How can you be against immigration while living in the middle of it?

About fear, contradiction, and why we keep looking at who arrives instead of why someone leaves.
This morning I had a conversation with my brother, the kind of conversation that actually happens everywhere but is rarely spoken out loud as honestly as it really is.
He said he didn’t want to vote, but that if he did vote, he definitely would not choose a party that is “too soft on immigrants,” and something about that stayed with me. Not only because I disagree with him, but mainly because I don’t fully understand it.
My brother works with immigrants every day, without problems. He laughs with them, works alongside them, sees them as colleagues. At the same time, he has had relationships with women from other countries such as Thailand, Morocco, Peru, Vietnam, and now Brazil, and yet something changes the moment the word “immigrants” comes up, as if it suddenly stops being about people and becomes some abstract whole he distances himself from.
Maybe that is exactly what affects me: how someone can simultaneously be open toward individuals, yet reject that same group the moment it no longer has a face, but becomes a label.
And maybe something else plays into it too, something less visible but still tangible. His ex, a woman from Morocco who lived in Russia, whom he married partly for her parents and partly because he believed in what they had together, eventually told him after a few years that she no longer wanted to be with him, while she was able to continue her life here, received housing and completed her studies, while he was left behind with something far more difficult to define than simple bad luck.
I can imagine something like that stays with you. That it settles inside you as a kind of proof, however unfair that may be, and slowly shapes the way you look at a larger group without fully realizing it yourself.
But even if I take that into account, something about it still feels off to me. Because when you live so closely alongside people, how can the image of “the immigrant” feel so different from the people you actually know every day?
In our conversation it quickly turned toward “fortune seekers,” toward people who supposedly come here for a better life. And somewhere I understand why that idea causes friction, why it can feel unfair, why it raises questions.
But at the same time I think: if you lived in a country where you had no future, where safety was not guaranteed, where opportunities were missing, would you not leave too?
What I find difficult is how immigration is so often discussed separately from the rest of the world, as if it simply appears out of nowhere, as if people one day suddenly decide to leave everything behind without any history or reason behind it, while those reasons absolutely do exist.
The world was not divided fairly to begin with. Borders were drawn without regard for the tribes and lives that already existed, power structures were built that reinforced inequality, and in many cases regimes were supported because it was economically or politically convenient. No simple explanations, and certainly no complete ones, but still part of the context.
And that continues, even now. Not as a straight line from cause to effect, but as a system that keeps influencing itself.
On top of that, climate change adds something that often still feels abstract but is at least as decisive: drought, failed harvests and regions that slowly become less livable. Not a sudden flight, but a slow push toward departure. Yet the conversation rarely seems to go there.
Instead, immigration is repeatedly pushed to the foreground as the problem, something that must be solved, limited or stopped, while in many cases it is more the consequence than the cause.
Maybe because it is visible and because people see others arriving, notice change and feel it up close, while the larger causes remain invisible, slow and complex, and therefore easier to ignore. And maybe fear plays a larger role in that than we want to admit. Fear of change. Fear of having to share something. Fear of the unknown. And fear is powerful, because it influences how we look, how we vote and which stories we believe, often without realizing how strongly it shapes us.
What affects me in that is that the fear itself is often taken more seriously than the causes behind it. As if we would rather react to what we see than try to understand where it comes from.
For me it feels different. If someone leaves everything behind, their country, their certainty or even their life, I do not see a problem but a person. And a story that began long before that person arrived here. That does not mean everything is simple. Or that there should be no borders. Or that there are no challenges. But it does mean the story is larger than how it is usually told.
Maybe that is also why I do ultimately vote. And why my choice ends up with the Party for the Animals. Not because they are “pro immigration,” but because they dare to look at the bigger picture. Not only at who arrives here, but at why someone leaves their country in the first place. Not only at symptoms, but at causes. Because when circumstances improve, people have less reason to flee. Because when climate change is addressed, pressure on living environments decreases. Because when procedures here become fairer and faster, people do not remain trapped in uncertainty for years but are able to build a life more quickly, wherever that may ultimately be.
For me this is therefore not about being for or against immigration, but about how honestly you are willing to look at the world and perhaps even more importantly: at people.
If we continue treating immigration itself as the problem without looking at what lies underneath it, we will keep going in circles. And maybe that is what affected me most about that conversation with my brother: not that we think differently, but that we seem to be looking at a different part of the same reality.
Maybe real change only begins once we dare to look at the whole story instead of only the part that shouts the loudest.