Liberalism, Post-modernism, and Migration: How They Shape Policy and Public Opinion

Introduction

Few issues reveal the philosophical undercurrents of modern politics as clearly as immigration and asylum. In debates about open borders, refugee protection, and national identity, the assumptions of liberalism and post-modernism converge and clash. Liberalism provides the institutional backbone of modern democratic states, rooted in individual rights, rule of law, and market exchange. Post-modernism, a cultural and epistemic turn that gained prominence in the late twentieth century, challenges those universalist assumptions by emphasizing plurality, constructed identities, and suspicion of “grand narratives.” The intersection of these two philosophies explains why immigration policy in Western societies oscillates between humanitarian openness and defensive border control, and why public opinion on migration remains polarized even among citizens who share democratic values.

Liberalism: Universal Rights and the Logic of Openness

At its core, liberalism views individuals, not tribes, religions, or ethnic groups, as the fundamental moral unit. From John Locke’s idea of natural rights to Kant’s notion of “cosmopolitan right,” the liberal tradition imagines a moral community larger than the nation-state. Modern liberal democracies translate that ethic into rule-based governance, equal treatment under the law, and, at least in principle, the right of asylum for those fleeing persecution (Rawls 1999; Nussbaum 2006).

Liberal institutions are therefore predisposed toward regulated openness: borders exist, but they are meant to serve liberty, not deny it. Immigration systems in North America and Western Europe rely on legal frameworks that reconcile two competing imperatives, respect for universal human rights and the state’s right to control entry (Joppke 1998). Refugee law itself is a liberal construct: the 1951 UN Refugee Convention codified protection from persecution as a transnational legal right, transcending local loyalties.

Economically, liberalism reinforces openness through its faith in markets. Labor mobility is viewed as an extension of free trade and comparative advantage. As globalization deepened, leaders in liberal economies faced strong incentives to adopt what scholars call “selective open-migration regimes”, systems that welcome skilled workers or refugees on humanitarian grounds while maintaining control over irregular migration (van Houte 2023; Escobari 2025).

Yet liberalism’s universalism also breeds contradiction. By insisting on the moral equality of all persons, it implicitly undermines the special status of citizenship. Citizenship implies ownership of entitlements that governments create as a promise in return for taxation. When translated into migration policy, this ideal collides with electorates that see the state’s first duty as protecting its own citizens’ welfare. The philosopher Michael Walzer (1983) called this “the paradox of liberalism”: a society founded on universal rights must still draw boundaries around membership.

Post-modernism: Plurality, Identity, and the Deconstruction of Borders

While liberalism provided the architecture of rights, post-modernism transformed the cultural atmosphere in which those rights are interpreted. Thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida dismantled the Enlightenment faith in universal reason and objective truth. In their view, knowledge and morality are socially constructed and historically contingent. Lyotard (1979) famously defined the post-modern condition as “incredulity toward meta-narratives.”

Applied to migration, post-modernism challenges the very categories that liberal policy assumes: “citizen” versus “foreigner,” “host” versus “migrant.” Sociologists of migration describe Western societies as “migration societies” rather than “nations receiving migrants” (Favell 2019). Identity is no longer a stable inheritance but a hybrid performance, transnational, diasporic, constantly re-negotiated.

Post-modern perspectives also reinterpret asylum. Instead of viewing refugees as passive victims to be integrated, post-structuralists analyze how states and NGOs “construct” the ideal “good asylum seeker”: compliant, grateful, non-threatening (Horsti 2020). Power, not compassion, shapes humanitarian regimes. Thus, post-modernism transforms the moral language of migration into a question of discourse and representation: Who has the authority to define belonging? Whose suffering is visible?

Culturally, post-modern pluralism encourages policies of multiculturalism and diversity recognition. If identity is fluid and every narrative has validity, assimilation appears coercive. Instead, states adopt “integration without conformity” models, promoting coexistence of multiple cultural identities within the liberal framework. Canada’s and the EU’s official multicultural doctrines are examples of this synthesis of liberal rights and post-modern recognition (Kymlicka 2015).

The Liberal–Post-modern Fusion: Inclusion and Its Discontents

In practice, contemporary migration policy in the West reflects a hybrid ideology: liberal in its institutions, post-modern in its culture. Human rights law, due process, and market liberalization remain the official principles; yet public rhetoric emphasizes diversity, narrative plurality, and intersectional justice, hallmarks of post-modern sensibility.

This synthesis produces both moral progress and political tension. On one hand, it has expanded compassion beyond national borders: refugees are no longer seen merely as foreigners but as moral claimants. On the other hand, the weakening of shared narratives, what Charles Taylor (2007) calls the “ethics of authenticity”, undermines civic cohesion. When every identity seeks recognition yet none claims universality, societies struggle to articulate why anyone should assimilate.

In immigration politics, this manifests as a values gap. Liberal elites, influenced by cosmopolitan norms, design humanitarian or skills-based systems grounded in procedural fairness. Ordinary citizens, operating in post-modern consumer cultures but anxious about social change, often experience immigration as evidence of loss, loss of cultural continuity, job security, or epistemic clarity about who “we” are. The result is a widening chasm between policy cosmopolitanism and popular communitarianism (Fukuyama 2018).

Public Opinion and the Politics of Ambivalence

Empirical research confirms that public opinion toward immigration in liberal democracies is ambivalent rather than purely polarized. Surveys show that citizens generally support admitting refugees fleeing genuine persecution but oppose uncontrolled or economically ambiguous migration (Pew Research 2022; Dornsife Center 2023).

Liberal framing, emphasizing rights and equality, appeals to moral universalists but alienates voters who prioritize social order and identity cohesion. Post-modern framing, celebrating difference and diversity, wins symbolic support yet provokes backlash when difference seems to erode common norms. The rise of populist parties in Europe after the 2015 refugee crisis demonstrates this dynamic: populists exploited the sense that elites had embraced “borderless moralism” detached from civic identity.

Thus, the same hybrid philosophy that expands empathy can also erode trust. When citizens perceive that elites moralize immigration in universal terms while ignoring local strain, housing, welfare, crime, the liberal-post-modern consensus loses legitimacy. Publics oscillate between humanitarian impulses and security anxieties, between moral universalism and communitarian self-protection.

Policy Implications

Understanding the interplay between liberalism and post-modernism helps explain why migration governance in Western states looks inconsistent: open in rhetoric, cautious in practice. Liberalism demands due process; post-modernism demands recognition of difference; politics demands control. The challenge is to design systems that honor rights and diversity without dissolving social trust.

Countries that have succeeded, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, frame migration in economic and civic rather than purely moral terms: transparent criteria, integration programs, and public consultation (van Houte 2023). Where states rely mainly on humanitarian or ideological narratives, as parts of Europe did during the 2015 crisis, backlash follows. The task for liberal democracies is to re-ground openness in civic confidence, not just moral cosmopolitanism.