The Migration Obsession
Essay · Peter Scholten on Why Politics, Media, and Research Can’t Stop Problematizing Migration — and What It Costs Democracy
Why Is the World So Obsessed With Migration?
Political scientist Peter Scholten argues that today’s migration debates are driven by a mutually reinforcing system of language, media logic, political attention-shifting, and research — a “moral panic” that problematizes migration while migrantizing broader social problems. The result: bad policies, declining trust in democracy, and sharper racial and social boundaries.
Essential points in this essay:
The migration obsession is not driven by migration facts — it’s a structural preoccupation reinforced by language, media, politics, and research
Migration talk “migrantizes” broader problems: demographic change becomes “multicultural crisis,” inequality becomes “integration crisis,” global insecurity becomes “refugee crisis”
The obsession undermines policy quality, erodes trust in democracy, and sharpens the very social and racial boundaries it claims to address
About the author: Peter Scholten is Professor in the Governance of Migration and Diversity at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He publishes mostly on the politics of migration and migration-related diversities, from a perspective of complexity governance.
Why is it that so many countries seemingly just can’t stop talking about migration? From Trump’s fixation with building a wall at the border with Mexico and haunting undocumented migrants, to Europe’s panic about a so-called refugee crisis, to rising anti-migrant sentiments in countries as India and Japan: migration and the sensation that there would be a migration crisis keeps surfacing in a broad range of countries and keeps controlling attention in politics, media, research and public debate. It seems as if in a world marked by complexity, a lot of our concerns, our discontents and our uncertainties get projected on this one central topic; migration.
“As a sort of ‘moral panic,’ the migration obsession is a societal problem driven by a set of mutually reinforcing social and political logics, rather than a problem of just specific actors or specific speech acts.”
Some say that the saliency of migration reflects that we are living in age of migration; it’s the migration that makes it salient. Others such as Hein de Haas say it is driven by pervasive myths on migration, about it’s size, its drivers and its implications. Or that it is simply the result of anti-migration politics, such as the growing importance of populism. I will argue that there is much more to this fixation on migration than migration facts or the acts of radical and populist politicians. What I will describe as the migration obsession is a more structural preoccupation with problematizing migration as well as migrantizing problems, marked by hyper-saliency and seemingly constant crisis discourses. As a sort of ‘moral panic’, it is a societal problem driven by a set of mutually reinforcing social and political logics, rather than a problem of just specific actors or specific speech acts.
How Language Migrantizes Broader Problems
One of the mechanisms behind the migration obsession is the role of language in the migrantization of problems. Migration talk, such as defining mainly only mobility across borders as migration and labelling persons as ‘migrant’ for sometimes several generations, helps essentializing migration. Often migration talk mixes with crisis discourses, such as on refugee crisis, asylum crisis, multicultural crisis, integration crisis or border crisis. This way migration talk has not only played a key role in problematizing migration, but also migrantizing much broader problems. For instance, broader demographic transitions were reduced to a multicultural crisis, issues of inequality and politization reduced to an integration crisis, or global insecurities reduced to a refugee crisis.
Another mechanism involves media logic. Migration seems to tick all the boxes of a media logic that not only amplifies migration as ‘crisis’ but also introduces biases in our understanding of migration. Media logic tends to reinforce dramatized narratives (‘crisis’), to personalize broader trends or patterns to specific visible personal implications (‘incidents’), and to bring a focus on attributing blame to those perceived as responsible for migration problems (often migrants themselves). Especially in commercialized media landscapes, it is almost inescapable that media jump on migration, and spread crisis discourses but inadvertently also often spread fear.
Nationalism and the Politics of Attention-Shifting
Although the migration obsession should not be reduced to just politicization, it is important to discuss it as one of its mechanisms. It seems that especially the rise of nationalist politics has driven as well as has been driven by the migration obsession. Ruth Wodak has elaborated how nationalist politics often needs discourses of fear on the other, often being (international) migrants. Through a strategy that political scientists call ‘attention shifting’, nationalist politicians have been very successful in making migration a key stake in national identity politics, and in making it a symbol for anything that threatens or confuses ‘the nation.’ In many ways migration is a symptom of economic globalization, and nationalist politics has made it symbolic for popular resentment against the consequences of global capitalism.
