The political map of Western democracies has changed dramatically due to mass migration. Populist or far-right parties now lead polls in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. This marks a dramatic transformation in how societies deal with migration pressures. Liberal promises clash with demographic realities as nations struggle with unexpected population shifts. Post-Brexit Britain shows this clearly – the country welcomed 4.5 million immigrants between 2021 and 2024, a remarkable number for a nation of 69 million people.
Mass migration creates waves of change that test traditional liberal frameworks. These changes go beyond simple population movements and create demographic and ideological strain. Eastern Europe’s population has dropped by about 9% since 2004 as people moved to Western Europe. Research shows migrants tend to hold more liberal values than those who stay behind. Their departure links to democratic decline in their home countries.
Liberal political systems face two major problems: falling birth rates and weakening social trust. This stems from liberalism’s core conflict. The focus on personal freedom over group unity can boost economic growth by allowing free movement of people and capital. Yet this approach weakens social bonds. This piece explores how mass migration tests liberal ideas, changes social patterns, and reveals contradictions that liberal democracies must address in today’s mobile world.
Liberalism’s Core Assumptions and Their Fragility
Liberal philosophy builds on idealistic assumptions that seem shakier as demographics shift dramatically. Classical liberal ideas took shape in societies where most people shared similar backgrounds. Today’s cultural diversity and mass migration put these basic principles to the test.
Individual rights and universalism
Liberal democracies put individual rights above group identity. This point of view assumes basic rights apply to everyone, no matter their culture, religion, or ethnicity. Such a framework lets diverse people live together under shared civic values while keeping their unique identities.
Mass migration reveals cracks in this idealistic foundation. Groups arriving with different value systems raise questions about which principles stay universal. Liberal societies struggle to resolve conflicts between individual freedom and newcomers who value group identity, religious authority, or traditional hierarchies.
These tensions show up in debates about free speech versus religious sensitivity, gender equality versus cultural traditions, and secular governance versus religious legal systems. The idea that everyone shares core values becomes sort of hard to get one’s arms around when faced with real cultural differences from mass migration.
Liberal focus on the individual might weaken the social bonds needed to keep liberal institutions strong. Emphasizing personal freedom over community ties can erode shared stories and trust that democracies need – exactly when demographic changes make these qualities vital.
Equality before the law
Legal equality stands as the life-blood of liberal thought – laws should treat everyone similarly regardless of status, wealth, or background. This reflects liberalism’s rejection of random authority and special legal treatment.
Notwithstanding that, diverse societies formed through migration face practical challenges. Legal systems must adapt to communities with different views on justice, family structure, and personal duty. Courts now face cases where applying laws equally conflicts with respecting cultural differences.
On top of that, legal equality assumes everyone understands and can access legal processes. Language barriers, unfamiliar institutions, and varying trust in authorities create actual inequality even with neutral laws. Mass migration shows how equal laws might not deliver real justice without extra support.
The biggest problem comes as societies grow more diverse. Legal systems face pressure to treat people differently – making exceptions for religious practices, cultural needs, or integration rules. These exceptions, though well-meant, chip away at the liberal ideal of one law for all citizens.
Freedom of movement vs. national identity
Liberal tradition favors free movement of people, goods, and ideas. This clashes with another strong force: national identity and communities’ right to choose their members.
This conflict stands out when people move from developing regions to wealthy nations. Liberal principles might suggest open borders make sense, but no liberal democracy fully accepts this idea. Most countries run complex immigration systems that create categories of who belongs and who doesn’t.
More people notice how migration changes their society’s identity. Rapid demographic shifts, especially in cities, raise questions about cultural continuity and social bonds. Citizenship – once a simple legal concept in liberal theory – becomes disputed ground.
Liberal thought contains an unsolved tension between its universal goals and the reality of human communities. Mass migration brings this tension to light, challenging liberal societies to balance their theoretical beliefs with practical governance of diverse populations.
Mass Migration as a Challenge to Liberal Subjectivity
Liberal democratic systems place subjectivity at their core – specifically who gets to fully participate in society. Migration patterns now reshape this concept and push us to rethink community membership and how societies construct “otherness” through laws and everyday practices.
Who counts as a citizen?
Human mobility puts tremendous strain on traditional citizenship models. European integration brought one of its biggest changes through the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. This treaty separated citizenship from nationality and created new ways to belong based on where people live rather than their national identity.
