparison with other social sciences disciplines. Across Europe, the topic doesn't receive priority in the agenda, the dialogue is often left to individual sensitivities, and social policies, social work organisations and social education programs don't yet express the attention that this important topic reality deserves. However, migration and social work are closely interrelated.

Against this, the importance to discuss about the role, the peculiarities, the challenges and opportunities of social work with migrant people, also through research lenses, is increasingly necessary.

In recent years, social work research has experienced a remarkable development due to two main factors: on one side, the growing consciousness, by an increasing number of social workers, of the pivotal role of social work as a human rights-based profession and discipline with all it entails. On the other side, the positionality of social work research sharing a common ground of methodology and literature with the rest of social science disciplines while holding a unique knowledge base derived from its hybrid condition of being both a profession and an academic discipline. Therefore, as in a mutual and dialogical relationship, professional interventions with migrant people in need can be nurtured not only by academic research but also by the practitioners’ critical reflection on their work at the very grassroot level, which, in turn, feeds academic research and theoretical perspectives.

Many social workers are not familiarised with migration as a phenomenon, and lack competences that would enable them to make better interventions when taking care of migrant people in the generic sense. Some of them do not only critically examine migration as a phenomenon but also engage with migrant people at the various stages of the migration or asylum-seeking process. Social workers, as helping professionals, welcome migrant people in need, intervening in all the stages in which being migrant or asylum seeker means to live in poverty or to be homeless, having to deal with huge difficulties without a supportive network, being a child or a young person without a family, being ill and with no access to the necessary care, being voiceless and subjected to violence, being discriminated and marginalised in society.