Movement across geographies is not a new phenomenon but a longstanding feature of human life, shaped by the need for survival, adaptation, and connection. Thus, migration is not an anomaly, but a fundamental expression of human behaviour. Across time and place, people have crossed borders in search of safety, opportunity, and survival. Families stretch across continents, communities are formed through shared histories of movement, and identities are shaped through encounters with new social worlds. However, despite this, migration is rarely discussed in ways which reflect its everyday, human reality. In much contemporary political discourse, particularly across the global North and in the United Kingdom, migration is increasingly framed through the language of crisis. It is presented as something to be managed, contained, or reduced. This framing narrows the conversation, turning complex lives into simplified categories of risk, burden, or threat.
What disappears in the process are the psychological dimensions of migration: the uncertainty, adaptation, loss, resilience, and meaning making which accompany movement across nations. These dominant narratives shape the conditions in which migrants live, influencing policies, institutions, and everyday interactions in ways that can both subtly and overtly produce harm.
When rhetoric becomes environment
Political rhetoric around immigration naturally leaks into the social environment. Language choices shape public perception, often amplifying fear and division while obscuring underlying political agendas. This kind of sensationalism filters into everyday interactions, influencing how communities see one another and reinforcing social distance and separatism.
In the UK, the growing visibility of anti-immigration rhetoric, including that associated with Reform UK, have intensified calls for restriction and control. The local elections in England in May 2026 showed a significant surge for Reform UK, with the party emerging as one of the largest gainers in council seats and expanding its control in several local authorities, alongside substantial losses for Labour. While these are local-level results, they are widely interpreted as signalling a broader shift in the political climate, particularly around issues of immigration, borders, and national identity. The growing electoral traction of explicitly anti-immigration platforms does not operate in isolation from the everyday narratives outlined above; rather, it intensifies them, lending institutional weight to sentiments that frame migration as a site of threat and contestation. Thus, political rhetoric and electoral outcomes mutually reinforce a social atmosphere in which belonging is increasingly politicised and unevenly distributed. For migrant communities, this extends beyond simply background noise, into lived experiences that are felt, navigated, and anticipated in daily life.
Even those with secure legal status are not insulated from these effects. The tone of public debate can generate a persistent sense of precarity; a feeling that rights may shift, belonging may be questioned, and safety is conditional. Studies by organisations such as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, alongside work from Migrant Voice and Open Rights Group, point to the psychological consequences of such climates. Anxiety, withdrawal, and heightened vigilance are not isolated responses, they are patterned outcomes of living within environments structured by suspicion and exclusion. However, these experiences are rarely centred in public debate. Instead, discussions remain focused on enforcement, numbers, and borders, leaving little space to consider how these systems are lived and felt.
Decisions shaped by uncertainty
The effects of hostile climates become particularly visible in the decisions people make. In recent years, applications for British citizenship in the UK have risen significantly, reaching record levels. While often interpreted as evidence of integration or aspiration, these trends can also be understood as responses to instability.
For many, applying for citizenship is less about opportunity and more about securing a sense of permanence in an uncertain landscape. However, the high financial cost, now close to £1,750 for most adults, introduces another layer of inequality. Security becomes conditional on both legal eligibility and the ability to pay; those with fewer resources are left navigating greater risk, reinforcing existing disparities. Similar dynamics can be observed in the United States, where immigration enforcement practices led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have produced widespread fear.
Accounts documented by organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch highlight serious concerns about detention conditions, healthcare failures, and the psychological toll of confinement. Prolonged uncertainty, isolation, and punitive practices contribute to significant mental health impacts, including depression, anxiety, and increased risk of self-harm and suicide ideation.
The psychological weight of policy
Migration policy is often discussed in administrative or economic terms, but it also has profound psychological consequences. Living under conditions of uncertainty, where legal status, safety, and belonging may be questioned, can generate chronic stress. Over time, this stress accumulates, shaping psychological wellbeing, family dynamics and children’s development. Professional bodies such as the British Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association have emphasised the need to recognise these impacts. Their work highlights how environments characterised by fear and instability can undermine mental health, calling for approaches that prioritise wellbeing rather than exacerbate harm.
However, for this work to be impactful, there is a need to situate contemporary migration debates within longer socio-historical trajectories. Countries like the UK and the US are not neutral actors in global migration patterns. Their histories of empire, expansion, and resource extraction have shaped the very conditions that drive movement today. Scholars such as Gurminder Bhambra and Frantz Fanon remind us that migration cannot be separated from these histories. However, public discourse often presents it as an external problem, detached from questions of accountability and global inequality.
Recentring lived experience
In response to these gaps, research in migration psychology has increasingly turned toward lived experience. Palgrave Macmillan has recently published our two-volume collection Migration Psychology, a project developed at Leeds Trinity University which brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to foreground the emotional and relational dimensions of migration. Rather than treating migrants as abstract subjects of policy, these books explore how people make sense of movement in their own lives.
Migration Psychology Volume I and II both consider identity, belonging, and connection, while also situating these experiences within broader systems of power, including borders, institutions, and historical inequalities. Importantly, this perspective resists reducing migration to narratives of suffering alone. While acknowledging trauma and exclusion, it also highlights agency, resilience and resistance. Migrants sustain families across distances, create new forms of community, and contribute in meaningful ways to the societies they inhabit. These stories complicate dominant narratives, showing migration as both constrained and creative.
Beyond simplified solutions
Despite the complexity of migration, policy responses often remain reductive. Research from the Migration Observatory demonstrates that migrants are deeply embedded in the UK’s social and economic systems, however services and policies frequently fail to reflect this reality, relying on uniform approaches that overlook diversity of experience.
A more meaningful understanding requires listening to those directly affected. Testimonies collected by the UN Refugee Agency and community organisations reveal the everyday work involved in rebuilding life, navigating unfamiliar systems, managing uncertainty, and negotiating belonging in contexts that may be both welcoming and exclusionary. These experiences are shaped by both national policy and local institutions such as schools, healthcare systems, housing, and workplaces; these sites can either support inclusion or deepen marginalisation. Recognising this is crucial to developing responses that are both effective and productive.
Rethinking the conversation
As migration continues to occupy a central place in political debate, there is an urgent need to shift how it is understood. Psychology offers valuable tools for this shift, drawing attention to the ways social environments shape mental health, relationships, and collective life. Moving beyond deficit-based narratives means recognising migrants as individuals navigating complex conditions with resilience and resourcefulness, rather than problems to be eradicated. It also requires acknowledging the structural factors that produce harm, rather than locating difficulties solely within individuals or communities.
Migration is neither new nor exceptional: it is an enduring feature of human societies. When approached with attention to dignity, context, humanity and lived experience, it becomes possible to move beyond fear-driven narratives and towards more nuanced, inclusive ways of thinking about movement and belonging.
Saira Mirza & Dr. Laura De Pretto
Saira Mirza is a PhD researcher and author in Psychology, and Dr Laura De Pretto is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology, both at Leeds Trinity University.
Migration Psychology Volume I and II are out now!
Migration Psychology Contributors:
Naziya O’Reilly, Clarrie Smith, Chiedza Jane Ikpeh, Ho Yeung Woo, Angeli Santos, Weiwei Wang, Marcin Polak, Ann Gillian Chu, Claire Hiu-ching Cheung, Francesco Varriale, Daína Eileen Pestana Blay, Stephen Henry Fox