Visible walls, invisible walls.

Every border wall was first an inner wall. The migration crisis exposes walls we didn't know we had.

Visible walls, invisible walls.

While we debate border walls and immigration policies, we ignore the walls we build inside. Every physical wall a country erects reflects thousands of psychic walls its citizens had already built. The architecture of fear is first interior, then materializes in concrete and barbed wire. Politicians don't invent fear of the foreigner—they exploit it because it already exists.

The global migration crisis reveals more than public policy problems: it exposes the fragility of our supposed tolerance. When refugees were distant statistics, we were sympathetic; when they knock on our door, we discover walls we didn't know we had. The progressive who defends open borders may find themselves relieved when migrants go to another neighborhood. It's not cynicism—it's the clash between conscious ideals and unconscious defenses.

Dismantling the border wall without dismantling the inner wall only displaces the problem. True immigration policy begins in the psyche—in the capacity to tolerate the presence of difference without needing to turn it into a threat to justify our anxiety.

Reference:

Davids, M. F. (2021). Ethnic purity, otherness and anxiety: The model of internal racism. En K. White & I. Klingenberg (Eds.), Migration and intercultural psychoanalysis: Unconscious forces and clinical issues (pp. 11–29). Routledge.

Psychotherapy

1h

Book Now