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What comes to mind when you consider the word “immigrant”? There’s no doubt that today immigration is a, if not the, political issue that draws some of the most sharply divisive lines of contemporary politics. This debate echoes around the world, with anti-immigration hardliners evoking images of violent criminals skirting the system, while those campaigning for freer borders emphasize ideals of human rights, diversity, and economic prosperity.
Over the past decade, far-right figures in Europe have found a significant political foothold: “Fortress Europe”—a construction of the continent as defending itself against immigrants—emerged as a policy orientation and rhetorical device before more recent analogous developments in the United States. Spain has been no exception to this wider continental trend. Vox, a far-right party with explicitly nationalist rhetoric: this echo of Francoist nostalgia has been gaining electoral success over its evocation (among other causes) of a “Reconquista” of the country. However, in January 2025, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government voted to regularize over half a million undocumented immigrants. Does this represent a meaningful reversal of the existing trend, or is Spain just an exception to what seems to have become the rule regarding official attitudes on immigration?
Parsing the answer to this question requires considering how exactly immigration becomes so contentious, and by the same token, so politicized. Immigration is indeed a policy debate, but at its core, it is a debate over what the meaning of “immigration” is. In the words of political theorist Ernesto Laclau, “immigration” would belong to a category of political device called ‘floating’ or ‘empty signifiers’—concepts which lack a fixed meaning—over which multiple hegemonic projects are contested.
Instead of focusing on the policy implications of immigration, it might be more illuminating to get to the base of the issue: why does immigration mean one thing to one group of people, and the opposite to the other? And considering this ambiguity, how can Spain’s recent move be used to justify one particular understanding of the idea?
The (Counter)Hegemonic Project
‘Hegemony’ describes the phenomenon that occurs when one group is able to present itself as realizing a broad set of aims of the wider range of a particular population, and by the same token, establishing itself as the dominant interpreter of those aims. In the same vein, an idea can be hegemonic if it is widely accepted. However, hegemonies do not just arise out of nowhere—they have to be constructed. An idea becomes hegemonic not because it is inherently true, but because it is (successfully) articulated as such.
According to Laclau, the articulation of a hegemonic operation is really a discursive practice—one that links disparate concepts or social demands together into a ‘chain of equivalence’.1 Crucially, any hegemonic operation must therefore draw what Laclau calls an ‘antagonistic frontier’: the dividing line between ‘us’ and an ‘enemy’, or more simply, an in-group and an out-group.2 What ultimately holds together a chain of equivalence, however, is what Laclau terms a ‘floating’ or ‘empty’ signifier. These are political devices through which hegemonic operations are launched; if a signifier is ‘floating’, its meaning is yet undetermined, leaving it up to a hegemonic operation to attempt to ‘fix’ its signification. Although Laclau concedes that there might be such things as empty signifiers, most are really just floating signifiers: no hegemonic operation is really ever complete.3
‘Democracy’ is an example of such a signifier. When a group demands ‘democracy’, it is not self-evident what they are truly asking for. The term itself is at once laden with meanings, but at the same time, devoid of any fixed significance: is democracy about the protection of basic human rights, or representation, or freedom, or simply the right to vote? In the words of Laclau, “the particularism of the demand” is no longer “self-sufficient and independent of any equivalential articulation”—“its meaning is indeterminate between alternative equivalential frontiers”.4 Floating signifiers are therefore constitutive of different chains of equivalence, and therefore, competing hegemonic operations.
While most of the world can generally agree that democracy is desirable—as the hegemonic operation behind democracy has succeeded, at least for now—the same consensus cannot be extended to immigration. Two hegemonic articulations of ‘immigration’ are at play here. One chain of equivalence links together ideas of a ‘crisis’, an ‘invasion’, or an ‘emergency’, drawing the line between ‘real citizens’ and ‘illegal immigrants’ as the outside that is constitutive of this in–group. Another chain of equivalence connects ‘prosperity’, ‘diversity’, and ‘necessity’, highlighting the significance of the structural factors behind immigration. But beyond one chain of equivalence being ‘anti-immigration’, and the other pro-immigration, what is the wider significance of the hegemonic competition between these two equivalential chains?
Spain in ‘Fortress Europe’
Throughout contemporary European politics, immigration has been hegemonized through a relatively stable chain of equivalence. In the dominant articulation, immigration is connected to ideas of invasion, illegality, and a loss of sovereignty—in turn connected to Eurosceptic sentiment. In particular, undocumented migrants have been positioned as embodiments of societal disorder: as ‘illegal immigrants’, these figures exist outside the law and therefore outside the protection of the political community. This sentiment is reproduced from the ground up and through institutions: from British ‘activists’ harassing migrants crossing the English Channel, to the Swedish government restricting the movements of asylum seekers. Clearly, this hegemonic articulation does not only rely on far-right actors for its propagation, but has also been reproduced across mainstream political debate, with centrist leaders like Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz ostensibly conceding language on immigration to their far-right counterparts.