The progress remains unfinished. Many migrants find themselves caught between two conflicting rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees the right to leave countries, but immigration remains heavily restricted. This creates a tiered citizenship system where many become “denizens” – second-class citizens who have some rights but lack full political membership.
Different migrant groups face unique recognition challenges:
- 4.4 million stateless people worldwide lack any formal citizenship
- 26 million environmentally displaced people in 2023, projected to reach 216 million by 2050
- Irregular migrants stay unrecognized despite their presence and contributions
Legal categories keep splitting the concept of societal membership. Settlement used to pave the main path to belonging. Now policies treat citizenship more like a “reward” than a social good, which makes settling substantially harder.
The migrant vs. the national worker
Economic factors shape how societies position migrants against native workers. Research consistently shows migrants don’t replace native workers – they aren’t “substitutes”. Informal economies absorb foreign labor while official policies claim restrictions. This creates a hypocritical system where migrants provide a “hidden economic subsidy”.
This contradiction shows clearly in how migrants end up with “three-Ds” jobs: dirty, degrading and dangerous – work that nationals avoid. Their position as economic outsiders justifies exploitation while making their contributions invisible.
Economic exclusion becomes self-perpetuating. Former ILO Director-General Juan Somavia noted that “migrant workers provide essential services in their host countries… [yet] this contribution is rarely recognized and most of the time they are very badly paid”.
Constructing the ‘other’ through policy
Legal systems actively create and reinforce migrant otherness. EU law carries colonial legacies that help “borderization” processes label certain groups as excessive or unwanted. EU citizenship laws draw lines that make third-country nationals “the others”.
This othering works through formal laws and their implementation. Systematic detention, racial profiling, and criminalized immigration show how practices marginalize immigrants. Both approaches work together – laws establish “us vs. them” logic while practices enable discrimination.
Protective legal distinctions can still reinforce otherness. The European Court of Justice ruled Afghan women qualify for asylum based on gender and nationality alone. This decision unintentionally marked them as fundamentally different from other women.
Othering goes beyond laws into public conversation. European narratives since 2015 paint migrants as “thieves who struggle to integrate, steal jobs, and impose their cultures”. These stories feed ideas like “massive invasion” and “the great replacement,” turning normal human migration into an existential threat.
Capitalism, Mobility, and the Making of Migrants
Image Source: In These Times
“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” — Warsan Shire, Award-winning British-Somali poet
Economic systems shape how people move around the world. The global capitalist system doesn’t just watch migration happen. It creates it through processes that turn people into mobile workers.
Mass migration meaning in capitalist systems
Mass migration means much more than people moving from place to place in capitalist systems. It represents a basic economic need. The system needs workers to move as businesses look for cheaper labor beyond borders. Yes, it is worth noting that a fully open capitalist system with free movement would make the world economy AED 286.41 trillion richer.
This creates a strange contradiction. Capitalism supports free movement of money and goods, but people face strict restrictions. Technology has advanced over the last several years, yet moving money remains nowhere near as difficult as moving people. International migration stays between 3-3.4% of global population despite more trade.
Capitalist growth gets more and thus encourages more migration through regional differences. These gaps aren’t random but come from what economists call “labor arbitrage” – businesses taking advantage of wage differences between regions. Labor migration has created and repeated patterns of uneven growth that keep the divide between developed and developing countries going.
Primitive accumulation and forced mobility
Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation” shows how large groups lost their means of survival. This created both capital and workers without land. This process continues throughout capitalism as what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”.
History shows primitive accumulation through American colonization, African slave trade, and events like the Opium Wars. The fight for socialism in Europe came after “one of the longest, most horrific series of crimes in history.” European pre-capitalist civilization made 400 years of African forced labor camps, stole the American continent, and committed genocide.
This connection between losing land and migration continues today. Chinese rural urbanization took land from 50-66 million peasants between 1990 and 2002. Vietnam saw fewer farming jobs and more factories, which pushed millions from villages to industrial work.
Labor commodification and dispossession
People become products once they lose their land. They must sell their work to survive. Chinese market reforms turned 290 million rural workers (174 million migrants) into wage laborers. Vietnam’s wage employment grew from 19% in 1998 to 33% in 2006, while farming jobs dropped from 67% to 49%.
Global companies make huge profits from migrant workers. To cite an instance, see Apple’s iPhone 4 costs from 2011: Chinese manufacturing labor was just 1.8% of the selling price. Supplier Foxconn got 14.3% while Apple took 58.5%.
