Migrants: hierarchy of needs

Share Kellie-Jay

The establishment’s favourite trick is to pretend that ordinary people are too stupid to understand cause and effect. They tell us that concerns about mass migration are irrational, emotional, even hateful, while simultaneously insisting that collapsing public services, stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, rising crime, and declining social trust are all unfortunate coincidences. Yet I have never met a single person who genuinely believes migrants and asylum seekers are the root cause of Britain’s decline. People know perfectly well that successive governments, aided by corporate interests and a detached political class, have spent decades undermining the economic and social foundations upon which ordinary lives depend. They know that tax avoidance is tolerated, that small businesses are strangled by regulation, that energy costs have been driven upwards by ideological policymaking, that education standards have fallen, that communities have been hollowed out, and that the people making these decisions rarely suffer the consequences of them.

What ordinary people also understand is that migration is both a symptom and an exacerbation of this decline. When living standards are already falling, when wages have stagnated for years, when housing is scarce, when schools are overcrowded and GP appointments impossible to secure, adding hundreds of thousands of people to the system every year is not a solution but an accelerant. It is particularly strange that many on the political left appear unable or unwilling to acknowledge this reality, given that unrestricted labour supply has always been understood to suppress wages and weaken the bargaining power of working people. The people expected to absorb these costs are not investment bankers, politicians, or media commentators. They are cleaners, delivery drivers, care workers, shop assistants, and young families trying to build a life.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps explain something else that confuses commentators. They often ask why people protest outside a migrant hotel but not outside the headquarters of a multinational corporation.

Why are they angrier about a group of asylum seekers being housed in their town than a billionaire sheltering money offshore? Why does a hotel full of migrants provoke more public outrage than a supermarket chief executive receiving a pension package worth millions?

The answer is not that people approve of tax avoidance, corporate greed, or elite excess. It is that human beings respond most strongly to threats they perceive at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, because those are the needs that determine whether daily life feels secure. A billionaire using an offshore tax haven may contribute to the long-term decline of the country, but most people do not experience that directly. They do not see him on their street. They do not encounter him outside their children’s school. They do not believe his presence alters their immediate safety, access to housing, local services, or sense of community. The damage may be real, but it is distant and abstract.

Migration, particularly when it consists largely of fighting-age men arriving illegally, is different. People see it. They live alongside it. They are expected to absorb the consequences of it. They see hotels commandeered while local families wait for housing. They see schools, surgeries and hospitals struggling to cope. They see groups of young men, often from cultures radically different to our own, placed into communities without consultation and then told that any concern is evidence of prejudice. Whether every fear is justified, and I would argue that they are, is almost beside the point. What matters is that these concerns sit squarely within the layers of Maslow’s hierarchy dealing with security, safety, stability, belonging and community. Those are not luxury concerns. They are foundational human needs.

Yet even this does not fully explain the public anger. Migration itself angers many people, but the greater outrage comes from the behaviour of those in power. People can tolerate difficult problems when they believe their government is acting honestly and in good faith. What they cannot tolerate is indifference. They cannot tolerate being told that what they can see with their own eyes is not happening. They cannot tolerate being expected to shoulder burdens that the political class refuses to acknowledge.

The real source of resentment is the widening gulf between those making decisions and those living with the consequences. The ministers approving hotel contracts do not live next door to them. The civil servants designing the policies do not compete for social housing, school places or GP appointments. The journalists and commentators demanding compassion do not have to explain to their daughters why they no longer feel comfortable walking through certain areas after dark. The burden falls overwhelmingly on working people while the people insisting upon sacrifice remain insulated from it.

That is why protests often focus on migrant hotels rather than government buildings. As well as the hotel being a genuine in your face risk of sexual or physical assault, the hotel becomes a symbol. It represents a government that appears unable or unwilling to control its borders. It represents a political class that dismisses concerns as ignorance or bigotry. It represents a system in which ordinary people are expected to accept costs, risks and inconveniences that decision-makers will never personally experience. The anger may be triggered by migration, but it is sustained by the growing belief that those in authority neither understand nor care about the lives of the people they govern.

Before people concern themselves with abstract ideals, they want to know that their children can walk home safely, that they can get a doctor’s appointment when they are ill, that there will be housing available for local families, that wages will support a decent standard of living, and that the community around them remains stable and recognisable. When people feel those things are threatened, they react. They always have. It is not evidence of ignorance. It is evidence of human nature.

Parents who once allowed their daughters to walk home alone now think twice because groups of unfamiliar men congregate around areas where women and girls should feel safe. Residents know that a local surgery already struggling to cope will not improve when hundreds more people arrive. They know that housing waiting lists will not shrink. They know that schools operating at capacity will not suddenly find spare places. Anyone who has spent time in a city-centre A&E department can see the strain for themselves. These are not theoretical concerns. They are visible, everyday realities experienced by the people who are told most often that their concerns are illegitimate.

The same pattern can be seen throughout public services. Hospitals and pharmacies increasingly rely on overseas recruitment because it is cheaper, while many British-trained professionals struggle to find opportunities. The NHS itself has become a symbol of institutional decay, consuming ever-greater resources while delivering ever-poorer outcomes. When my own daughter developed sepsis, I experienced first-hand a system that felt uncaring, chaotic and fundamentally broken. Millions of people have their own version of that story. They do not need politicians or activists to tell them that everything is functioning well. They have eyes.

What angers people most is not migration in isolation but the accumulation of failures that surround it. They have watched governments close community hospitals, reduce support for children with special educational needs, burden small businesses, drive up energy costs, allow criminal networks to prey upon vulnerable girls for decades, weaken border controls and indulge increasingly detached ideological projects while dismissing ordinary concerns as ignorance. They have been told to ignore what they can see, deny what they can experience and accept what they would never choose.

Migration is an issue. The asylum system is increasingly viewed as a scam that rewards those willing to exploit it. But the deeper issue is a political class that appears insulated from the consequences of its own decisions. The people making policy do not compete for social housing, do not sit for twelve hours in overcrowded emergency departments, do not worry about whether there will be a school place available, and do not walk through the towns most transformed by the policies they champion. They do not care about the impact on safety, they do not care about the deterioration of communities, and they do not care about the growing sense of abandonment felt by millions of citizens. Above all else, they have demonstrated that they do not care about you.