Every generation creates a villain convenient enough to carry the burden of society’s failures. In our time, that villain is the immigrant. Not a real human being with contradictions, strengths, weaknesses, dreams and flaws, but a political invention trapped in a bizarre paradox: Schrödinger’s immigrant.
The immigrant today exists simultaneously as two incompatible creatures. On one hand, he is portrayed as a lazy welfare dependent draining public resources, crowding hospitals, filling council housing lists and surviving on benefits paid by hardworking natives. On the other hand, that same immigrant is somehow an unstoppable economic superhuman taking all the jobs, dominating industries, suppressing wages and outcompeting local workers in both skilled and unskilled sectors.
Apparently, he is too lazy to work and working too much at the same time.
He is stealing jobs while refusing to work.
Living off the state while simultaneously carrying entire industries on his back.
A burden and a threat.
Weak and overpowering.
Invisible when taxes are collected but highly visible when politicians need a scapegoat.
The contradiction does not matter because the immigrant is not meant to be understood. He is meant to be useful.
This shape-shifting outsider has become the perfect political invention because he explains away every complex domestic failure without forcing leaders to confront the real causes. Productivity has flatlined for over a decade? Immigration. Public services collapsing after years of underinvestment? Immigration. Housing shortages created by planning failures and speculative property markets? Immigration. Wages stagnating while corporate profits soar? Immigration. Infrastructure crumbling? Immigration.
The beauty of the scapegoat is that it requires no accountability.
A politician can spend fifteen years cutting local councils to the bone, neglecting transport systems, underfunding healthcare, ignoring vocational education and refusing long-term industrial strategy, then suddenly appear on television pointing at a family that arrived three years ago from Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland or Syria as the source of national decline.
It is political alchemy. Turn policy failure into public anger directed at foreigners.
The irony is that modern economies are deeply dependent on immigrant labour while publicly pretending otherwise. Hospitals rely on foreign doctors and nurses. Farms rely on migrant labour. Technology sectors recruit globally because domestic training pipelines have been neglected for decades. Care homes would collapse almost overnight without immigrant workers. Entire transport, construction and hospitality industries quietly function because immigrants do the jobs locals either cannot or will not do under existing conditions.
Yet politicians speak about immigration as though migrants arrived solely to vandalise national prosperity.
Britain provides perhaps the clearest modern example of this contradiction. For years, the country was told immigration was the primary cause of pressure on public services. Yet after Brexit, when freedom of movement ended, the promised economic renaissance failed to materialise. Instead, labour shortages emerged across agriculture, logistics, hospitality and healthcare. Fruit rotted in fields. Restaurants struggled to find staff. The NHS continued recruiting internationally because the domestic staffing crisis had never been solved.
It turned out immigrants were not the cause of Britain’s structural problems. They were often the temporary patch covering them.
The same phenomenon exists across Europe and North America. Governments that failed to invest in housing blame migrants for overcrowding. Governments that refused to modernise infrastructure blame migrants for congestion. Governments that weakened labour protections blame migrants for wage competition. Rather than confront corporate concentration, declining productivity or failed economic planning, immigration becomes the universal explanation because it is emotionally powerful and politically profitable.
Fear travels faster than facts.
And there is another uncomfortable truth many politicians avoid. Immigration frequently exposes weaknesses that already existed. A healthcare system that collapses because population rises slightly was already fragile. A housing market unable to cope with demand was already dysfunctional. Schools struggling with modest demographic change were already under pressure. Migrants did not create the weaknesses; they merely revealed them.
But admitting this would require governments to explain why wealthy nations increasingly resemble societies permanently stuck in managed decline despite historic levels of taxation and technological advancement.
That conversation is dangerous.
It is far easier to maintain the Schrödinger’s immigrant paradox. Keep the outsider permanently guilty regardless of the evidence. If unemployment rises, immigrants took the jobs. If unemployment falls, immigrants are depressing wages. If crime increases, blame immigration. If the economy weakens after immigration drops, quietly change the subject.
The immigrant becomes less a person and more a political utility belt.
None of this means immigration is beyond criticism or that every immigration policy is wise. Nations have legitimate concerns about border management, integration, labour market pressures and social cohesion. Serious countries should debate these issues honestly. But honest debate becomes impossible when immigrants are transformed into mythical creatures responsible for every national anxiety.
A society obsessed with blaming outsiders eventually stops fixing itself.
History repeatedly shows that nations decline not because immigrants arrive, but because political systems become addicted to distraction instead of reform. Rome blamed foreigners while corruption hollowed out institutions. Britain once blamed colonial migrants while deindustrialisation reshaped entire regions. America periodically blames newcomers while inequality, healthcare costs and infrastructure decay continue unchecked.
The script never changes. Only the target does.
The real danger of the Schrödinger’s immigrant is not merely the unfairness toward migrants. It is the intellectual laziness it encourages within society itself. Once a nation accepts a permanent scapegoat, genuine accountability disappears. Politicians no longer need competence. They only need an enemy.
And that may be the greatest immigration story of our age: not what immigrants are supposedly doing to countries, but what politicians are doing to truth.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 