Migration now looks more like forced movement than choice. People join mixed migration flows because they just need to when legal paths close but work demands stay high. Studies show “all but one of these economic migrants didn’t choose this path”. This forced movement leaves migrants always facing job insecurity, instability, and social exclusion.
The system keeps what scholars call “a global apartheid-type system.” Poor regions hold people forced to move for survival while their work serves dominant capitalist interests. Making migrants remains a key part of how modern capitalism works, even if we don’t always see it.
The Ideological Contradictions of Liberalism
“We welcome refugees, not because they are American — but because we are American.” — Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO, Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service)
Mass migration exposes inherent tensions in liberalism. These contradictions show the cracks in liberal democratic systems as they try to settle competing moral and political demands.
Solidarity vs. securitization
Security and solidarity aren’t always opposing ideas in migration debates, contrary to what many believe. Studies of Germany’s response to the 2015/16 migration crisis show that security concerns often stem from worry about migrants’ wellbeing rather than anti-immigrant views. This challenges the idea that security-focused discussions automatically reduce solidarity with migrants.
The “liberalism of fear” concept gives us an interesting viewpoint on this connection. You might think fear leads to more security measures and security-focused thinking throughout society. But the liberalism of fear can actually slow down securitization through what experts call “the securitization of securitization”. This creates a balance against escalation in both regular and security-focused politics.
States keep developing stricter border controls while expanding legal protections for migrants. This seeming contradiction shows how liberal states direct competing demands for legitimacy. They respond to political pressures that favor restrictions while upholding universal liberal rights principles.
Human rights vs. border control
Border control remains essential to liberal democracy. This need creates friction with human rights obligations that limit policymakers who want to keep migrants out. Liberal governments face two main challenges: they need to address their citizens’ priorities while keeping their international human rights promises.
Migration policies reflect what experts call “the liberal paradox.” Economic and rights-based liberalism pushes democracies toward open borders. National identity concerns and voter politics pull toward restrictions. This explains why Western liberal democracies keep passing relatively open immigration reforms despite growing political resistance and public demand for restrictions.
The asylum system shows this contradiction clearly. Human rights commitments keep frustrating government efforts to manage asylum effectively. Courts link human rights obligations to duties toward asylum seekers. This creates policies that look contradictory – governments use deterrence tactics while including human rights protections that let migrants challenge deportation.
Economic rationality vs. moral responsibility
The connection between welfare and migration presents another basic contradiction. Liberal states must guide their way between providing social protection and controlling migration. This creates what economists call “welfare chauvinism” – the belief that migrant and native populations should have different benefit levels.
Governments handle this tension through fragmentation and conditions. States create systems of “civic stratification” by giving different migrant categories fewer social rights than natives. This approach ties benefits to specific individual traits and merit-based criteria. It satisfies those who want restrictions while partly meeting liberal obligations.
Climate change makes these contradictions worse. People from developing countries suffer first and most from climate change, though they’ve contributed least to causing it. Climate migration could displace between 50 million and 1 billion people. This creates moral obligations that go beyond borders. Liberal democratic systems don’t deal very well with this responsibility because they lack legal recognition for people displaced by environmental causes.
These contradictions show how liberalism struggles to settle its universal ideals with the reality of human communities and national borders.
Effects of Mass Migration on Social Trust
Image Source: FasterCapital
Social cohesion studies show intricate patterns at the time communities face major demographic changes. The social fabric of receiving societies faces its toughest test during mass migration events. These events affect everything from how much people trust each other to their community bonds.
Ethnic diversity and declining trust
A detailed meta-analysis that looked at 1,001 estimates from 87 studies found a clear negative link between ethnic diversity and social trust. This connection grows stronger when people think about trusting their neighbors. The effect becomes more visible when measuring ethnic diversity locally rather than nationwide. These findings sparked heated debates about whether diverse societies can keep enough social cohesion to support liberal democracy.
The story becomes more complex as we take a closer look. Several studies show that economic inequality and poverty might explain falling trust levels better than diversity itself. British research found little proof that diversity hurts trust once researchers factored in the link between diversity and economic hardship. The biggest factors turned out to be urbanization, income gaps, and local poverty.
The data shows something fascinating – contact between different groups can soften negative effects. People who build bridges between ethnic groups tend to report higher trust levels, even in diverse neighborhoods. This suggests that meaningful interactions, not just living near each other, shape trust in multicultural areas.
Urbanization and alienation
Mass migration and quick urbanization meet to create unique social challenges. Urban centers where newcomers gather see both migrants and local communities making major adjustments. In stark comparison to this common belief that migrants adapt slowly, real evidence shows substantial integration across generations. Second-generation migrants show almost no differences from locals once family factors come into play.
