Drawing on the works of Ahmed, Balibar and Appadurai, this article explores the complex dynamics of stranger making in Europe, with particular focus on the status of immigrants who are marked by systemic racialization. The article offers brief analyses of a series of ‘critical incidents’ to illustrate contemporary enactments of stranger making politics in order to examine how theorizations of race and racialization may be shifting in European contexts. It argues that specific notions of nationalism and national identity are being re-configured in the current neoliberal climate of European Union austerity and civil unrest to reify a national ‘us’ against those who must be made ‘stranger’.