Immigration, regrettably, continues to be framed as one of the country’s greatest problems. The issues of borders, citizenship, and resource allocation have always existed, yet the narrative dominating public discourse and seeping through all policy discussions has, chillingly, become a wider, deeply ingrained pattern of dehumanising and scapegoating.
This construction has become acceptable in every corner of our society, shaping media, politics, and everyday conversations in ways that pit people against each other, removing empathy and compassion. In a nation built on successive waves of migration – one that has seen its culture and economy enriched because of it – immigrants are increasingly cast as threats rather than contributors.
Expert voices – and those of migrants and asylum seekers themselves – are discredited or ignored, while those elected to office, who could challenge the falsehoods pushed by a populist rightwing agenda, remain silent or play along. They hope to score points in a game of sensationalist antagonism where, ultimately, everyone loses their humanity.
This narrative gains traction, in part, because people across the country are facing genuine scarcity. Resources are difficult to access, even for locals in many regions, some travelling for hours just to secure a single medical appointment. When essential services feel increasingly difficult to obtain, it’s no wonder that some fear migrants may “take their place” in already stretched systems. It is this feeling, while understandable, that is being exploited.
Migration is part of the solution
What is rarely communicated is that migration is also part of the solution. Newcomers include nurses, doctors, caregivers, and other essential professionals – people who, once integrated, can pay taxes and help relieve the very shortages that fuel public anxiety. But instead of highlighting this, the dominant story paints migrants as a dangerous, profiteering collective, responsible for society’s problems, and see exclusion as the cure.
This story did not emerge organically; it is intentionally cultivated. And its consequences are deeply corrosive.
Migration has always been, and always will be, an essential part of societal evolution. Asylum seekers are human beings in need of safety. Offering help to those in danger is a basic moral principle – echoed across every ethical tradition and ideology – and one widely supported across society. Genuine integration, which benefits both newcomers and long-standing residents, is achievable only when people feel secure: secure in the stewardship of public resources, secure in the protection of their democratic values, and secure in the understanding that culture is not a rigid and brittle object threatened by outsiders, but something vibrant that grows only richer through exchange.
If political leaders truly wish to address this so-called ‘crisis’, they must confront the real issue: the ongoing production of fear and division that serves to distract from structural inequalities and preserves existing hierarchies. Their task is not to amplify scapegoating narratives, but to challenge and diminish them, and to empower a public capable of meeting migration with clarity, confidence, and compassion.
To move forward, taxation and public policies must be re-evaluated with empathetic, human-centred priorities, rather than purely profit-driven ones. Only then can we begin to rebuild trust, expand access to resources, and create systems where communities – and the newcomers who join them – are not pitted against each other, but supported to thrive together.
Nazish’s story
I am an immigrant. I came to Paris from Karachi in the late 1980s. Ostensibly I came to study, since I had received a scholarship from the Paris School of Fine Arts. But mostly I came to escape the violence that had erupted in Pakistan following the implementation of Taliban-influenced extremist martial law.
I did not ask for asylum because I did not know this process existed. I had been raped, I had seen friends tortured and killed, and I had had acid thrown on me at the university bus stop in Pakistan – an effort to stop girls and women like myself from studying. The Afghan war, and Western support of religious extremists against the Russians, had wreaked havoc in my home country. Violence was everywhere. I was so broken by it that I didn’t start speaking about all that had happened to me until the year I turned 47, some three decades later.
I had not asked for asylum. A kind Frenchman from the consulate had seen my paintings in Pakistan – the ones I had started doing to express my anguish, afraid as I was of writing or speaking of the horrors I was witnessing – and had sent them to the Paris school on my behalf. Traumatised by terror, when the acceptance letter came, I did not think twice and left the country, despite opposition from my family.
I did not ask for asylum, even though I was a young brown girl born to the ‘wrong faith’, with a ‘worthless passport’, and pretty enough to encourage all kinds of abusers to take advantage of my vulnerability.
I clung to life in Paris, refusing to return, even in some very difficult circumstances. People commended me on my bravery, but I marvelled at their ignorance; it would have been braver to have stayed in Pakistan and spoken out instead.
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Support from friends and women connections
I struggled, but I not only survived, I thrived. I studied, had a career, and a family. I know what it is that helped me achieve this: it is the support I was lucky enough to receive from friends that I met in the first weeks of my arriving in Paris, and who are my closest friends to this day. There were days I was unable to move, paralysed by fear and hopelessness, but they lent me their strength, and I was able to step out from my shell.
Years later, I started a non-profit in Paris to care for immigrant women from Brazil. Domestic violence and abuse are prevalent in this population. The Brazilian Consul, a brilliant woman, helped me, and hired the therapist and lawyer I worked with to officialise the support needed so desperately. Together, we would not only care for these women, accompanying them to the police station and assisting them with their legal issues, but also providing them with emotional safety. We organised visits to museums, meet-ups, discussions, bazaars, and other events, where these women could come and feel surrounded by friendly souls and protected from the evil.
And then a few years ago, when the US decided to pull out from Afghanistan, I was connected to Farzana, a young 24-year-old journalist from Kabul. Targeted by the Taliban, I helped her to leave the country and hosted her in my home for three years. When she arrived, she was exhausted and terrified. She refused to leave the house. I accompanied her to a local soup kitchen and insisted that she help out once a week and serve food. It was her first contact with locals, a safe place, where she could interact with others. She now speaks fluent French, has completed a business degree, is working, and bought her first apartment last month. And last month she was received by French authorities for an interview for French citizenship.
At the same time, I was in contact with other women who had arrived in France from Afghanistan. While the government provided them with housing, clothing, language classes, and regular visits by a social worker, there was little emotional connection.
One of the women, Parisa arrived in France in December 2021. When I met her in March 2022, she clung to me and said it was the first time she had been able to talk to someone. She needed to share the pain she felt on hearing her brother, a pilot, had been killed by the Taliban. Having seen how working in the soup kitchen had helped Farzana, I approached one in Tours, where Parisa was based, to ask if they would take her on. I was made to understand that the Catholic soup kitchen was not open to people of Muslim origin and told that Parisa could try to “integrate” elsewhere.
“Yes, but not immigrants like you”
Asylum seekers and immigrants have always been treated as lesser humans the world over. But in recent times, this treatment seems to have gained in violence and cruelty. When I discuss this with people who cast their votes for the extreme right, I am often told “yes, but not immigrants like you”. I was a brown girl, from a Muslim country, with no financial resources, when I arrived and worked illegally in a butcher shop to survive. I wonder what they mean by “not immigrants like you”?
The other phenomenon I have observed is that anti-immigrant feelings are often most extreme in regions where there are few or no immigrants. Fear and mistrust are presumably not born, then, from seeing real people but from imagined monsters inhabiting the skins of humans of different origins. These asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants are relentlessly demonised and scapegoated to deflect from the real causes of the ills of our society.
These people are hidden – during the long waiting period as their papers are processed, they have little contact with locals and are housed in isolation with only others in similar situations. It makes it so easy for political grifters to project on to them any scary story that will help their cause, by enraging a struggling local population. What these merchants of horror are most afraid of is letting people create connections and bridge differences.
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