Why Are We All So Afraid? The Neuroscience of Immigration and Immigration Fear

Years ago, I moved to an Eastern European country. I was very young, very naïve, and very very excited. When I arrived, my employer informed me we would be immediately hopping a train to a neighboring country, where we would stand in line at the embassy at 4:30am to beg for a visa.

I remember waiting in line watching the people in front of me holding their thumbs,¹ and feeling scared.

My handler, trying to lighten the mood, made a joke about the guy working the door. He claimed the burly bearded man was evil Santa Claus. He had something we needed that he may or may not give to us based on how good he thinks we are².

After being interviewed by evil Santa, we went back to my new home and waited six weeks before we could return for the decision. I asked my employer what happened if the police showed up at the school where we worked. She said, "you go out the window." I laughed. She didn't.

I remember what it was like for everything to be new and exciting along with unsure and scary. Everything felt wrong. Wrong smells, wrong sounds, wrong faces, wrong everything.

Now I live in a country where immigrants are being kidnapped and protesters are being shot, and I struggle to recognize my own country. I do, however, recognize the fear — both the immigrant's fear and the fear of a country worried about losing its own culture.

Welcome to the neuroscience of immigration, where everyone's brain is kind of right and completely wrong at the same time.

What Immigration Does to Your Brain

Dopamine Gone Wild

A 2017 study put immigrants and non-immigrants into PET scanners and measured their dopamine levels. Then they stressed them out.

The immigrant brains lost their shit. Scientifically speaking.

When stressed, immigrant brains showed an increase in dopamine production and release (Egerton et al., 2016). Most people associate dopamine with being a 'feel good' chemical. The reality is it's more of the motivating or 'this matters' chemical.

When dopamine is working right you notice that your kid just said their first word, or that workout felt good.

When dopamine is chronically elevated it tells you that everything matters. The fluorescent lights matter. The stranger's footsteps behind you matter. The way someone looked at you on the bus matters. Your brain can't filter out what's actually important from background noise.

This consistently elevated dopamine is associated with psychosis and schizophrenia.

When dopamine gets to pathological levels the brain loses its ability to distinguish signal from noise. Everything feels significant. Everything feels like it might be a threat. You're stuck in a state of hypervigilance where you can't turn off the alarm system and eventually the system begins sounding at things nobody else can detect.

Immigrating Rewires Your Brain

Your brain spent the first seven years of your life building a cultural operating system. Not learning about culture, but becoming it. By the time you hit second grade, your neural pathways had already decided what counts as food, how close is too close, whether eye contact means respect or an invitation to get punched in the face.

These aren't conscious beliefs you can just update. You can't ctrl+z your childhood no matter how hard you try.

From birth to roughly age seven or eight, your brain is in what neuroscientists call a sensitive period for cultural acquisition (Hensch, 2004). During this window, your brain is strengthening the neural pathways that match your cultural environment and aggressively pruning away the ones you're not using. It's neural Darwinism.

This is why kids who grow up bilingual don't have accents in either language. Their brains captured both sound systems during the sensitive period. Adults learning a second language? You're building new pathways while fighting against decades of established ones. Your brain can do it, but it's the difference between learning to walk as a toddler versus learning to walk after a stroke.

When you immigrate as an adult, you're not just adding new cultural software. You're trying to override the deeply myelinated, automatic pathways that have been running your social behavior since you were still trying to figure out object permanence.

To do this your prefrontal cortex has to consciously inhibit the cultural response that got wired in when you were four while deliberately implementing the new one. Every single time.

Stand closer. No, not that close. Make eye contact. Wait, not that much. Smile at strangers. Actually, maybe don't, you look unhinged.

This is metabolically expensive. Your brain is burning through glucose to stop you from automatically doing what feels normal. This kind of constant inhibition rapidly depletes mental resources, and under stress is one of the first cuts the brain makes (Diamond, 2013).

Your Hippocampus Keeps Loading the Wrong File

The hippocampus is your brain's context and memory integrator.

It's the part of your brain that turns "something happened" into "something happened there, then, and it's over." Part of its job is to build cognitive maps and to knows where home is (O'Keefe & Nadel, 1978).

Immigration asks the hippocampus to maintain detailed memories of an inaccessible place while simultaneously building an entirely new framework. All while learning English and trying to figure out how a W-2 works.

This increased demand forces the hippocampus to increase in volume so it can keep track of all this new information (Mårtensson et al., 2012; Voits et al., 2022). Unfortunately and paradoxically, chronic stress happens to physically shrink the hippocampus (McEwen, 2007). So your brain is trying to grow and shrink the same structure simultaneously.

Evolutionarily, this is called "being fucked."