Next to politics and media, the role of research in reproducing the migration obsession should not be overlooked. Research and the production of data on migration ‘flows’ and ‘categories’ and their success or failure in terms of ‘integration’ has been essential in the broader process of migranticization. Knowledge production in the face of highly complex social issues as migration face the challenge of preventing reductionism and simplification. Migration research instead has played a key role in ‘hypervisibilisation’ of migration, reducing the complexity of global economics and global insecurities to migration flows.
These mechanisms each play a mutually reinforcing logic in producing and reproducing the migration obsession. It is not so simple that taking away one mechanism would prevent the migration obsession. For instance, even if politics would decide to take a break and talk about something else, media, language and research would still enforce a fixation on migration.
Beyond the West: A Global Pattern
The migration obsession is not just a Western thing. Yes, it is common in Western democracies, whose migration histories but also whose democratic political systems provide a playground for all the mechanisms that are conducive to a migration obsession. But we also see it beyond the west, such as in India where nationalism, politics and media also seem to produce an obsessive logic, or Egypt where nationalist policies and public anxiety about refugee immigration seem to trigger a similar logic.
The obsession clearly has very powerful and disruptive consequences for our societies today. The irrational and problem amplifying logic behind the migration obsession clearly already undermines the quality of government. It leads to bad policies, which have merely symbolic purpose, are not well thought-through, and can sometimes aggravate problems rather than alleviate them. Think of how inadequate European governments have proven themselves to be in responding to what they have framed as a refugee crisis, with an approach causing anxiety rather than addressing real issues. Such an undermining of the quality of policy and government will inevitably also contribute to an undermining of trust in democracy, as we are seeing already in countries across the world.
Another consequence is that the obsession does not so much seem to respond to polarization, but rather contribute to it. The obsession sharpens social but also racial boundaries in society. It can thus contribute to the very racialisation and minorisation it claims to address. This is an effect already very visible across societies today, from the Minneapolis demonstrations against ICE to declining political participation and even increasing emigration aspirations amongst European youngsters with a migration background.
Confronting the Migration Obsession
“It begins with refusing to let migration carry the weight of every wider social anxiety, and with restoring proportion, precision and perspective to how we speak about societal change.”
So, if we want to reach beyond the migration obsession, we first need to confront the beast head-on. It begins with refusing to let migration carry the weight of every wider social anxiety, and with restoring proportion, precision and perspective to how we speak about societal change. That means investing in better language to talk about migration, more evidence, and more focus on quality in politics: addressing concrete issues such as anxiety about global economics on its own terms, rather than constantly reframing it as migration problems. Only then can societies move from reactive crisis talk to a better-quality debate on migration.
Peter Scholten is Professor in the Governance of Migration and Diversity at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He publishes mostly on the politics of migration and migration-related diversities, from a perspective of complexity governance. His work includes the book Mainstreaming versus Alienation: A Complexity Perspective on Migration and Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan).
Quite a disappointing analysis of an interesting question (especially having read somewhere that it's the summary of a new book?). That there is an "obsession" is true. That the media's fixation on crisis narratives, nationalism and the research hype contribute to this obsession is also beyond evidently true. But this doesn't answer why this obsession occurs. The media hype, essentializing language, nationalism and complicit research are as much a result of this obsession as they are helping reproduce it.
Have we not established long ago that there is no such a thing as "migration facts"? There is a wealth of works showing that the whole idea of migration is only legible through a neocolonial-nativist logic that sees national borders as natural dividers of clearly delineated "nations". The reinforcement of these borders ("migration management") is a necessary tool in protecting the wealth and privilege of former empires from the very same people whose historical and ongoing (if more subtle) dispossession financed this privilege. That's why states need an obsession with migration - to justify the violent ways they defend their wealth and privilege, which is globally concentrated in a minority of white-dominant countries.
Scholten is here doing the same thing as de Haas and other respected migration scholars of peddling the myth that all that is wrong with migration governance is that the "facts" are ignored. Hence policies are not "balanced", "rational" and "evidence-based" - if only they could rely more on that research on "flows" and "categories" and "integration" that Scholten himself rightly sees as part of the problem. Why then ask for more evidence as a solution to this obsession, when evidence is reinforcing this rationale? I find this narrative - while evidently well intentioned - ultimately dangerous because it justifies migration as something objective, observable and solvable, therefore deflecting from its function of regulating racial capitalism.