Manufacturing Migration Threats: Collective Trauma, Postcolonial Legacies, and the Politics of Fear

How to cite this journal: Author, Date of the post, WMO Conflict Insight, Title of the post, ISSN: 2628 6998, https://worldmediation.org/journal/

EDITORIAL NOTE *

This article advances a sustained critique of migration policy and of the conduct of particular governments and named political figures. That critique reflects the author’s own perspective; this journal’s editorial position is neutral on contested questions of national policy. The manuscript discussed a recent violent incident in the United States, naming the accused, describing his mental health, and referring to a pending capital case. That passage has been removed: a named private individual awaiting trial should not be discussed in these terms in a journal with an ISSN, and the argument the passage illustrated is made elsewhere in the text without it. The article was written in 2025.

ABSTRACT

Across Europe and the United States, migration is increasingly framed as an existential threat. This article examines how states draw on collective trauma, historical insecurity, and postcolonial legacies to justify militarised borders, mass surveillance, and the erosion of civil liberties. It combines postcolonial theory, cognitive psychology, and critical security studies with empirical data and examples from the United States, Europe, and Israel, in order to examine how migration is securitised through the social construction of fear.

KEYWORDS

Migration, postcolonial theory, cognitive psychology, critical security studies, militarisation, securitisation, fear-driven governance

INTRODUCTION

Migration has always been a marker of human freedom, yet in Western politics today it is portrayed as one of society’s greatest threats (de Haas 2024). Across Europe and the United States, narratives of invasion, cultural erosion, and criminality have become central to debates about borders and citizenship. Empirical evidence, however, consistently contradicts these fears: research demonstrates no causal link between migration and increased crime or terrorism (Walczak and Lampas 2020; Light and Thomas 2022). The perception of migrants as a danger is therefore a constructed political instrument rather than a reflection of reality.

This article argues that the militarisation and securitisation of migration are responses not to objective threats but to deeper, unresolved anxieties rooted in collective trauma and in the legacies of colonial domination. Policies that fortify borders, expand surveillance, or criminalise mobility do not create safety; they manufacture fear, fracture societies, and obscure systemic failures. Migration becomes a scapegoat, deflecting attention from domestic and global inequalities. By tracing the historical, psychological, and political mechanisms that construct this threat, the article argues the need for a postcolonial and human-centred framework, one that prioritises dignity, justice, and sustainable peace over fear-driven governance.

MAIN CORPUS

Colonial legacies

Postcolonial theory reminds us that the wealth of the developed world was not self-generated. It was extracted, through slavery, colonisation, and the violent reordering of space, people, and resources. The Global North once moved freely through the Global South under the euphemism of exploration, seizing land and labour without consent. Now, when people from those formerly colonised regions move in the reverse direction, seeking safety, dignity, or opportunity, they are described as invaders.

Fanon described the colonial world as a world divided into compartments, a structure that continues to shape the present. Rights of movement are not distributed evenly; they are mediated by race, class, and geopolitical interest. As Achiume argues, whiteness confers privileges of international mobility, and proximity to whiteness calibrates those privileges (2022). Western states, swift to welcome Ukrainian refugees, have simultaneously subjected African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern migrants to hostile conditions and rhetoric.

The racialised logic behind this was made explicit by the former Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov when he justified opening the border to Ukrainian refugees, describing them as European, intelligent, and educated, and contrasting them with earlier arrivals about whose identity and past he said there had been uncertainty. Bulgaria, along with Hungary, is among the countries identified in the research as having high levels of anti-immigrant sentiment despite the absence of direct exposure to terrorist attack. This contradiction may be rooted in the region’s historical memory of Ottoman rule, suggesting how historical trauma continues to shape contemporary migration politics.

Gilroy’s concept of postcolonial melancholia (2005) captures the root of this contradiction: the West mourns the loss of empire without reckoning with its lasting consequences. Migrants are thus viewed not as those affected by global inequality but as threats to be contained. The migrant becomes the postcolonial subject who contests the space to which they were once confined (Ponzanesi 2016).

Current migration policies also entrench inequalities inherited from empire. Although explicitly ethnic selection of the kind once practised is no longer general, giving priority to the more educated, technically skilled, and wealthy is no less a form of restriction. It is restriction by wealthy states that deprives the poor and vulnerable in low and middle income countries, for whom globalisation was supposed to work, and the unavailability of legal and protected routes is not only contrary to the principle of equal opportunity but also drives irregular migration.