If you've immigrated under stressful circumstances, you probably recognize this. You can't remember where you put your keys. You get lost three blocks from your apartment. You walked into a room for a reason but the reason has evaporated. Chronic stress impairs the exact structure that's supposed to help you navigate (Kim et al., 2015).

At the same time, you can navigate parts of the city better than people who've lived there for years. You're unconsciously code-switching between languages. You've developed a sixth sense for reading social cues. Your hippocampus is adapting.

Now add discrimination. Not just the social pain of it, but the neurological impact. When you experience chronic social rejection and racism, your stress response system stays activated. Elevated cortisol. Reduced neuroplasticity. Impaired memory (Lupien et al., 2009).

Discrimination doesn't just make assimilation socially harder. It neurologically sabotages the exact mechanisms required for cultural adaptation.

Why Immigrants Inspire Fear

When people with anti-immigrant attitudes were placed in an fMRI and showed faces labeled as immigrants or refugees, researchers noticed increased activity in a region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus (Kesner et al., 2020).

The fusiform gyrus helps your brain decide what you're looking at when things are visually similar. Faces, written words, and objects that differ by subtle details all lean heavily on the fusiform gyrus.

Like most parts of the brain it has a left and a right side. The right side sees things more holistically. It sees my friend Penny walking towards me and says "Oh that's Penny! Yay!" The left fusiform does more categorical, feature-based processing: Penny has blond hair, curly texture, blue eyes, nose ring.

When people with anti-immigrant attitudes look at pictures of immigrants, they show heightened left fusiform activation compared to people with more welcoming attitudes (Kesner et al., 2020).

Why does this matter? Anti-immigrant brains appear to be treating refugee faces less like people and more like categories to sort. And when someone is processed as a category it becomes harder to miss their individuality and harder to care about what happens to them.

Your Amygdala Needs Implicit Bias Training

The amygdala is your brain's threat-detection system. It's the reason you jump at sudden noises and why horror movies work.

When researchers show people images of out-group faces (faces that don't belong), particularly racial or ethnic out-groups, the amygdala activates (Cunningham et al., 2004). This happens even in people who explicitly reject racist attitudes. The response is fast, automatic, and measurable³.

The evolutionary logic tracks. For most of human history, you needed to quickly identify who was in your group and who might kill you. Your amygdala evolved for snap judgments based on facial features, accents, and unfamiliar behaviors (Kubota et al., 2012). During the Paleolithic era, quick threat assessment meant survival.

To help counteract this automatic response your brain takes the information from the amygdala and sends it to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is responsible for answering the question "given everything I know, how good or bad is this really?"

Your amygdala says "This person shopping for groceries feels dangerous"

Your vmPFC says "You're being silly. That's someone buying milk"

When someone is consistently exposed to negative stereotypes about a group of people the prefrontal regulation system doesn't calm the amygdala as effectively. The threat feeling persists even when nothing dangerous is happening (Forbes et al., 2012).

The reward system reinforces the out group acceptance struggle. When people watched their own group members receive rewards, their ventral striatum lit up harder than when outsiders got the same rewards (Hackel et al., 2017).

The stronger someone identified with their group, the more intensely their brain responded. Your internal reward system essentially runs a loyalty program where people like you earn double points

None of this makes xenophobia acceptable. But it does present a neurological explanation. Your brain is running old software in a new world, treating strangers as threats because that's what kept your ancestors alive.

The Feedback Loop from Hell

Immigrant brains are stressed, pumping out elevated dopamine, trying to rewire decades of cultural programming, dealing with the neurological aftermath of trauma, and functioning under chronic activation of their threat-detection systems.

Meanwhile, host population brains are responding to these immigrants by activating their own threat-detection systems, treating unfamiliar as dangerous, and struggling to regulate automatic fear responses.

Then policy and social changes are enacted that remind both groups that the other group is worth fearing. The melting pot is boiling over. And boiling nervous systems do not produce cohesion.

They produce reflex, rumor, and policy driven by whoever shouts "danger" the loudest.

What Actually Helps

Spend Time Around Immigrants

Exposure to people of different backgrounds, ethnicities, and races matters. It's one of the most consistent findings in the neuroscience of prejudice.

The brain's threat response is malleable. When people view faces of out-group members who are famous or respected, amygdala activation diminishes (Phelps et al., 2000).

Personal connection trumps automatic bias.

In the 1970s, Henri Tajfel randomly assigned people to groups based on trivial criteria like preference for paintings or coin flips. Even with these meaningless distinctions, people immediately started making biased attributions (Tajfel et al., 1971).

When an in-group member did something bad, observers said it was because of circumstances: "They were having a bad day." When an out-group member did the exact same thing, observers attributed it to character: "That's just how they are" (Hewstone, 1990). The behavior was identical. The interpretation changed based solely on group membership.

