The double-edged sword of scapegoration: how anti-immigrant hostility harms both immigrants and host societies

Immigration is among the most consequential social phenomena of the 21st century, yet the psychological dimensions of anti-immigrant hostility-particularly its bidirectional harms-remain insufficiently theorized. This paper introduces and defines the concept of scapegoration, a portmanteau of scapegoating and immigration, to describe the systematic attribution of structural societal failures to immigrant populations as a means of deflecting responsibility from institutional and political actors. Unlike xenophobia, which denotes generalized fear or hostility toward foreigners, scapegoration captures a specific politico-psychological process in which immigrants are instrumentally constructed as causal agents of pre-existing social problems. Building upon Albert Memmi's (1957) framework in The Colonizer and the Colonized and integrating Integrated Threat Theory, Social Identity Theory, moral disengagement theory, and the concept of crimmigration, this paper argues that the criminalization and scapegoating of immigrants inflict psychological harm on both migrants and host populations. The analysis operates across individual, group, institutional, and societal levels to demonstrate how scapegoration functions as a self-perpetuating system of exclusion and dehumanization. Drawing on clinical psychology, sociology, political theory, and critical migration studies, the paper examines how host societies develop moral hypocrisy, epistemic distortion (the systematic misrepresentation or misattribution of social reality through politically reinforced narratives), and cultural paranoia (persistent and exaggerated beliefs that cultural identity is under existential threat from immigrant populations), while immigrants experience trauma, exploitation, intergenerational harm, and identity disruption. The paper concludes with an integrated multilevel framework for counter-scapegoration interventions encompassing policy reform, narrative change, and structural inclusion.