While we know that the far right thrives when migration is salient in public agendas, what happens when this issue is no longer under the spotlight? Building on 25 face-to-face interviews with activists mobilized against migration during COVID-19 in Italy, this article explores far-right framing of migration as a non-salient issue. We find that far-right groups indeed reframe their messages vis-à-vis a less favourable political setting; yet they are also able to seize fresh opportunities to reactivate opposition to migration, notably via prognostic frames delivering ostensibly depoliticized views that hijack solidarity principles and emphasize pragmatic and technocratic approaches to border control and migration management. In uncovering the discursive strategies used by far-right actors to bolster their credibility and appeal when out of their comfort zone, this article contributes to the scholarly understanding of politicization and highlights the mechanisms by which far-right ideas are becoming normalized in the public sphere.

The radical right has become a central political force in most Western democracies. This process has been the result of the normalization and mainstreaming of its political leaders, discourses, and visions of society, notably involving the scapegoating of immigration and the use of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. However, the normalization and mainstreaming of radical right actors competing for the leadership of their overall political family remain an under-researched topic. The scope of the current article is to explore this phenomenon by considering the case of France, which after the United States, is the largest Western state that could potentially be ruled by a radical right president with extensive executive powers. The analysis shows that actors competing for the leadership of the radical right in a given country can generate diverging strategies of normalization and mainstreaming to secure their political distinction. Immigration and the Great Replacement constitute, respectively, a topic and a conspiracy theory that are emphasized and/or downplayed by opportunistic stakeholders weaving a web of interactions to define their comparative legitimacy and supremacy in the public sphere.

Many citizens in liberal democracies are concerned about immigration and its impact on their countries. Governments often seek to address these concerns by restricting the post-entry rights of immigrants such as the right to permanent settlement or access to welfare benefits. Thereby, it is expected that immigrants with an inferior legal status are (perceived as) less threatening to natives and, as a result, make the latter more willing to accept new immigrants. Does this policy rationale indeed attenuate public opposition to immigrant admission and thus allow for the reconciliation of the economic need for immigrants with the political concerns of domestic constituents? This study advances the theoretical argument of a rights-conditionality in citizens’ immigration preferences and provides empirical evidence on the phenomenon. A factorial survey experiment among citizens in the United States and Switzerland tests the effect of residence and welfare rights on the public opposition to immigrant admission. The results show that restricting immigrants’ welfare rights does significantly decrease public opposition towards immigration across the two countries. In contrast, restricting immigrants’ residence rights does not, and in the context of Switzerland, even increases opposition to immigrant admission. Citizens critical of immigration are thus not per se more welcoming to immigrants if they receive an inferior legal status but seem to care about immigrants’ contributions and commitment to the receiving society. The findings highlight the importance of immigrants‘ post-entry rights in the view of citizens and show how the design of immigration policies may help to understand public immigration preferences.

In contemporary Italy, media and public actors frame the exploitation of migrant agricultural labourers as the outcome of caporalato. This concept – translated as labour brokerage or gang mastery – connotes the violent treatment of workers and their exploitation by powerful individuals, who are today increasingly racialised and understood as being Black and immigrants. However, our fieldwork in Apulia and Sicily uncovered a more complicated picture. This article considers a variety of sources to explore how caporalato is constructed and to what effect. Our argument is that, though rooted in real dynamics, caporalato is also a reductive, sensationalised, and racialising framing device that transposes historic tenets of Italy's ‘Southern Question’ onto ‘othered’ migrant workers. It affects policy by creating categories of people who are made ‘illegal’ and ‘deportable’. In also reinforcing derogatory stereotypes about the Italian South, it makes visible further South(s) of the Italian South(s) – offering insight into how and where borders are created and what their effects are.

