Fear and rejection of the migrant, or fear and rejection of ‘the other’?

“We are all children of immigrants,” sings Marilia Monzón. More than a metaphor, it is a historical fact. A look at any family tree or a memory of the rural exodus of the mid-20th century is enough to show that movement is part of our history. Migration is not an exception but a structural form of social organization. Today the labels may change — incoming migrants, expatriates, digital nomads — but the phenomenon endures.

Today, roughly 4% of the world’s population lives outside their country of origin, and only a minority of them — about 14% — do so involuntarily. In Spain, one in seven people is foreign-born, and one in three babies is born to a mother who is an immigrant.

Looking at receiving societies, they experience their own tensions in response to immigration. Claude Lévi-Strauss explained that human thought tends to organize reality into oppositions: us and them, what is ours and what is foreign. Those categories help make the world comprehensible, but they also oversimplify it and can produce distortions in contexts of high social complexity. The labels we use to name the other also shape the collective imagination. That is why speaking of “invaders” affects both migrants and the host society, exacerbating defensive mechanisms in the face of fear of the other.

In that sense, migration can act as a surface onto which a society projects its tensions and anxieties, usually tied to fear of losing status or stability. Migration can become the screen where unresolved social conflicts are placed, projecting a group’s internal tensions onto an external group and turning the migrant into what René Girard calls the “scapegoat” in group theory. The problem, therefore, is not migration itself but the meanings attached to it. This mechanism temporarily reduces collective anxiety because it reinforces the primary group’s identity, but it fosters the exclusion of what is conceived as “the other” and weakens social cohesion.

Social neuroscience has shown that the brain triggers alert responses to the unknown by releasing cortisol when it detects threat, while contact with people we recognize as peers produces connection mediated by oxytocin, as neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky explains. Added to this is the cognitive fatigue associated with diversity. Rejection thus does not always stem from hostility but also from the difficulty of tolerating ambiguity.

For those who migrate, migration implies a profound identity transformation. It affects belonging, self-esteem and social position. The so-called migratory grief includes visible losses — such as country or social network — and subtler ones, like recognition or cultural familiarity. In many cases a feeling of incomplete belonging appears: not fully of here nor there. This experience is especially common in middle generations who grow up between different cultural codes and often face the perception that they fit nowhere.

What most affects migrants’ mental health is not the act of moving but the conditions that follow: access to housing, employment, education, healthcare, stability and legal recognition. Unwanted loneliness, rejection or invisibility have a direct psychological impact. Administrative status is therefore not only legal but symbolic. Living without legal status implies constant uncertainty, a sense of threat and distrust that can trigger paranoid defenses and make it hard to project a future, as seen in transcultural psychiatry clinics. Regularization processes therefore have not only legal effects but psychological ones as well, because they facilitate recognition and the shift from “them” to “us,” as poverty researcher and activist Gonzalo Fanjul notes.

Ultimately, a society’s relationship with migration indicates how it manages complexity and fear. The conditions that promote collective mental health are also those that facilitate integration. Coexistence does not guarantee understanding, and multiculturalism does not ensure integration. Contact reduces discrimination when it involves proximity, cooperation, equality and shared goals. The type of interaction matters. One way to approach the other is to lose the fear. Fear feeds on abstraction. Faceless data do not produce empathy, and narratives without history do not build bonds. In clinical practice, as cultural psychiatrist Laura Moreno points out, when you listen and understand, you connect with the common human experience and the perception of threat decreases. It is about recognizing that human concerns are shared — health, stability, family, the future.

Empathy is a mechanism of social cohesion. With proximity, the boundaries between “us” and “them” can shift. When the other ceases to be an abstract category, society lowers its alert level.

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