There’s a Reason Europe Is So Obsessed With Immigration

Mr. Jäger is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “Hyperpolitics.” He wrote from Brussels.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm was no friend of nationalism.

Growing up Jewish in the ruins of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, he held an instinctual suspicion of all claims to national belonging. Yet as a phalanx of new nationalist parties entered European parliaments in the early 1990s, claiming that migration constituted a mortal threat to their communities, he offered a surprising interpretation. The appeal of anti-migrant politics, he speculated, lay less in a sense of national pride than in its ability to cover a hole at the heart of Europeans’ self-understanding. “There was no other way left to define group identity,” he wrote, “except by defining the outsiders who were not in it.”

The words carry a strange resonance for Europe today.........

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