Anna Alma van Vree

Immigration politics is often told as a story about good and evil. People on the move may appear as vulnerable human beings in need of protection or as dangerous outsiders threatening the nation. Politicians can present themselves as brave defenders, while opponents become cruel, weak, or complicit. This dissertation asks how such moral narratives are constructed in elite communication and citizen deliberation, and what they mean for division in society. I develop a framework for studying moral archetypes — heroes, villains, victims, and cowards — as familiar roles through which political actors and citizens assign blame, sympathy, responsibility, and worth. Empirically, the dissertation follows moral narratives across Dutch party manifestos, Geert Wilders’ Facebook posts, and Danish focus-group discussions. It shows how immigration conflict is organized through role-based stories in which immigrants, nations, politicians, and citizens are made morally legible. These roles are built through metaphor, images, captions, and culturally familiar ways of representing social groups, including racialized and gendered repertoires that shape who is read as threatening, innocent, vulnerable, or deserving. The dissertation also shows that these stories matter beyond political messaging. When disagreement over immigration becomes a judgment about what kind of person someone is, political difference can turn into moral boundary-drawing between citizens. Yet moral narratives are not fixed. In conversation, people can challenge, qualify, and reopen the roles assigned to themselves and others. The stories through which we divide the world into good and evil remain politically powerful but also open to scrutiny and contestation.

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