Notwithstanding that, absorption worries stay prominent. Moving to urban areas raises concerns about environmental pressure and social adaptation. Families often split up when members migrate separately, which strains relationships. Modern communication technology helps ease these challenges by letting people stay connected across distances, unlike in earlier times.
Economic factors drive these urban migration patterns. Most people move to find better jobs and education. Rural areas face a tough situation as quality opportunities increasingly cluster in urban centers, leaving behind communities with reduced access to social services.
The role of media and political elites
Media coverage shapes how the public sees migration and often reinforces problematic stories. Research in six European countries revealed politicians made up 44% of direct quotes in traditional media migration coverage. Political talk shapes media stories while politicians use media to gage public opinion.
Media’s power grows during perceived crises or major events. Coverage can either humanize migrants or strip away their humanity. Studies show that using divisive language (us/them divisions) and stereotypes repeatedly makes the public less welcoming to newcomers. Coverage varies by country – Swedish media stays more positive while British outlets, especially right-wing ones, push harder anti-immigrant narratives.
Regular exposure to negative media messages ended up activating stereotypical images of migrant groups and might even change how people vote. This media-influenced cycle helps explain why many Europeans see migration as threatening despite facts that prove otherwise. To cite an instance, people link terrorism risk with migration even though native-born residents carried out most terrorist attacks in Europe.
Legal Categories and the Politics of Inclusion
Legal frameworks that govern migration create powerful systems to categorize people. These systems decide who belongs and who stays excluded. The impact of these classifications goes way beyond the reach and influence of administrative convenience. They shape life opportunities for affected populations.
Citizenship, asylum, and statelessness
A profound legal anomaly exists in statelessness. It affects those “not considered a national by any state”. People without state protection cannot access basic rights like education, healthcare, housing, employment, and documentation. UNHCR data shows around 537,000 stateless persons live in Europe. Global estimates reach 4.4 million. Most countries don’t report statelessness data, so experts believe actual numbers are nowhere near the real total.
Statelessness and refugee status create a complex web of challenges. Stateless individuals in EU+ countries filed about 84,200 asylum applications from 2010-2019. Recognition rates started high but dropped from 90% in 2015 to 64% in 2019. Wrong identification during registration means officials often miss statelessness and its effects in asylum processes.
The multiplication of migrant categories
Legal instruments create an intricate framework that puts migrants into categories. These include separate labels for women, men, children, refugees, stateless persons, migrant workers, and trafficking victims. Each group gets different rights and protections under various laws: international human rights, labor standards, refugee law, criminal law, humanitarian law, consular law, and maritime law.
This category system creates hierarchies of inclusion. To name just one example, see how few EU Member States have dedicated procedures to determine statelessness. Most states make stateless persons apply for residence permits through other means. This leaves many in legal limbo when they can’t meet alternative criteria. Identity issues block access to family reunification, resettlement, and other protection paths.
Law as a tool of dispossession
Law hasn’t just protected people throughout history – it’s also made dispossession legitimate. Legal frameworks in colonial and settler-colonial contexts moved ownership and rights from indigenous populations to colonizers systematically. Israel’s Absentees’ Property Law moved ownership from anyone called “absent” to the state. Military orders created an intricate system to control Palestinian land.
These legal mechanisms made challenges almost impossible. Military Order 58’s “good faith” clause kept transactions valid even when property classification was wrong. This shows a bigger pattern where “law [becomes] a tool of war, a tool of discrimination, a tool of annexation”.
Migration laws today still carry colonial legacies. Italy’s current migration management shows this through racial hierarchies and resource extraction logic. These legal frameworks copy exploitation patterns from colonial domination. Security processes affect racial minorities more than others.
Teaching Migration in a Liberal Society
Image Source: The Journalist’s Resource
Education plays a vital part in shaping how society views migration and migrant populations. The classroom serves as both a political and ethical space where people form and challenge their understanding of human mobility.
Critical pedagogy and migrant subjectivity
Teaching migration through critical pedagogy needs to put migrant voices at the center rather than talking about them from positions of authority. This approach sees migrants as knowledge producers in their own right and values their experiences and viewpoints. Critical pedagogy needs dialog about migrants’ worldviews and educators’ viewpoints. It acknowledges that their actions and views reflect their situations.
