/Politics

Three weeks ago a European report confirmed something anyone following the news already sensed: xenophobia and far-right movements targeting immigrants are growing in Portugal, and the document goes further than the obvious — it directly links that growth to the normalization of xenophobic rhetoric, which according to the authors has already resulted in organized violence, with paid calls for aggression circulating on social media during the 2024 and 2025 election campaigns. It's the first time this report, the European Civic Space Report, has dedicated a full chapter to the country. And the picture it paints isn't of an isolated phenomenon, but of a pattern that repeats itself with few variations from one country to the next, every time a migration crisis shows up on the political radar. What stands out in this kind of report isn't the xenophobia itself — unfortunately, the world already knows that story well enough — but the timing. It doesn't grow alongside the number of immigrants. It grows alongside the discourse about them. You can see this clearly when comparing regions: European cities with very little migrant presence sometimes concentrate the most hostile rhetoric, while urban centers with decades of settled immigration deal with the topic in a much calmer way. The real trigger usually isn't the migration crisis as a demographic fact, but how it gets told — and by whom. And that's where the part most articles on the topic avoid comes in: someone profits from this. It's no accident that practically every recent wave of xenophobic growth has a party, a candidate, or a movement riding it. Germany's AfD, Spain's Vox, Orbán in Hungary, the recent American election cycle itself — all of them have, at some point, used the narrative of an "invasion" or migration "out of control" as political capital. It works because migration is an easy topic to oversimplify and a hard one to quickly disprove: it takes minutes to spread a rumor about foreign crime and months to dismantle it with data. Which is, by the way, another uncomfortable point: the gap between what people think is happening and what's actually happening. Opinion surveys across several European countries show populations estimating the share of immigrants at two or three times the real census figures. That's not a statistical footnote — it's the core of the problem. When perception drifts that far from reality, public debate stops discussing migration policy and starts discussing fear instead. Still, it would be too simplistic to treat every concern about immigration as disguised xenophobia, and this is maybe the most delicate point of the whole piece. People rightfully worry about tight job markets, overwhelmed schools and hospitals, housing that gets more expensive in cities absorbing large flows in a short time. That's a legitimate concern, part of any healthy democratic debate over public policy. The problem isn't the concern itself — it's the vacuum that forms when nobody debates it honestly, and that vacuum is exactly the space xenophobic rhetoric moves into. When mainstream politics avoids the topic for fear of sounding insensitive, the people left to talk about it are the ones with zero commitment to nuance. Social media speeds this whole process up in a way that deserves its own attention. Inflammatory immigration content simply performs better on algorithms — more engagement, more anger, more shares — than any balanced analysis of migration policy ever will. The Portugal report even cites direct monetization of hate speech during election periods, which suggests this isn't just algorithmic bias anymore, but an actual business model built around hostility. None of this is particularly new, worth remembering. The script has repeated itself since at least the 19th century: Italians and Irish arriving in the United States were described, point for point, with the same adjectives used today for other groups — lazy, criminal, unable to integrate. The target changed, the rhetoric stayed nearly intact. That should be a warning to anyone who thinks "this time it's different." And the cost of all this runs both ways. On the human side, it's visible and tragic — in 2023 alone, deaths crossing the Mediterranean were already on track for the worst year since 2017. But there's also a political and economic cost to closing doors: loss of labor in sectors that depend on it, diplomatic isolation, erosion of the very cohesion these movements claim to be protecting. Societies that close themselves off don't automatically become safer or more prosperous; they just become more isolated from the problem they keep having. It's hard to end a piece like this with a tidy conclusion, because the topic doesn't really have one. What can be said is that political xenophobia tied to migration crises is rarely about the crisis itself — it's about who controls the narrative around it, and about the space left over once honest debate disappears. Source: [Portugal's civic freedoms "under pressure from far-right surge, police abuses"](https://www.portugalresident.com/portugals-civic-freedoms-under-pressure-from-far-right-surge-police-abuses/) — Portugal Resident