Populism and the politics of migration

By Oliver Schmidtke, Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria

Migration figures prominently in the political mobilization of right-wing populism. Anti-immigrant sentiments are at the very core of this actor’s rallying cry and popular campaigns. Yet, how are we to understand the link between populism and migration? Are immigration and growing cultural diversity to blame for populist forces that advocate an exclusionary form of nationalism? For instance, has the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015-16 triggered or even caused the series of extraordinary electoral achievements of the populist right? In my view, this link between populism and migration is more indirect and multidimensional in nature. Here are some ways to conceptualize this link:

Migrants as easy scapegoats: It is one of the essential tools in (electoral) politics to assign blame and, by assigning responsibility for social ills, design politics based on the exclusion of the undesirable group. In politics, this form of scapegoating works so effectively for mobilizing purposes because it allows complex issues – such as unemployment, social inequality, housing, or crime – to be addressed in a highly simplistic fashion. Ascribing blame to a particular group like migrants steers a general, unspecific sense of frustration with politics towards a concrete adversary and frames intricate political issues in a simplistic logic of Us versus Them. Migrants are an easy target for such scapegoating practices also because they have a very limited public and political voice in particular in European societies. And right-wing populists can build on latent xenophobic feelings that are deeply rooted in the historic legacy of the European nation-state and its colonial practices.

Migrants as the threatening Other: Populists need a tangible sense of who is threatening the people and their well-being. Their very political identity is organized around the image of an urgent threat directed at ordinary people. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (Twenty-First Century Populism, 2008) define populism as “an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous ‘others’ who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.” The practice of depicting migrants as the ‘dangerous others’ is instrumental in providing the people with a collective identity (in the case of right-wing populism primarily defined in terms of an ethno-cultural nationalism) and identifying those depriving the ‘virtuous people’ and their community in fundamental ways. With the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the alleged threat to the wellbeing of the own community is given a face, an easily identifiable reference point for directing dissatisfaction and political aspiration.

Migrants as a tool for a mobilizing collective identity: The racialization of the non-national other is a highly productive way of political mobilization drawing on the friend-enemy dichotomy that Carl Schmitt depicted as the very essence of politics. In his book The Concept of the Political (1932: 26, 38), he describes the friend-enemy distinction as speaking to the “utmost degree of intensity … of an association or dissociation.” Right-wing populism exploits this distinction and the emotional, or even existential power it displays. In this regard, populists can challenge the often frustratingly unresponsive and stale routine of liberal democracy with an emotionally charged fight for the security, if not the survival of the own community. Migrants are indispensable for the form of identity politics based on which right-wing populism challenges traditional competitive party politics. The resurgence of exclusionary nationalism and anti-immigrant forces itself has the potential of developing into a veritable threat to the viability of liberal democracies in general and the rights of minorities in particular.

 

Not by accident these three interpretations focus on how populist actors use migration for their political mobilization rather on the challenges posed by migration itself. My underlying hypothesis is that the political and policy issues related to migration (security, long-term integration of newcomers, accommodation of cultural diversity, etc.) cannot explain the rise of right-wing populism. Rather, the politics of migration regularly follows a different logic. Consider the 2015/16 ‘refugee crisis’: The number of irregular border crossings has dropped dramatically and the number of asylum seekers coming to Europe has gone back to pre-crisis levels. Still, the political debate in many European countries is still dominated by anti-immigration rhetoric deliberately staged by right-wing populists to exploit a divisive issue for their political mobilization.

Are the three approaches to conceptualizing the link between migration and populism the most fruitful and relevant ones? What aspects do these three interpretations leave out? Please feel free to add to the conceptual discussion or contribute with some empirical observations.

5 Replies to “Populism and the politics of migration”

  1. Controversial topics such as immigration are easy targets for the efforts of advancing political goals. Migrants have been used time and time again as the scapegoat for deeper social and economic issues. Political parties do not want to appear as they have failed or that their party is unable to address problems accurately. So instead, migrants are used as the source of underlying social, political, and economic issues. In Europe and the United States, the recent rise in right-wing populism has brought on an onslaught of the blame onto migrants. Right-wing populist parties have portraited immigration as the greatest threat to national identity and economic opportunities. Right-wing populist parties attempt to shield issues by taking advantage of marginalized people with little to no voice within politics.
    By portraying migrants as the ‘threating other’ greater support for the resurgence of nationalism and the protection of national identity is orchestrated. Right-wing parties can then manipulate fear and anger into extreme support for their party and political objectives. Therefore, right-wing populism uses migrants as scapegoats for underlying social issues and the ‘us versus them’ dichotomy to achieve further political motives. Furthermore, because of this, right-wing populism is the greatest threat to liberal democracy and causes more dangerous and hostile environments for migrants.

    Concerning this blog, I do think that these three interpretations capture how far-right populist parties use issues around migration for political advantage.

