Will People Surrender Civil Liberties in Exchange for Action Against Migration?

Civil liberties—including but not limited to the freedoms of speech, assembly, and movement—are a core privilege enjoyed by members of democratic societies. The compact between citizens and their elected officials guarantees the protection of these basic rights. For decades, citizens of Western democracies have taken these rights for granted.

Yet in recent years, these liberties have been increasingly curtailed or suspended in many societies, including in established democracies. Such curtailments have been premised on grounds of achieving progress on popularly desired policy objectives, from limiting unlawful immigration to reducing the prevalence of drugs or responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. How have citizens reacted to this tradeoff between policy responsiveness and reduced freedoms? Do they find it a fair bargain and reward the elected officials who undertake such policies, or have such infringements been met with punishment at the ballot box?

This question is especially pertinent in the context of government responses to immigration. The flow of individuals across national borders has become a hot-button issue across many developed democracies in recent years, with anti-migrant sentiments among natives linked to increased support for right-wing populist parties. Efforts by these parties to deliver on their campaign promises have often included erecting physical barriers and aggressive policing of immigrants at ports of entry.

Immigration enforcement may also impose tangible costs on citizens. The wrongful detention of U.S. citizens by immigration agents in the United States is but the latest example. In the UK, the “Right to Rent” scheme forces landlords to act as border guards, leading many to deny housing to British citizens from ethnic minorities or those without a passport to avoid potential fines. Across the EU, the reintroduction of internal border controls to curb irregular migration has eroded the right to free movement. Do the citizens who have their rights infringed upon as a consequence of such policies tolerate or even celebrate these actions, or do they penalize the elected officials who initiate them?

To study this question, we turned our attention to the 400-kilometer border between Poland and Belarus. In the summer of 2021, illegal crossings into Poland from Belarus began to surge as Belarusian president Alexandr Lukashenko’s regime began facilitating migrant flows into the European Union—a tactic that has since been widely described as the “weaponization of migration.”  In response, the Polish government adopted a hardline stance. In September 2021, it declared a state of emergency along a narrow strip of territory along the border.

The emergency, which was Poland’s first constitutional emergency since martial law in 1981, suspended several core civil liberties for residents in the affected area. Freedom of movement and assembly were restricted, non-residents including NGOs and journalists were prohibited entry, and locals were subjected to daily interactions with armed representatives of the state through road checkpoints, car searches, and identity checks, among others. These changes disrupted the everyday lives of many local residents. The emergency lasted three months, and certain restrictions were extended for another seven.

Because these civil liberty curtailments applied only to residents in a clearly demarcated geographic area along the border (on average an area up to 3 kilometers from the border), this episode offered an opportunity to evaluate whether and how the political preferences of citizens deprived of some civil liberties diverged from those of nearby citizens whose civil liberties were unaffected. As such, this allowed us to assess whether voters are willing to tolerate the erosion of their own civil rights for a decisive anti-migration policy in a real-world setting—and, more broadly, to explore how citizens balance security and liberty in times of crisis.

We examined if support for the anti-immigration incumbent party (Law and Justice Party, PiS) or support for pro- and anti-immigration opposition parties changed between the 2019 and 2023 parliamentary elections in areas affected by these policies when compared with nearby areas that fell outside the affected areas. Interestingly, we did not find evidence that voters living in the state of emergency areas punished the incumbent party for the prolonged infringement on their civil liberties. We also did not find evidence that voters shifted toward other political parties, either to the left (which criticized the policy) or to the right (which supported a hardline stance). To put it simply, voters who directly experienced prolonged restrictions on their freedom did not turn against the government that imposed them.

Where does that leave us? A sudden surge of refugees —42 million individuals around the world—at a country’s border can create intense political pressure that prompts both voters and governments to view drastic policy responses as not only justifiable, but necessary, even if they limit civil liberties. Take for example the European Commission’s response to the very migration crisis we examined. In a 2024 press release, the European Commission explicitly endorsed measures to counter the “weaponization of migration,” including actions that “may entail serious interferences with fundamental rights.”  When viewed alongside our findings—which suggest that localized, costly immigration enforcement might be tolerated by voters—these trends suggest a potentially worrisome normalization: politicians may increasingly feel emboldened to curtail civil liberties in the name of decisive action, particularly when migration remains a salient issue for the public. Such public acquiescence creates precedence which could encourage leaders to experiment with similar tradeoffs in other domains. The abrogation of accountability in the European context could also inspire elected leaders in other world regions to test the waters of democratic backsliding.

Pawel Charasz is an assistant professor in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Anil Menon is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Merced.

Thumbnail credit: Ed Schipul (Flickr)