We are living through an age of disruption. The post-war consensus that liberal democracy, free markets, and open societies were the “only game in town” has been steadily eroded by crisis after crisis. The 9/11 terrorist attack crushed Western hopes of a post-Cold War world united by faith in capitalism. The financial crash of 2008 exposed the fragility of globalisation’s economic promises.
The refugee crisis of 2015 in Europe revealed its social strains. Then the Covid pandemic of 2020 brought globalisation to a screeching halt and reawakened the authoritarian dream of closed borders and strong states.
Add to this the escalating costs of climate change, rising inequality, a global trade war, and a cost-of-living crunch, and one begins to see why faith in democratic governments to manage complexity is waning. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, anger, and disillusionment, a simple story has taken hold: it’s all the fault of immigrants.
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Immigration on populists’ crosshairs
When economies sputter, when public services strain, when communities feel fragmented, immigration becomes the symbol for everything wrong with globalisation.
It offers politicians a visceral, easy-to-grasp story: ‘Your housing is unaffordable because of them. Your hospital is overcrowded because of them. Your jobs are threatened because of them.’
Never mind that the evidence shows otherwise—that migration generally boosts economies, raises overall output without depressing local wages, and is a net fiscal positive.
Populism and the politics of fear
What matters is that the hard truth is complicated, while the populist narrative is simple. Faced with a “spaghetti chart” of interconnected crises—pandemics, supply shocks, inflation, housing pressures—people gravitate toward the single, tidy explanation: immigration is to blame.
That’s exactly what Pauline Hanson, the leader of Australia’s far-right One Nation political party, recently told Australia’s The Saturday Paper, to explain her party’s recent lift in the polls: “People have lost hope … wherever you look – mass migration, climate change, the education system, escalating crime, the cost of living, job security, being able to buy a house – the whole country is in one hell of a mess, and that’s why they’re angry and they want a change.”
This narrative has deep roots. Humans are wired for group identity, drawing lines between insiders and outsiders, especially in times of insecurity. In earlier eras, it was witches or infidels. In World War 2, it was a phantom Zionist conspiracy. Today, it is the immigrants.
Once immigration is cast as the source of all ills, the next step is equally simple: only a strongman can stop it. The democratic process, messy and pluralistic, is portrayed as weak and complicit. The promise of authoritarians is neat and compelling: ‘I alone can fix it. Give me power, and I will close the borders, protect your jobs, restore your community.’
This is the story Donald Trump told in 2016, branding Mexican migrants as criminals and rapists, and insisting that only a wall and a “tough guy” could save America.
Variations of the same narrative fuelled Brexit in the UK—“take back control”—and continue to animate far-right movements across Europe. They echo the totalitarian leaders of Europe just before World War 2, another age of complex intersecting crises blamed wrongly on ethnic minorities. In each case, migration has been the poster child for a much broader rejection of globalisation.
The current far-right surge is therefore part of a political cycle.
Authoritarianism defined the mid-20th century, but its defeat in World War 2 opened the way for a liberal revolution, which merged two currents: social liberalism, driven by civil rights, feminist, environmental, and student movements; and economic liberalism, driven by a revival of free-market thinking.
Together they established the new liberal orthodoxy of globalisation, open borders, and individual freedoms that dominated Western politics for half a century, reaching a peak of triumphalism after the Cold War.
But over the last 25 years, the cascade of crises has steadily eroded that hegemony. Terrorist attacks, financial meltdowns, refugee movements, climate pressures, and finally the pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of openness and reminded societies of the appeal of closed borders and strong states.
What began as marginal authoritarian nostalgia has re-entered the mainstream, carried by the promise of simplicity and control in an age of complexity. The question now is how to avoid the wholesale collapse that has occurred at this point in past cycles.
The flash mob effect
What sets today’s anti-immigration movements apart is how they organise.
They grow online, out of sight of mainstream politics. In closed networks, they immerse isolated individuals in an alternative reality, where the notion that “immigrants are ruining everything” is taken as fact. These groups feed on each other’s anger, hidden from view, until they erupt suddenly into the streets as marches or protests.
What we are seeing are ‘political flash mobs’. They look sudden, but most are the result of months or years of online incubation. Like vaccine conspiracy theories, anti-immigrant myths spread fast across borders, pushed by the viral logic of social media. These digital echo-chambers make fringe views feel mainstream and give authoritarian leaders a ready-made army of loyal supporters.
And it’s not just the far right. Social media has reshaped politics everywhere. People once scattered and silenced have gained power by linking online. The rise of LGBTQ politics shows this: people once isolated by stigma found they were not alone, built communities, and organised at a scale that was impossible before. That new strength has reshaped the Left of politics and become central to today’s culture wars.
The lesson is that online platforms act like accelerants. They let both fringe and minority groups build solidarity, create closed worlds, and mobilise out of sight. When these movements surface—whether in campaigns for minority rights or marches against immigration—they seem sudden. But they are the product of new forms of digital cohesion that have destabilised traditional politics on both sides.
Australia’s populist test
Australia has not escaped anti-immigrant populism. Some right-wing leaders tried Trump-style rhetoric, but voters rejected it. Before the last federal election, the Opposition Coalition ran hard on an anti-immigration platform. After an early rise in the polls in mid-2024, it collapsed in a historic defeat.
Commentators call this landslide loss “the Trump Effect.” Voters toyed with populist rhetoric but, after Trump’s win, recoiled from a local version. The Coalition’s defeat was brutal: its seats fell to under half the Government’s, its leader lost his own electorate, and the party split for the first time in almost four decades. The new leadership is now in soul-searching mode, with immigration at the top of its agenda for a rethink.
