Illegal, Useful, Acceptable: The Politics of the ‘Perfect’ EU Immigrant

By Carmen Gray

Public opinion on immigration has become one of the most visible and emotionally charged features of contemporary political existence. Across the EU and beyond, debates about immigration now occupy a constant presence in news cycles, social media feeds, and coffee-shop conversations. Migration itself is nothing new, however recent political trends have guided the conversation in a direction on which individuals feel more of a right and ease to discuss; public perceptions. Recent headlines on immigration highlight precarious underground groups spreading digital hate for immigrants, anti-immigration protests, and even the brutal visibility of immigration enforcement in the United States, underscoring a modernised importance which public perception can play in directing policy and conversation.

A recent study by the University of Cambridge encapsulated societal discourse on this topic very well. The study (Begum, 2025) is titled ‘Immigrants Against Immigration: British Ethnic Minority Brexit Voter Attitudes to Immigration’ and investigates the perceptions of the ethnic minority Brexit voters, intending to understand the reason behind ethnic minorities voting against immigration. Despite the slightly misleading title, the study did not find that ethnic minority voters were more likely to discriminate against immigrants as a whole. Rather, that ethnic minority group participants were more likely than white participants to distinguish between immigrants of different nationality.

The results from this study are certainly one thing, and perhaps worthy of further analysis to question the rhetoric being fed to participants who expressed a generally negative opinion towards immigrants coming to the UK. More notable however, is the skew within the study.

By pitting immigrants within the study against one another, it almost seems to encourage the discussion of a ‘hierarchy’ within immigrants. The study highlighted negative stereotypes which white and ethnic minority participants expressed against certain groups of immigrants, such as Eastern Europeans, and how this impacted participant’s opinions on immigration.

It becomes clear when examining this article and others that the discussion surrounding immigration has shifted; from whether our society is equipped to handle immigration, to who we consider to be the pinnacle of the ideal immigrant.

This almost eugenicisation of immigration has dangers both obvious and subtle. To measure the worthiness of others by arbitrary and shifting standards such as nationality, place of work or even legal status meets the definition of dehumanisation quite clearly, which can lead down dangerous paths both interpersonally and on the policy level. Furthermore, to open up this discussion of the ideal immigrant also incentivises political parties to compete over who can define the most acceptable immigrant, rather than addressing the structural conditions that shape migration itself. In this dynamic, the immigrants become the object of their rhetoric, and the scapegoat onto which all societal fears; violence, housing crises, femicide, are pushed.

Speaking to Zainab, a student in London, she highlighted this phenomenon of the ideal immigrant present in society. She notes that it has become normalised in white communities across the UK to ‘caricature’ immigrants into a ‘single group or identity’, rather than considering the actual attributes of the individuals. She also suggested that in the case where immigrants are ‘perpetrators’ of crime, people are perhaps vey willing to ‘unlearn’ all positive opinions on immigrants and resort back to group labelling.

This form of labelling immigrants certainly appears commonplace. Legality is seemingly the new ‘gotcha’ within anti-immigration rhetoric. The label of ‘illegal’ seems to negate all other circumstances, struggles, and rights, allowing public discourse and policy to treat them as not fully human- or an in the infamous words of Donald Trump- ‘animals’ (League of United Latin American Citizens, 2024). This trend is supported by recent data, including YouGov survey (Smith, 2025) finding a significant difference in the public’s opinions on legal immigrants and illegal immigrants.

With unrestricted social media access, we can see this trend without academic regulation. Legality when considering immigrants rested in public conversation when a clip went viral of a man asking a woman at a Trump-focused event if Jesus, being an ethnic minority, could enter America, and she answered ‘as long as he went through the proper… (process)’ (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFgKnpdB-fs/?hl=en).

Legality can be considered a ‘value-statement’, that is, a measure by which someone may define the worth of an immigrant. Sijilmassi et al. (2025) consider how public views are impacted by value-statements about immigrants during the 2024 elections. It found that providing participants with information highlighting the positive attributes of immigrants decreased the frequency of negative opinions and misconceptions about immigrants. In short, by providing people with factual positive accounts on the topic, their opinion was swayed.

This shift toward judging migrants by worth is not just rhetorically harmful; it carries clear historical and political risks. Research on dehumanisation has long shown that when groups are framed as less than fully human, the protections afforded to them begin to weaken. Herbert Kelman’s foundational work on dehumanisation and violence (1973) demonstrates that moral restraint erodes when people are reduced to categories rather than recognised as individuals.

This framework helps explain why the language and public conversations surrounding immigration matter so deeply. When migrants are described primarily through legality, usefulness, or perceived threat, they are no longer engaged with as other people navigating political systems, but as a group-problem to be solved. In such conditions, policies that would once have seemed extreme- detention, denial of asylum, restricted access to healthcare or housing- are normalised. The moral unease that may otherwise accompany these measures is dulled by the belief that those affected have failed to meet an expected, ideal standard.

Ultimately, the conversation around immigration in the EU and beyond is no longer just about numbers or policies; it has become a debate about human worth itself. The need of our current society to ‘rank’ immigrants in this way by their utility and worthiness ultimately reveals very little about immigrants, and far more about the moral standards perpetrated within modern society. With public perception fuelling so much of the immigration debate and policy, we must closely examine the nature of our discussions; and who has inspired or influenced them. A society that measures humanity this way must ultimately confront what it is willing to dehumanise, and who that truly serves. Any society willing to rank human worth must eventually reckon with the fact that no one is immune from being ranked. Hierarchy, once accepted, demands no permanent exceptions.