Introduction

Abstract Old immigration hubs and new ones worldwide have experienced rapid and increasing movements of people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. These movements have emerged along with a diversification of migration channels and migrant legal statuses. Migration-driven trends are profoundly transforming societies’ social, demographic, cultural, economic, and political structures in concurrent but differing ways. Across a range of disciplines and bodies of literature, these complex processes and patterns of social transformation are summarized in the concept of superdiversity. This introduction explores the notion of complex social transformation and its links to researching superdiversity. It also explains the organization of the handbook and briefly introduces the chapters.