Oldal 132 [132]
OCR
130 | Beäta Kovács 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