Perception and its formation

Well into the twentieth century the dominant view in Western psychology was one of biological determinism: the belief that psychological functions were driven entirely by innate impulse. This mechanistic conception of human reaction is the assumption from which governments have largely operated. Crime and mental illness, for example, are rarely addressed through a full understanding of context, and are instead treated as symptoms of individual inadequacy to be managed, often through securitisation. Vygotsky, by contrast, argued for the existence of lower and higher forms of human consciousness, the former based in instinct and the latter formed through cultural function, holding that each individual consciousness is built from the outside through relations with others (Kolstad 2012).

Perception, the giving of meaning to sense impressions, is a fundamental human capacity and represents the relationship to the outside world (Kolstad 2012). In the digital age it is algorithmically reinforced. Platforms driven by engagement rather than accuracy amplify narratives of threat, so that perceptions of the world are formed through the extreme rather than through experience. This is illustrated in the study by Walczak and Lampas, which found that the highest share of negative attitudes was observed in countries that had not in fact experienced jihadist attacks, a pattern explicable in part by dominant political rhetoric and shared prejudice (2020). There is, in other words, no correlation with direct experience, which points to the conclusion that the refugee-related threat of terrorism is a socially constructed problem.

This distortion is politically useful. Migration has become a convenient explanation for domestic insecurity. Rather than addressing inequality, climate disruption, or state failure, governments direct public anger toward those least responsible and least able to answer. This fractures social cohesion and redefines national identity along lines of exclusion.

Collective trauma and the counterproductive character of militarised safety

It is in human nature to seek safety through certainty, and trauma leaves traces. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 2001, Western states rewrote their legal and psychological structures around fear. As Nasciutti and Rahbari-Jawoko argue, collective trauma did not merely produce temporary emotional harm; it altered how people see, feel, and belong. It reshaped identities and, with them, the parameters of political acceptability. Fear, once private and fleeting, was rendered public and permanent. The consequences they identify include advances in military technology and surveillance, the networking of population intelligence and the sharing of civilian data, the strengthening of border control and the restriction of asylum procedures in the principal receiving countries, and a decline in dialogue and critical thinking amid the proliferation of false information (2021).

Yoder-Maina underscores the danger of unaddressed collective trauma, observing that chronic violence inflicts deep wounds not only on individuals but on the social fabric of communities, hindering development, eroding trust, and perpetuating cycles of violence, so that without addressing these underlying wounds communities remain susceptible to future conflict (2024).

For those forced to flee war or poverty, militarised borders and hostile host states risk physical harm, compound trauma, and erode dignity, reproducing the very cycles of violence that forced their movement. Poor conditions, combined with social isolation and systemic injustice, create conditions in which radicalisation becomes more likely. Securitisation is therefore not merely ineffective but counterproductive. It feeds the narrative that migrants are inherently violent or culturally incompatible. Islam is presented as antithetical to Western values, poverty is equated with criminality, and the West, unwilling to confront its role in destabilising the Global South, demands assimilation to a fictional ideal.

The disparity between perceived and actual risk

Despite the prevailing rhetoric, terrorism by foreign-born individuals remains statistically marginal. According to data compiled by the Cato Institute, the annual likelihood of an American dying in an attack committed by a foreign-born terrorist between 1975 and 2017 was approximately one in 3.8 million, and in twenty-seven of those forty-three years there were no recorded deaths at all attributable to such attacks.

Political narratives invert this reality. As documented by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other sources, including the far left and those inspired by transnational jihadist movements. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and their number grew significantly in the years to 2020, accounting for two thirds of attacks and plots in 2019 and a still higher proportion in early 2020 (CSIS 2020).

These figures reveal a striking disconnect between perceived and actual risk, sustained largely by politicised narrative and fear-based coverage. The consistent overrepresentation of foreign-born terrorism in public discourse has cultivated a disproportionate sense of threat, divorced from context. This aligns with what scholars of critical security studies identify as securitisation: the process by which political actors construct an issue as an existential threat, enabling extraordinary measures and circumventing normal democratic deliberation (Buzan et al. 1998).

The disproportionate attention given to foreign-born terrorism also obscures the more statistically significant threat posed by domestic extremism, and it legitimises policies that target migrants through surveillance, detention, and border militarisation despite the absence of any demonstrable link between migration and elevated terrorism risk. In this sense securitisation is less a response to empirical danger than a reflection of deeper anxieties about identity, cultural change, and the position of the West in a globalising world.