  2. Zachary Alexander Klein, PoliSci student at the University of Victoria
    Populism and the Politics of Migration: A Return to Nationalism and Xenophobia

    Introduction

    The year 2017 was a transformative period in contemporary European politics. Elections across Europe brought an astonishing rise in right-wing populism to the national political process. The electoral success and political participation of right-wing populist parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) came as a shock to both European mainstream parties and to the international liberal democratic system. With populism came an unprecedented objection to migration into European society. Why is it that European attitudes have changed significantly towards migration? Three conceptual explanations are discussed in the article which addressed this key question, as well as its link to migration as a political issue.

    Summary

    The first explanation: “migrants as easy scapegoats” suggests that by assigning blame to a certain group of people for economic and social problems (i.e., unemployment, social welfare/pensions & increasing diversity/demographic change) allows right-wing populist parties to benefit from the “peoples’” sense of frustration and to increase electoral gains for political advantage. This was the case when the AFD came into power. That is, they tapped into underlying anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiment of Germans left over from the 2015-16 refugee crisis when migration became a divisive issue. As a result, the AFD was the first far-right party on a populist platform to enter the Bundestag, national parliament, participating as the official opposition in mainstream politics since the Nazi Party.

    The second explanation: “migrants as the threatening other” suggests that right-wing populist parties identify a specific group of people, in this case migrants, as the foreign threat to the cultural identity of a “virtuous homogenous people” and contributes to right-wing populist parties’ electoral gains. This is a key aspect of depicting migrants as the “outside disease.”
    The FPÖ was a major coalition partner with the centre-right ÖVP (Austrian Peoples’ Party) and helped to pass restrictive immigration policies condemned as anti-migrant.
    According to this interpretation, a politically and emotionally charged anti-immigrant narrative creates a collective identity for the “people” that allows right-wing populist parties to use against migrants. This translates into electoral gains as the FPÖ demonstrated in the 2017 Austrian Legislative Election.

    Similarly, the third explanation: “migrants as a tool for a mobilizing collective identity” provides a political and emotional opportunity for right-wing populist parties by portraying migrants as an “immediate threat” to the “national survival” of the “people” and “community” through fearmongering. As a result, the influx of migrants creates the necessary collective identity of the “people” in an “us” versus “them” conflict between the native citizens and migrants in host European societies, whereby right-wing populist parties exploit the socio-economic and cultural tensions affecting citizens.

    Analysis

    I agree that these explanations help to clarify why right-wing populist parties are electorally rising across Europe. However, it is unlikely all three can be applied immediately. Further, I disagree with the previous analysis from Tatum B.
    An alternative analysis to the politicization of migration is that the second reason, “migrants as the threatening other,” is more fluid than the other two explanations because right-wing populist parties such as the AFD and FPÖ articulate anti-immigrant and xenophobic language which targets migrants and minorities, in this case, mostly Arab and African groups of Muslim origin during elections and not.

    Key Questions

    With the electoral accession of right-wing populist parties across Europe and increasing xenophobic and nationalist attacks against migrants and minorities, there are two key questions relating to migration.
    First, will this populist trend continue into and beyond 2020? How can mainstream parties protect their democratic institutions and competitive party politics from far-right parties?
    Second, even with full integration of migrants in their host European societies, Europeans will always regard migrants and their children as “the other.” How can European governments create more positive citizen-migrant relations? Will a second refugee crisis on the Turkish-Greek border produce a similar rise in xenophobia and nationalism as was seen in the 2015-16 refugee crisis?

  3. I believe that the three approaches to conceptualization mentioned above are indeed the most prominent in explaining the rise in populist rhetoric and ideology in recent years. An aspect of these interpretations that I think was left out, was the fact that these three separate approaches also work in harmony, in a way, combining them into one method.

    Although using migrants as a tool for political mobilization can be viewed as a separate method from portraying them as “the threatening other”, I believe that it is also the former being a result of the latter. By capitalizing on issues such as crime statistics in refugee/immigrant occupied towns in Europe, terrorist attacks committed by Islamic State refugees forming sleeper cells etc., populist parties are provided with significant ammunition to successfully portray them as a threat. They are also posed as a threat to national identity, the job market, cultures and traditions as mentioned above. All of these are core weapons used by right-wing populists in order to mobilize their political constituents and followers. Thus, the portrayal of a threat directly leads to the mobilization of populist groups in order to protect themselves from this threat, through means of collective identity and protecting traditional values. This inherently means that the migrants will also serve as “easy scapegoats” as mentioned in the first approach because if you are a populist politician trying to mobilize the masses against those who support mass immigration, you will use any opportunity possible to diminish, undermine or weaken the image of the migrant groups. In this sense, all three approaches blend into each other and assist each other in various ways.

