Are migrants invading Europe? Tarsis Brito shows how European conceptions of white nativeness have combined with the legacy of colonialism to portray migration as a state of siege.
Over the past decade, Europe has witnessed the rise of an anti-immigration discourse that paints the coming of racialised migrants from the Global South as an “invasion”. Far-right political groups, anti-immigration campaigners and elected politicians now routinely address migration as a “colonial” process that threatens Europe’s “native” white population.
The fear is clear: the growing arrival of non-white migrants since the beginning of Europe’s migrant crisis is cast as a menace to an imagined natural bond between whiteness and the nation state. Birth rates, cultural and religious clashes, and migrants’ crime rates are often mobilised as proof of a process of “white replacement” that purportedly pushes whiteness out of its own “native land”.
White nativeness
In this discourse, border violence is often sold as a solution to stop the invasion and maintain racial order. As one person in Middlesborough put it: “It’s our country and we are getting pushed out. Now I understand how the Indians felt in America… because that’s what the white men did when we pushed them out, only it’s the white man getting pushed out in this country.”
The appropriation of anti-colonial vocabulary from Indigenous communities in settler colonial contexts is strikingly ironic. European colonialism, after all, was responsible for invading territories, dispossessing, exterminating and subjugating Indigenous populations, as the very rioter herself seems to recognise. What is central here, however, is how this discourse of invasion – used to mobilise, legitimate and expand Europe’s infrastructure of border security – rests on a central premise: that Europe is naturally white, that is, a land of white nativeness.
This imaginary of Europe as a white landscape is often taken for granted. The idea of white nativeness in settler colonial spaces like Australia, the US and Canada is widely understood as the result of an occupation process that replaced Indigenous peoples with white settlers. In Europe, however, whiteness is not seen as arriving from outside but as the original or “unreplaced” native.
Yet, if whiteness – as race studies have long pointed out – is a “construction” of colonial modernity, then this means that “white Europe” itself must be a political and historical formation. Europe cannot be naturally white insofar as whiteness itself is not natural but a racial construct. This raises key questions: how does whiteness become “native” in Europe? And what is the relationship between this process of white settling and borders?
A state of siege
To understand this, we need to leave Europe for a moment and turn once again to the settler colonial world. There, white nativeness emerges out of a structure of occupation that continually replaced the Indigenous native with the “new” white native. Central to this process is what David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe call a generalised “state of siege”.
Because the structure of invasion is never complete, settler colonial states live in constant fear that occupation is under threat. This fuels a paranoid fear that racialised bodies pose a threat to whiteness’ possession over and nativeness to the land. Settler identity thereby projects its very invasion onto racialised others who are then – ironically – cast as invaders themselves.
It is no accident that it is exactly in the settler colony, in the second half of the 19th century, that borders and regimes of migration governance as we know them today first emerged. These regimes of mobility – a combination of laws, regulations, state bureaucracy and policing – were not simply tools to protect the physical frontiers of the nascent nation state.
Rather, they operated as settler colonial instruments to govern, control and often bar the coming of non-white populations – specifically from South and East Asia – while facilitating the immigration and settlement of white Europeans. This was central to the consolidation of this imaginary of a white homeland in the settler colonies.
Borders, whiteness and settler coloniality
So, what explains this increasing reliance on white nativeness in Europe and the use of borders as an instrument to mollify these racial anxieties? Two things are key here.
First, this imaginary of white Europe is a political construction directly shaped by its own settler colonial afterlives. Whiteness also had to “settle” in Europe, just like it did – and does – in the settler colonies. Settler colonial imaginaries and practices of white nativeness, in other words, did not remain confined in the settler colony, they travelled or boomeranged back to the metropole, producing in Europe its own state of siege.
Second, this boomerang process also relied extensively on the work of bordering. Like in the settler colonial world, the emergence of modern regimes of bordering and migration governance in Europe was part of a project to restrict racialised migration from previous colonies while enabling white immigration.
The goal was not simply to protect territorial sovereignty but to enforce a racial order centred around the figure of the “white native”. Not surprisingly, the exclusion of Europe’s previously colonised “others” became central to the construction of an imaginary of white Europe – a process that accelerated after WWII and deepened with the EU’s common migration regimes.
Understanding this historical and intimate connection between borders, whiteness, and settler coloniality is central to making sense of Europe’s present. The current panic over “invasion” and “replacement” in Europe is not simply a sudden response to recent migration flows, but part of a much longer and colonial history of how whiteness constructs itself as native – both in the settler colony and in Europe itself.
Far from a natural inheritance, white nativeness is a fragile and anxious project that relies on bordering practices to secure its claims to ownership and belonging. From Keir Starmer’s warning that the UK could become “an island of strangers” to Viktor Orbán’s insistence on keeping Hungary “mixed-race free”, what we see here is not simply the defence of Europe’s territorial integrity, but an attempt to preserve a racial-colonial order centred around whiteness.
Tarsis Brito will be speaking at an LSE event on 9 October 2025: Not just lines on a map: borders in a changing world.
Note: This article gives the views of the author, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: Sandor Szmutko / Shutterstock.com
Discussion about this post