February 28, 2020

By Kate Korte, Student at the Political Science Department at the University of Victoria

In June 2016, the United Kingdom (UK) startled the world by voting to leave the European Union (EU) in a public referendum. Although the majority of voters voted to leave, the margin was small — 52 per cent voted leave, and 48 per cent voted to remain. Since then, politicians in the UK and EU have been struggling to meet a deal, to no avail. On Jan 31 of this year, the UK left the EU officially.

During the Brexit campaign, immigration was a key focus. The leave campaign, in particular, used the perceived threat of increased migration with EU membership to steer voters in their direction.

It’s peculiar, however, to think that this would amass a majority of the public’s support. The United Kingdom never signed on to the Schengen Agreement, so it actually held more power over its borders than many other member states. The United Kingdom is also one of the farthest removed countries in the EU from the Mediterranean Sea. It has not seen a vast influx of refugees. This begs the question: why would voters resonate so strongly with the leave campaigns message of a migration threat?

The leave campaign capitalized off of the perceived, not actual, threat they saw migration posing to the EU’s economy and culture. Like many other countries in the EU, voters routinely overestimate the amount of migrants their country welcomes. Campaigns like the Leave campaign are able to capitalize off this innumeracy by feeding into the fears without articulating any real migration data. This could explain part of the reason voters opted to leave.

All areas in Wales opted to vote leave. This strikes as odd, given that Wales is one of the most economically worse off areas in the United Kingdom and benefits from a lot of EU money. Importantly, Wales doesn’t see a lot of migration. Despite these two facts, Welsh voters still resonated with the Leave campaign’s message enough to vote to leave and effectively vote to cut themselves off from a significant amount of EU funding.

On the other hand, areas in London that see a lot of migration voted to remain in the EU. Some have linked this to the general young, educated, and cosmopolitan nature of the city. In a big city like London, there is a high cost of living and a lot of people to compete for employment. Alas, London seems to welcome newcomers and voted to remain. Even though more migrants set their sites on London than on Wales, Londoners were less willing to listen to the argument that migrants hurt the economy.

Of course, as is the case with both London and Wales, other factors are clearly at play here. It’s certainly not the case that everyone who voted to leave did so out of a perceived threat of migration. But given the campaign’s heavy emphasis on migration and its impact on the economy, it’s worth questioning how unfounded voter’s perceptions of migration data are.

Brexit is still a staple issue in British politics, with Boris Johnson echoing his slogan, “get brexit done” at nearly every opportunity. In the 2019 election, a lot of the areas that switched from Labour to Johnson’s Conservative party were rural areas in Britain — and areas that don’t see a lot of migration. For as long as Brexit is relevant, migration will remain part of the political discourse. Whether or not voters’ fears are founded in reality is something worth exploring, as it draws to light how politicized migration has become in the UK.

The Brexit vote is broken down by area here. Migration data by area can be found here.

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.

Day: 28 February 2020

The Brexit vote: a clear example of politicizing migration

Populism and the politics of migration