Migration and Integration 4.0

A new generation of digital technologies is changing how people live, connect and participate in society. What does that mean for human mobility? 

This year's Demig Talk series brings together a set of conversations on the interaction between digitalisation, migration and integration. We will explore how digital technologies shape human mobility, transform migration governance, create new opportunities for participation and integration and generate new forms of inequality and exclusion. We will also examine how digital technologies influence attitudes and narratives around migration and how research is responding to these transformations. 

What Europeans Think About Immigration and Why It Matters

Speaker: Dr. James Dennison (European University Institute) 

8 October 2026, 14:00-15:15 CEST | online via Zoom (registration)

Immigration has become one of the most politically consequential issues in contemporary Europe. Yet public debate often rests on questionable assumptions: that attitudes are becoming steadily more hostile, that voters are easily swayed by political rhetoric, and that opposition to immigration straightforwardly drives electoral and policy change. Drawing on comparative survey evidence spanning several decades, this talk challenges these assumptions and presents a new framework for understanding what Europeans think about immigration, how those views are formed, and when they acquire political force. It shows that attitudes are multidimensional, relatively stable, and, in many respects, increasingly favourable.

Their political consequences depend less on wholesale changes in opinion than on changes in issue salience: when and why immigration comes to matter more than competing concerns. This distinction helps explain the uneven rise of radical-right parties, the changing strategies of mainstream parties, and a European migration politics characterised less by general closure than by heightened selectivity between different forms of migration.

The talk also considers why some immigration narratives and communication strategies resonate while others fail, and what these findings imply for the future of European politics and migration governance. It argues for an approach grounded in how citizens actually think and how migration actually operates—offering grounds for cautious optimism through a dose of realism.

About the speaker
James Dennison is a Professor at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute, where he directs the Observatory of Public Attitudes to Migration. His research focuses on political attitudes, behaviour and communication, particularly in relation to migration.

More information about the series will follow shortly.