Consent and the surveillance state

Despite the evidence that domestic extremism poses a greater threat, state agencies disproportionately target migrants under the heading of national security. Recent years have seen an expansion of immigration enforcement operations, domestic deployments, and surveillance technologies including facial recognition and biometric tracking. Framed as necessary for public safety, these measures function in practice to marginalise vulnerable populations.

This dynamic exemplifies the account given by Herman and Chomsky of manufactured consent: fear is mobilised to legitimise policies that would otherwise face resistance. The result is a securitised state in which civil liberties are subordinated to an engineered perception of threat. The rise of the surveillance state is thus not a neutral or technologically inevitable development but a politically produced response to perceived disorder, one that is racialised in its effects, selectively enforced, and justified through the language of security.

Securitisation becomes most dangerous when it converges with emotional shock events or isolated acts of violence, which are converted into general arguments about categories of people. The asymmetry in public response is striking: some acts of violence generate intense coverage and political mobilisation, while systemic violence against migrants, refugees, or racialised minorities routinely fails to provoke comparable attention. This reveals securitisation as a discursive as much as a material process, constructing categories of threat and innocence in ways that reflect ideology rather than objective risk.

Israel offers a further case of intensive securitisation. Long presented as a model of border defence and technological innovation, the state has developed a surveillance regime that operates extensively in the Palestinian territories under the heading of counterterrorism. Biometric databases, predictive policing, and restrictions on protest have become normalised, and comparable methods are increasingly exported to or replicated by other states (Zureik and Lyon 2012).

The public’s acquiescence in these measures is not accidental. Cognitive research suggests that in moments of heightened uncertainty people exhibit a bias toward authority, order, and perceived safety, even at the cost of civil liberties (Kahneman 2011). The collective trauma produced by decades of terrorism, economic insecurity, and social fragmentation has created fertile ground for securitisation. As a result, policies that would once have provoked alarm, such as indefinite detention, biometric surveillance, or military deployment in domestic space, are increasingly accepted as common-sense responses to complex social problems.

Yet this framework is counterproductive to peace and to public safety. By redirecting social frustration toward marginalised groups and embedding discriminatory assumptions in technological systems, securitisation inflames tension. It erodes trust, deepens polarisation, and displaces trauma-informed policy. The securitised state is not a site of safety but a site of managed fear, in which power is sustained not by solving problems but by continually producing them.

SUMMARY *

The article’s argument is that the gap between measured risk and public perception is not a failure of information but the product of a process, and it identifies three mechanisms that produce it. Historically, the hierarchies established under empire persist in who may cross a border and on what terms, which is why reception varies so sharply between populations fleeing comparable danger. Psychologically, threat perception is formed socially rather than experientially, which is why hostility to refugees is highest where refugees are fewest and attacks have not occurred. Politically, the construction of an existential threat authorises measures that would not otherwise pass, which is why the response is directed at the population that is statistically least dangerous and least able to object. The author’s conclusion follows from the third: a securitised state is not one that has failed to identify its actual risks but one for which the identification of the wrong risk is functional.

CONCLUSION

The securitisation of migration in the United States, Europe, and beyond reflects not objective risk but historical trauma, political calculation, and entrenched postcolonial hierarchies. Militarised borders, surveillance infrastructure, and exclusionary rhetoric do not mitigate insecurity; they reproduce cycles of fear, social fragmentation, and inequality. Far from enhancing public safety, these measures exacerbate the vulnerabilities of migrants and marginalised communities while normalising authoritarian practice in the name of security.

Recognising migration as a matter of rights rather than as a threat requires a shift of framework: one that centres human dignity, addresses the legacies of colonial exploitation, and acknowledges the cognitive and social mechanisms by which fear is produced. A postcolonial and trauma-informed approach would redirect attention from punitive measures toward constructive intervention, investing in social cohesion, equitable opportunity, and global justice. Only by dismantling the narratives that frame migration as inherently dangerous can states cultivate resilience, uphold civil liberties, and promote sustainable peace.

POTENTIAL SOLUTION *

The article’s diagnosis is well supported and its prescription is the part that would benefit most from development, because a critique of securitisation that concludes with a call for a different framework leaves the practitioner without anything to do on Monday.