This study investigates how agents in contested occupations justify and legitimize their work. It examines Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) attorneys who prosecute immigrant removal cases on behalf of the federal government, delving into the narrative strategies that attorneys use to attain self-legitimacy within the agency. While existing literature suggests that self-legitimacy stems from either public support or an intrinsic belief in one’s deservingness of power, this study introduces a third pathway to self-legitimacy, agency entrenchment, in which government prosecutors draw on a highly internalized sense of patriotism and a duty to their organizational role, in the face of heightened public protest and changing administrative priorities. Analyzing forty in-depth interviews with ICE attorneys, this study identifies two primary approaches to agency entrenchment. The first is a bureaucratic approach, in which attorneys derive an internalized sense of duty from the existing law. The second is an enforcement approach, in which attorneys derive moral authority from what they see as their protector status. By deploying these narratives of self-legitimacy, ICE prosecutors attempt to resolve perceived conflicts between their legally mandated responsibilities and the ethical and reputational criticisms they encounter. The findings contribute to the broader understanding of the occupational dynamics between political polarization and law enforcement prosecution.

Whether a topic is seen in a moral or moral-emotional light has significant political implications. Yet, we lack knowledge about the process of moralization: Who defines the way topics are communicated about? Where prior research has investigated the relative power of different actors to place a topic on the agenda or shape opinions, we study who sets the moral and moral-emotional tone of debate. To do so, we zoom in on immigration discourse in Germany and analyze fine-grained social media data from politicians, political parties, newspapers, and members of the public over a period of more than four years. After employing a transformer model to identify moral and moral-emotional appeals, we use structural vector autoregression models to demonstrate the important role of radical-right challengers in shaping public discourse in a negative moral-emotional direction. The results inform theories of moralization and political entrepreneurship.

This study contributes to understanding mainstream parties' room for maneuver in the immigration domain by exploring the impact of moralization as a rhetorical strategy. Research has found anti-immigrant messages to be more effective than pro-immigrant messages in shaping public opinion. However, a pre-registered survey experiment with Danish respondents reveals that moral rhetoric enhances policy support for pro-immigrant communication, rendering it as effective as anti-immigrant messages. Partisan-motivated reasoning influences reactions to all messages except the non-moral anti-immigrant message, suggesting that when appealing to out-party supporters, mainstream parties still meet least resistance with an exclusive platform.

This article explores responses in the Black press to the rapidly expanding U.S. deportation regime during the interwar period. While their perspectives have been largely absent from scholarship on deportation, Black journalists, editorialists, and commentators have historically been highly engaged with the issue. Black periodicals provided extensive coverage of the expulsion of Black immigrants, as well as of non-Black immigrants who violated the racial structures of American society (either through antiracist political advocacy or through interracial relationships). In doing so, the Black press insisted that deportation was a Black issue, and that antiblackness was central to the functioning of the early-twentieth-century immigration control system. By surveying roughly 1,100 articles on deportation in the Black press, I highlight how Black writers construed deportation as a powerful tool of white supremacy and a threat to Black immigrants and African Americans alike.

Public interest lawyers seek to empower clients through collaborative approaches to direct representation that redistribute legal knowledge and affirm clients’ agency; however, the legal settings in which attorneys operate shape their capacity to subvert dynamics they consider oppressive. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork at a legal nonprofit serving asylum seekers in Los Angeles, this study explores how the broader environment of a restrictive immigration system transforms the aspirations, possibilities, and strategies of public interest lawyering. Drawing from sociolegal literature on cause lawyers, access to justice, and the U.S. immigration system, the article argues that the politicization of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy destabilizes foundational legal norms, hindering the agenda of public interest attorneys. Procedural formalism constitutes one of the only resources at attorneys’ disposal, yet here it often impedes lawyers’ ability to disrupt perceived power hierarchies. Specifically, the prevalence of complex legal procedures that obstruct access to asylum reconfigures opportunities to uplift clients. These findings illuminate how hostile legal settings strain lawyers. They also contribute to timely debates around how attorneys protect access to justice and advance meaningful social transformation.

Liberal democracies are expected to provide residents with both negative rights, such as limitations against the abuse of police powers, and some range of positive (social) rights, such as access to social benefits. These rights are commonly deemed to apply equally, without respect to individuals’ ascriptive backgrounds. Existing research, often in the US context and focused on social programs, shows both support for abstract rights and group-specific prejudices. We interrogate whether similar patterns exist in Canada and innovate by directly examining negative and positive rights in the same study. Using a series of novel survey experiments, we demonstrate the degree to which categorical inequalities based on race and legal status affect public support for rights provision in Canada. Both rights are more recognized for citizens relative to out-of-status migrants, and legal status at times interacts with racialized minority status. Rights appear far from universal in the minds of Canadians.