This reversal has shaken the Liberal-National Coalition’s traditional alliance with far-right forces like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. The Coalition now faces a stark choice: cutting ties to such parties will initially cost votes, but in the long-term, it might be the only way to win back the centre. While far right parties will initially gain those votes, they will be frozen out of the mainstream, relegated back to the fringes.
In this context, the far right staged a show of force. After weeks of flooding social media with false claims about migration, a ‘March for Australia’ campaign drew thousands into city streets under the banner of ending “mass immigration.”
Many, misled by inflated statistics and glossy lies, ended up listening to hard-core neo-Nazi members of the National Socialist Network. Like partygoers duped by the infamous Fyre Festival, many went home shellshocked and humiliated.
The visibility of these marches emboldened copycat events in the UK, creating the illusion of a surging movement. But in Australia they look more like an urgent appeal for attention by a fringe movement at risk of losing its mainstream foothold. The August 31 ‘March for Australia’ was less a demonstration of strength than a plea to the new leadership of the Liberal-National Coalition: “Don’t abandon us.”
The migration state
Far-Right politics in Europe and the US differ from Australia’s. This is partly because migration shapes Australia’s identity more deeply: over half the population was either born abroad themselves or has a parent who was. It is hard to cast people as “outsiders” when nearly everyone, except Indigenous groups, descends from recent immigrants.
Compulsory voting strengthens this effect. Unlike in Europe or the US, where parties rally extremes to boost turnout, Australian politicians must win the median voter—often an immigrant or the child of one.
But there is another reason. Australia is what political scientists call a “migration state”. While garrison states focus on security and welfare states focus on population health, the central purpose of migration states is to control population movement.
That migration policy emerges from a large ecosystem of institutions across government, academia, the press, and civil society, keeping migration at tolerable levels and creating checks against extreme political reactions. As a result, major immigration policy shifts are rare: changes are usually small and handled by bureaucrats rather than politicians.
Migration in Australia is thus not just policy but part of the nation’s identity and state machinery: it is pre-political. This stability has shielded it from the immigration-driven turmoil seen in Britain with Brexit and in the US with Trump. Though Australia has more foreign-born residents than either, its debates are calmer, thanks to both national identity and long-term state capacity.
For historical reasons, Europe and the US have long maintained laissez faire systems with functionally open borders, and they rely on weak, reactive migration policies to mimic control.
Meanwhile, Australia has built a durable system that treats controlled migration as a normal part of society. This steadiness has helped it avoid the populist upheavals shaking other democracies.
International praise for Australia’s migration system often centres on the controversial “stop the boats” policy. Australia’s “Stop the Boats” policy refers broadly to a series of deterrence measures from the early 2000s onward—including the Pacific Solution, offshore processing in Nauru and Manus Island, and later the 2013 Operation Sovereign Borders—that combine maritime interdiction, boat turnbacks, visa denial, reporting blackouts, and military-led enforcement to prevent unauthorized sea arrivals and reinforce that entry is only possible with a valid visa.
In the UK, some argue its harsh deterrence spared Australia the populist upheavals seen elsewhere. But this view is misguided. “Stop the boats” has not stopped bogus asylum claims. Most come by plane, not boat. And while its architects were focusing on boat turn-backs, they were also quietly dismantling Australia’s visa compliance capabilities. This allowed a surge of copy-paste applications which have overwhelmed the asylum system.
Unlike boat arrivals, few of these applicants have been recognised as genuine refugees. By August 2025, more than 100,000 had been denied protection visas but not deported—far exceeding the numbers from any past boat arrivals. But this issue attracts little attention, because stories of arrivals by plane lack the drama of “invading boats.”
Europeans, meanwhile, have embraced the superstition that stopping boats equals migration control. It may look like control—and thus make some people feel reassured. But it comforts without delivering. Tormenting asylum seekers may look tough, but it’s not the same thing as real migration control.
To say “stop the boats” has worked is also to ignore its staggering costs: A$12 billion between 2012 and 2024, ruined lives, weakened institutions, and a diminished reputation abroad. Even if it deterred some, it is an ugly bargain: punishing the few to scare the many. It passes for pragmatism only because Australia has so far failed to imagine better.
The broader lesson is that controlling asylum is not the same as controlling migration. Australia has fumbled asylum but kept its wider migration system relatively steady, sustaining public trust. Irregular flows remain small not because of turn-backs, but because of a strong migration state.
That is the real best practice. “Stop the boats” cannot be copied: it only appears to “work” because of Australia’s deeper institutions, which Europe lacks.
Europe’s crises reflect a sudden shift from centuries of colonial emigration to large-scale immigration without building the systems to manage it. There is no silver bullet—only the hard work of constructing migration states from scratch.
A democratic path forward
What is needed now is not the false simplicity of scapegoating, but an honest reckoning with complexity. The crises faced by all liberal democracies—unaffordable living costs, extreme inequalities, energy disruption, pandemics, political polarisation, unchecked digital transformation—are real, but they are not caused by immigration.
Orderly and regular immigration remains essential to the economies, cultures, and demographic futures of industrialised societies. The real challenge is to better manage migration’s externalities: ensuring affordable housing, investing in infrastructure, supporting social cohesion, and maintaining trust in public institutions.
The alternative is to let exclusion, polarisation and resentment fester, allowing authoritarians to sell the lie that democracy has failed and only they can save us. That is a dangerous path, as history has shown too many times before.
Liberal democracies stand at a crossroads on issues of migration. One road leads to stronger democratic institutions capable of tackling socio-cultural complexity with honesty. The other leads to walls, scapegoats, and strongmen.
Alan Gamlen is Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at The Australian National University, Canberra. Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info
