Borders and Belonging

In recent days, it has become imperative to question not only the positions people take on immigration, but also the deeper scaffolding that produces those positions: histories of nationalism, evolving senses of cultural belonging, and a political climate that increasingly punishes clarity in favour of moral abstraction. Too often, debates around immigration are reduced to oppositional binaries — pro versus anti, open versus closed, globalist versus nationalist. But political allegiances, those that form because of right-wing populism are grounded in the fabric of daily life: in overburdened welfare systems, in job displacement, in WhatsApp groups flooded with warnings about neighbourhood change, in the fear of losing “who we are,” and in the frustration of navigating bureaucracies that fail to prioritise citizens.

Globally, the surge in support for right-leaning governments has corresponded to a growing awareness of immigration as a sovereignty issue. And it is not about the financial implications, the potential job loss but more elementally, identity, social cohesion, and the responsibility of the state to act in the national interest of the national people. Immigration has become a proxy for broader concerns: safety, fairness, and continuity. In France, for instance, analysis from 1988 to 2017 shows that a 1% increase in low-skilled, non-European immigration corresponds with a 0.5% increase in far-right support. This should not be dismissed as xenophobia. To be fair, it is a rational response to a growing sense that elites have sidelined national interests in favour of abstract ideals. The demography of migrants matters low-skilled, non-European migrants are more likely to provoke political backlash, while high-skilled migrants contribute to society and are more easily integrated. Voters see the difference. And they act on it.

Philosophers and political theorists have long tried to make sense of these tensions. José Jorge Mendoza frames the immigration dilemma as a liberty-security-equality trilemma: the freedom to move, the duty to protect, and the principle of fairness. Right-leaning governments, often caricatured as narrow-minded, understand something the idealists overlook. Security is not optional. The safety of the people comes first. Mendoza argues that right-wing populist movements resolve this trilemma by prioritising sovereignty and safety. But perhaps that’s not a failure of moral reasoning, but rather, a recognition of political reality.

This corresponds with communitarian theorists like Christopher Heath Wellman, who defend the right of democratic nations to control their borders. For Wellman, national self-determination is common sense. A country that cannot decide who joins it cannot sustain a coherent future. Critics like Joseph Carens, a Canadian-American political scientist, argue for open borders based on universal equality. But this view, though noble in theory, collapses in practice. Principles of wage stability and trust, both communal and national are at the risk of being undermined. There’s a reason such policies fail to gain traction in democratic elections.

This is the fundamental gap between theory and real-world governance. Right-leaning movements don’t need to “simplify” complex issues. They need to translate them into priorities that mirror what people see happening around them. Populist parties speak to cultural anxieties. They name what others obfuscate. They assert, correctly, that an uncontrolled immigration system does not serve the average citizen and it eventually leads to a melting pot of resentment and the violation of national sovereignty.

These narratives translate to policy. Poland’s 2025 asylum suspension, for example, may seem harsh to the average person, but it demonstrates a stance taken towards national pressure. The same can be said of Britain’s post-Brexit immigration reforms. High-skilled workers are welcomed. Those who arrive without invitation, especially in large numbers, are not. Critics of this approach call it a “vicious cycle.” They say that right-wing parties deter high-skilled migrants and thereby fuel the perception that immigration is low-skilled and burdensome. But perhaps the causality runs the other way. Governments respond to what’s already a visible pattern. A 10% rise in populist support reduces high-skilled immigration by 27%, but it also reflects a public desire to slow things down, to stabilise what has changed too quickly, too often for the common man to realise.

More importantly, however, the issue is converging on culture. In Austria, Italy, Sweden, and everywhere, right-leaning governments have risen not because they reject migrants, but because they reject the forced transformation of national identity under the guise of humanitarianism. They believe a country has the right to remain itself. What’s striking is how quickly mainstream discourse dismisses these positions as irrational or bigoted. But the real failure lies in its refusal to take the public seriously — to acknowledge that there are trade-offs between openness and order, between moral aspiration and democratic autonomy. The liberal imagination often wants complexity, but only if it doesn’t disrupt its own assumptions. And immigration disrupts. It always has.

The rightward shift on immigration, then, isn’t an aberration. It’s a course correction. It reflects a growing insistence that democratic governments must respond to their citizens first, not to international institutions, not to global norms, and not to elite idealist moral frameworks. It’s not about closing borders. It’s about making sure that those borders mean something.