Within this hegemonic framework, the idea of ‘illegality’ is often the point that fixes the meaning of immigration. Rather than workers, neighbors, or fellow community members, once migrants are branded ‘illegal’, they become problems to be managed or threats to be neutralized. Moreover, as much as this chain of equivalence includes ‘rational’ elements like crime rates or economic figures to prop up the idea that immigration is ‘bad’, ‘illegal immigration’ is a potent affective signifier through which political frustrations and fears about globalization, and economic precarity can be voiced.
Immigration is ‘regular’ to Spain: almost one-fifth of the country’s residents are foreign-born, and important sectors like hospitality and construction rely on migrant labour to fill low-paying jobs. But in the context of ‘Fortress Europe’ as immigration’s leading conception, Spain’s recent regularization of undocumented immigrants is not merely an administrative or technocratic measure; it constitutes a counterhegemonic operation against the chain of equivalence that Fortress Europe upholds.
Spain’s regularization of undocumented immigrants shifts the central node around which immigration is articulated from “illegality” to “precarity”. The campaigning that led to this particular reform was sparked by the particular hardship that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated for those in irregular situations, particularly those without official access to social services. This reframing explicitly shifts the burden of responsibility for immigration from individual lawbreakers or criminals to peers facing a set of social and economic structures that are common to us all: Spain has regularized undocumented immigrants before, but apprehension of economic precarity is likewise a phenomenon that occurs cyclically. It is also worth recalling that every hegemonic project necessarily draws an antagonistic frontier. In reframing immigration around precarity, to this (counter)hegemonic operation, the in-group is made up of a far more expansive, non-essentialist base. The new constitutive outside, rather than functioning as a scapegoat for ongoing social issues, is arguably a more direct target: the wider structures that contribute to social and economic hardships—ones that the brunt of the population must bear.
Prime Minister Sánchez’s sentiments echo the logic of this equivalential chain. In a guest essay for the New York Times, Mr. Sánchez frames undocumented immigrants as just like any other Spanish citizen: they live, work, and contribute to the community. He also highlights the reasons behind migration as structural forces: “poverty, inequality, unregulated markets, barriers to education and health care”. Rather than conceding that these forces are too complicated to oppose, however, Mr. Sánchez crucially points out—in accordance with Laclau’s framework on the drawing of a new outgroup—that “we should focus our efforts on addressing those issues, because they are the real threats to our way of life”.5 In regularizing the status of these people, he is not necessarily evoking a new image of Spanish society; rather, he points out what Spain already looks like. These migrants are no longer undocumented, but official, ‘regular’ members of the community.
Laclau’s Political Discourse
Ultimately, what we can take from Laclau’s hegemonic operations, empty signifiers, and chains of equivalence is a new perspective on political discourse, especially regarding issues that are as multifaceted and polarizing as immigration. While Laclau might argue that there is not necessarily a ‘right’ or a ‘wrong’ in political debate—they are all necessarily hegemonic constructions—his way of understanding how issues are constructed and how we come to understand our places in the world is illuminating for those of us who want to encourage politics to go in the ‘right’ direction. What we can learn from Laclau is a different way of instructing our articulation of political discourse: rather than focusing on getting the right data, or framing the right moral argument—not to say that these tactics aren’t also important—we should recognize that political change must occur through constructing alternative hegemonic projects that are capable of reorganizing meaning itself.
Laclau’s theoretical framework posits that a hegemonic operation inevitably involves the distinction between an in-group and an out-group. And both sides of the battle for the hegemonic meaning of immigration are painfully demonstrative of what happens when people are, or feel that they are, excluded from what it means to be a political subject. But Laclau also emphasizes that, as discursive articulations, hegemony never is. Rather, it is always in the process of becoming. No antagonistic frontier is definitive, nor can it ever be permanent.
In its regularization of undocumented migrants, Spain not only breaks the chain of equivalence between immigration and crime, but literally gives migrants legal residency and the political rights and protections that come with it. However, a successful counterhegemonic operation that reframes the floating signifier that is ‘immigration’ must then eventually contend with a signifier that is, like all other signifiers, open to reinterpretation: “citizen”. If “immigration” can successfully be articulated through precarity instead of illegality, Spain’s successful attempt at regularization reaffirms that the boundaries of citizenship itself are not fixed on essentialist terms, but political efforts open to redefinition. In the face of expansive structural forces that undoubtedly impact us all, Spain reminds us of the promise of a counterhegemonic operation through which belonging is not shaped through exclusionary frontiers, but by the unity brought through common experience.
Edited by Martín Rojas Remolina
The argument defended in this article is solely that of the author and does not reflect the position of the McGill Journal of Political Science, the Political Science Students’ Association, or the McGill Department of Political Science.
Featured image from PxHere
- On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005), 166: there is not necessarily any obvious relationship between the objects in a chain of equivalence. It is merely that the counterhegemonic discourse makes their differences equivalent to one another, to the extent that they stand in opposition to the given hegemonic order—their grouping only makes sense when seen in the context of the wider political project. ↩︎
- On Populist Reason, 74. ↩︎
- On Populist Reason, 166. ↩︎
- On Populist Reason, 131. ↩︎
- Emphasis added. ↩︎