The evidence on what changes attitudes is more encouraging than the article’s account of manufactured consent implies. Correcting misperception has a documented effect: people in almost every surveyed country substantially overestimate the proportion of migrants in their population, and studies that supply the actual figure produce measurable shifts in policy preference. Contact has a larger and better-established effect, and the finding from the intergroup literature is specific: sustained, cooperative contact between people of roughly equal standing in a shared setting reduces hostility, and it does so most where the contact is ordinary rather than organised around the difference. That points toward workplaces, schools, sports clubs and neighbourhood associations rather than toward campaigns, and it is work this journal’s readers are positioned to do.

Second, the geography of hostility that the article identifies deserves to be pressed further, because it is the most actionable finding in the piece. Opposition is highest where migrants are fewest and where local institutions have thinned, and the research on this associates it with the decline of the intermediary bodies through which people once encountered one another and through which grievance was once channelled. That is a structural account and it suggests that the response to anti-migrant sentiment lies substantially in places where migrants are not present.

Two qualifications strengthen the argument. The claim that securitisation serves elite interests is largely right and is incomplete: public opinion has in several cases moved ahead of political rhetoric rather than following it, and treating populations as objects of manipulation reproduces the condescension the article criticises elsewhere. People with concerns about the pace of change in their communities are not simply the recipients of propaganda, and a framework that cannot engage them will not change any policy. And the article’s evidence on terrorism is strong precisely because it comes from the Cato Institute and from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, neither of which can be dismissed as sympathetic to its conclusions; that provenance is worth stating explicitly, since it is the strongest thing the argument has.

Finally, a note on method. The article’s most valuable observation is that securitisation converts individual acts into arguments about categories, and the mechanism is well known: a single vivid case is more available to memory than any statistic and displaces it. The corresponding discipline, for anyone writing about these questions, is to resist making the same move in the opposite direction. An argument that rests on the documented pattern rather than on the counter-example is harder to answer, and it does not require anyone’s case to be discussed before it has been decided.

* Added by the WMO Editorial Team

REFERENCES

Achiume, E. T. (2022) Racial Borders. Georgetown Law Journal 110(2), 445 to 505.

Buzan, B., Wæver, O., and J. de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Lynne Rienner, Boulder.

Cato Institute (2019) Terrorism and Immigration: A Risk Analysis. Washington D.C.

Center for Strategic and International Studies (2020) The War Comes Home: The Evolution of Domestic Terrorism in the United States. Washington D.C.

de Haas, H. (2024) Changing the Migration Narrative: On the Power of Discourse, Propaganda and Truth Distortion. IMI Working Paper No. 181. University of Amsterdam.

Esposito, A. (2022) The Limitations of Humanity: Differential Refugee Treatment in the EU. Harvard International Review, 14 September 2022.

Fanon, F. (1965) The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, New York.

Gilroy, P. (2005) Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia University Press, New York.

Herman, E. S., and N. Chomsky (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, New York.

Huysmans, J. (2006) The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. Routledge, London.

Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.

Kolstad, A. (2012) Vygotsky’s Theory of Consciousness and the Social Construction of the Mind. Psychology 3(9).

Light, M. T., and J. T. Thomas (2022) Undocumented Immigration and Crime in the United States.

Nasciutti, F., and M. Rahbari-Jawoko (2021) Psychological and Social Analysis of Collective Trauma: The Enduring Lessons Learned Twenty Years after the September 11th Terrorist Attacks. Reflexão 46.

Ponzanesi, S. (2016) Postcolonial Subjectivity and Migration Studies. Interventions.

Walczak, B., and N. Lampas (2020) Beliefs on Refugees as a Terrorist Threat: The Social Determinants of Refugee-Related Stereotypes. Migration Studies: Review of Polish Diaspora 46(2), 53 to 70.

Yoder-Maina, A. (2024) On collective trauma and chronic violence.

Zureik, E., and D. Lyon (Eds.) (2012) Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power. Routledge, London.

Supplementary references added by the WMO Editorial Team

Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, 1951, and the Protocol of 1967, in particular Articles 31 and 33.

International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, 1990.

Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, 2018.

Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Addison-Wesley, Cambridge.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751 to 783.

Grigorieff, A., Roth, C., & Ubfal, D. (2020). Does Information Change Attitudes toward Immigrants? Demography, 57(3), 1117 to 1143.

Rodríguez-Pose, A. (2018). The Revenge of the Places That Don’t Matter. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 11(1), 189 to 209.

Bigo, D. (2002). Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease. Alternatives, 27, 63 to 92.