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Unlike Georg Simmel’s stranger, the immigrant is no longer the one who comes
today and goes away tomorrow, but rather the person who arrives today
and stays here tomorrow (Bigo 2002, 63-64). Immigrants are thus ‘hybrid
aliens’ constructed by various local/global factors, personal experience, and
the media.
Migration may also have become such a significant (political) topic because
it can be presented as a collection of several social problems at the same time.
On the one hand, from a socio-economic point of view, immigration is in
many cases connected to rising unemployment rates, a crisis of the welfare
state, and a deteriorating environment. The feeling of insecurity often fuels
the ideology of exclusion: in times when resources are scarce, there is no
guarantee that the immigrants will not use the help of the welfare state to
the “detriment of the majority” (Flecker et al. 2007, 57).
On the other hand, migration can be associated with security problems,
such as everyday crimes, organised crime, or terrorism. Also, in the eyes of
many, immigrants should be feared regarding (national) identity, as they can
pose a threat to the demographic composition of society and can endanger
European traditions and values. Overall, migration has become an umbrella
term for contemporary social problems (Tsoukala 2005).
Migration-related fears are therefore complex fears that can affect multiple
dimensions of our lives. Integrated threat theory (Stephan and Stephan 1996)
attempts to respond to this complexity by distinguishing between three types
of fears. In the case of realistic fears, the in-group feels its own existence or
physical survival threatened by the out-group. In contrast, the so-called
symbolic fears are most simply summed up by the sentence: “immigrants
endanger our way of life and our culture” This one includes various moral
considerations, beliefs, attitudes, and all the values that the group professes
to own. Last but not least, intergroup anxiety involves those tensions and
frustrations that arise during the interaction with a member of the out-group.
CONNECTION POINTS
Although there are many ways to argue for the omnipotent nature of fear, if we
seek to explain its political relevance, we have to explore in depth the possible
links between identity and fear. Fear is basically an individual emotion, but it
can easily appear at the societal level as well. It is a universal emotion, but it
has a constructed nature, too. At the same time, although identities are not
essential, they are not one hundred per cent constructed either. They are also
schizophrenic, as they are both multiple and complex (Calhoun 1993), and
we shape our identities in relation to many communities.
If we study the connection points between identity and fear at the individual
level, we can argue that fear is an integral part of the basic nature of human
beings, and becoming an adult is about nothing more than learning what