    To answer the question regarding the relationship between immigration levels and rising right-wing populism, I don’t necessarily agree that the declining levels of asylum seekers and refugees, despite a constant or increasing prominence of populism, means that the two are not directly related. In my opinion, the refugee crisis, the wave of terrorist attacks by the Islamic State throughout Europe, and some of the outrage caused in European countries are still relatively recent events and still fresh in the minds of many Europeans. I do not support the populist ideology or the ways in which it is being used in these cases, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect to see a decrease in populist ideologies, simultaneous with decreasing refugee/asylum seeker levels. I think that the events of 2015/16 and the surrounding years will have a lingering effect for quite some time, despite the decreasing numbers in immigration and some of the regulations being put in place. After all, populism is an ideology that works through manipulating and evoking emotion, and the emotional significance for Europeans of some of the events in this time period will not simply disappear in a short time frame.

  4. Sophia Anderson, Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria

    The three positions presented in this blog all point to the same goal for populist leaders; expanding their loyal voting base by vilifying migrants. Migrants, especially those who are visibly of a different race than the native majority population, provide an easy scapegoat for populist leaders to exploit in order to mobilize their base. Taking the example of the 2015-16
    ‘refugee crisis’ which caused extreme reactions throughout the European continent, refugees and migrants who were seeking refuge in European countries were often visibly of a different race. Populist leaders such as Nigel Farage in Britain, a chief driver behind the Brexit vote, and Matteo Salvini in Italy, who contributed to the decision to shut Italian waters to African and Syrian migrants, were able to exploit the arrival and existence of these refugees into Europe during and after the refugee crisis. As mentioned in the blog, the arrival of refugees to Europe has slowed dramatically from the peak of 2015-16. Despite this decrease, the support for populist parties has grown instead of slowed in the 5 years since. Arguably, this is because populist leaders used the crisis to expand their base, and have been extremely successful in maintaining and growing their base through continued fear mongering. In Britain, the lengthy Brexit process has kept migrants and border mobility at the forefront of political conversation. Additionally, with the measures being put in place by governments around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with many countries including Canada choosing to suspend most international entries into their countries, borders appear set to remain a topic of discussion for the foreseeable future. Although the situation around COVID-19 is different from the ‘refugee crisis’; it does introduce some of the same issues into the political and popular discussion. Although this is merely speculation, it would not shock me if, as the global pandemic begins to subside, populist leaders begin to use the rhetoric surrounding border closure and increased screening and apply it to their arguments about preventing the arrival of migrants to their countries. The three approaches presented in the blog seem to be the most prevalent ones for this discussion, although it is possible that they will be adapted and expanded in the future.

  5. Sibel Karadag, Undergraduate Student at the University of Victoria

    Possibility of a Transnational Populism: DiEM25

    The increasing distrust and disaffection towards current Western liberal democracies provides an opportunity structure for populist leaders such as Trump and Le Pen to rise to power. Because populism involves constructing an all-encompassing ‘people’ to oppose the corrupt and oppressive ‘elite,’ populist leaders commonly use exclusionary politics to place the blame of current social, political, and economic inequalities on non-national outsiders. As a result, populism tends to be conflated with more right wing, nationalist politics.

    This begs the question, is it possible to imagine a populism that can mobilize beyond the bounds of the nation state? Both nationalism and populism revolve around an appeal to the people, either to the populist people-as-underdogs or the people of the nation. However, the insider/outsider logics that nationalism and populism utilize are distinct. The people of the nation are very clearly defined by their nation state’s borders who oppose non-national outsiders, whereas the populist people are more abstractly defined based on a populist leader’s political motive to oppose the abstractly defined elite.

    Because populism defines its people on a more abstract hierarchical basis rather than based on horizontal insider/outsider logic, it has the possibility to move beyond nationalist antagonisms towards a transnational people and a transnational elite. Given the several cases of national populism in Europe today such as Brexit as well as right leaning populist governments in Italy, Poland, and Hungary, there is a significant threat to the continent’s legal, political, and economic interdependence. The possibility of a left wing transnational populist movement may provide both a resistance to these threats as well as a more comprehensive solution to the disaffections with current western liberal democracies.

    The distinction between transnational and international populism is an important one. International populism refers to the connections and cooperation between several national populist leaders across the globe. On the other hand, transnational populism refers more so to the idea of the people surpassing their national differences and opposing a network of elites that act on a supranational level such as the EU and the IMF. It has been argued that social justice movements such as Occupy Wall Street use a transnational populist language with their slogan, ‘we are the 99%;’ however, its respective protest and mobilizations remained local and targeted ‘elites’ remained domestic, which places the Occupy movement on an international rather than transnational level.

    The possibility of a transnational populist movement does not end here. The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) is a movement that began in 2016 with a mission to democratize supranational governing bodies on a pan-European level. The movement does so by exposing the undemocratic nature of supranational actors such as the EU and addresses the current disaffections towards liberal democracies with more inclusive policies and procedures. Although the movement’s success is still unknown, it may prove to be a necessary precondition towards more unified construction of the people-as-underdogs as well as a way to create a space for transnational populist movements in the future.

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