Learning materials that connect to students’ real experiences help create text-to-self connections. These materials encourage critical thinking skills and develop what Freire called “conscientization”. Students can reflect together on their economic status and express personally and politically important knowledge.
Avoiding category essentialism
Essentialism defines groups based on supposed common biological or cultural characteristics and often justifies unequal access to resources. Women who migrate face multiple essentialist processes. These connect to their gender, migration status, class, country of birth, and racialisation.
Educational research often strengthens essentialism by dividing samples by “migrant background,” a binary variable that:
- Masks participant heterogeneity
- Reinforces exclusionary norms of belonging
- Groups very different individuals solely by non-native heritage
Finnish curricular approaches show how to move past essentialism. They create an “imaginary of ‘culture’ as dynamic and including all students, with every student being a multicultural student”. This viewpoint avoids concepts that set apart and marginalize certain students.
Reframing migration as a shared condition
Today’s pedagogy of hospitality takes language education beyond basic function. It creates transformative experiences that enable growth and intercultural dialog. This needs an ethics of “mestizaje.” It recognizes how cultures and identities depend on each other in a dynamic process that grows richer through interaction.
Re-imagining Migration’s framework identifies five core dispositions to navigate increasing mobility:
- Understanding viewpoints
- Asking about migration
- Communicating across difference
- Recognizing power inequities
- Taking action toward inclusive societies
These approaches help students “learn to live with, work with, and respect our differences.” This work becomes “essential for the survival of democracy” in a world where human mobility keeps increasing.
Rethinking Liberalism in the Age of Mass Migration
Image Source: EuropeNow
Liberalism needs to address its core conflicts about human movement. Traditional liberal ideas don’t deal very well with today’s unprecedented population changes that challenge their basic principles.
Can liberalism survive its contradictions?
Liberalism faces a progressive’s dilemma—the apparent trade-off between supporting immigrants and keeping strong welfare states. Research across nations shows that countries with multiculturalism policies have kept their social spending and inclusive attitudes. However, studies show that large-scale emigration from Central and Eastern Europe (about 9% of the region’s population since 2004) is linked to democratic decline in those countries. This exodus affects liberal democracy because people who migrate usually have more liberal values than those who stay.
Toward a post-liberal ethics of mobility
Border abolition frameworks provide alternatives by challenging not just physical borders but all systems of exclusion. This approach aims to make borders “obsolete” by building new social connections. Different from simple “open borders,” this perspective reshapes how people connect across boundaries. Liberalism might continue to weaken as voters who oppose migration support nationalist parties, which makes forming coalitions across Europe more difficult.
Reimagining solidarity beyond borders
New “altruistic solidarity” puts the welfare of distant groups first. This solidarity surpasses traditional mechanical and organic forms by turning weak functional connections into ethical commitments for people far away. Expanding moral circles becomes vital to promote solidarity across boundaries. Meeting global challenges needs structured frameworks that support climate solidarity efforts across distant places and generations.
Mass migration is maybe even the biggest challenge liberal democracies face in the 21st century. We’ve seen fundamental contradictions emerge between liberalism’s universal goals and the reality of human communities. Liberal societies find themselves stuck between competing needs – economic logic versus moral duty, human rights versus border control, and personal freedom versus keeping society together.
These tensions show up everywhere in society. The rise of populist parties across Europe points to growing unease with traditional liberal views on migration. The economic picture is complex – capitalism needs workers to move freely but restricts people crossing borders. The legal system’s many migrant categories create unfair systems of who’s in and who’s out, which goes against equality under law.
Social trust forms the foundation of democratic societies, but it faces new challenges when communities change quickly. Research suggests economic inequality, not diversity itself, might better explain why trust declines. But social media disrupts these dynamics when migration combines with city growth, creating problems that liberal systems don’t deal very well with.
Education could offer a way forward. Teaching methods that center migrant voices, avoid stereotypes, and show migration as something we all share are a great way to get people to understand each other. But these approaches alone can’t solve the deeper conflicts within liberalism itself.
We might need to think differently about solidarity beyond traditional borders. Ideas like “altruistic solidarity” and expanding our circle of moral concern point to ways that surpass geographic limits. Liberal democracies must answer a tough question: can they adapt their core principles to handle unprecedented human movement while keeping society unified?
Mass migration shows that liberalism isn’t fixed – it’s a changing system of values and institutions. Nobody knows if this system can resolve its internal conflicts. What’s clear is that solving these problems needs us to be honest about the tension between liberal ideals and demographic realities. This honesty might be the first step toward bringing them together.