This is called the ultimate attribution error, and it explains why shallow exposure to people different from yourself isn't enough to change your mind about them.

The exposure has to be deep enough to shift someone from "them" to "us." Once that shift happens, the attributions flip. Now when you see that same stressed behavior, you think "they're dealing with a lot" instead of "that's just how they are." Your brain gives them the same charitable interpretation it gives everyone else in your in-group.

And when you spend quality time with immigrants you may gets some badass pączki, tamale, or biryani out of it.

Catch Your Thoughts

Cognitive reappraisal is therapist speak for reframing a situation to change your emotional response.

In the context of immigration, this reinterpretation helps the brain to process out-group members as whole humans rather than abstract concepts, which allows the prefrontal cortex comes back online and the amygdala to stand down (Amodio, 2014).

When a professor was teaching our class cognitive reappraisal she told us: "I don't hold you accountable for the first 30 seconds of a thought. I hold you accountable for every thought after second 31."

You see someone from an out-group on the street. First thought: "Illegals are taking our jobs." That's your amygdala. It fires automatically. You didn't choose it. But second 31 starts now. You can let that thought run, or you can activate your prefrontal cortex: "Weird thought. This just looks like a man working hard to provide for the people he loves."

Your prefrontal cortex can override your amygdala, but it costs you. It requires metabolic resources. When you're stressed, tired, worried about money, or feeling threatened, your prefrontal cortex goes offline. The amygdala takes over.

This is why xenophobia spikes during economic downturns. People's regulatory systems are already taxed. The automatic threat response wins.

Children Are the Key

Young children don't show amygdala responses to racial differences. Researchers scanned the brains of children aged four to fourteen while they looked at faces of different races. Four-year-olds? No differential activation. Ten-year-olds? Nothing. But by fourteen, there it was: a clear preference for the child's in-group (Telzer et al., 2013)..

Nobody is born sorting people into us and them, that shit gets learned. Which means diverse schools during the years when brains are wiring matter more than diversity training seminars for adults with already-formed circuits.

It's really hard to fix neural architecture with a PowerPoint.

How To Win Friends and Influence Amygdalas

Narratives Work

The most effective way to change anti-immigrant sentiment is collaborative connection between immigrants and the host community. Get people in a room together, let them talk, magic happens.

Except this is not always possible. Or safe.

The next best option is perspective-getting, which is different from perspective-taking. Perspective-taking is when you ask someone to imagine being an immigrant. This doesn't work. Your brain just projects your own shit onto their situation while congratulating itself for being so evolved.

Perspective-getting is when you stop and listen to an immigrant's actual story (Kalla & Broockman, 2023). When you perspective-get you're learning from someone's life, you get details that contradict your assumptions. Your brain has to reconcile new information with old beliefs, which creates cognitive dissonance. That discomfort is what forces your neural pathways to update instead of running the same narrative.

How you tell the story matters. Emphasizing economic hardship as the reason for immigration instead of violence, victimhood, or humanitarian crisis positively changes the experience of the listener (Williamson et al., 2021).

This is because stories of economic hardship activate values people already have. Work ethic. Providing for your family. People working hard jobs. Suddenly your brain is able to identify with the immigrant. They aren't all that different from you.

First-person narratives are more effective than third-person accounts. When an immigrant tells their own story, your brain processes it differently. Emotional engagement increases. Counterarguing and reactance drop (Igartua & Frutos, 2017).

Your brain knows the difference between hearing something secondhand and hearing it straight from the source.

What Definitely Won't Work

Correcting misperceptions does almost nothing. People wildly overestimate how many immigrants are in their country. You can show them the actual numbers. They can believe you. Their attitudes toward immigration still won't budge (Hopkins et al., 2019).

The prejudice isn't caused by bad math. It's caused by threat perception. Fixing the facts doesn't fix the fear.

Reminding people they're descended from immigrants produces tiny, unreliable effects (Williamson et al., 2015). Your cousin who thinks we should close the borders doesn't care that his great-grandparents came through Ellis Island. That was different, his brain says. Those were the good immigrants.

Appeals to fairness, human rights, or moral obligation mostly bounce off people processing immigrants through a threat framework.

With each of these you're trying to bring a prefrontal cortex to an amygdala fight. The amygdala usually wins.

Final Thoughts

I think about that visa line a lot lately.

Standing there at 4:30am, watching people hold their thumbs for luck, waiting for evil Santa to decide if we were good enough to stay. My amygdala firing on all cylinders. Every footstep behind me mattered. Every facial expression from the consular officer mattered. My brain couldn't filter signal from noise because it was all signal.

I was terrified.

The fear made me understand that when your threat-detection system is maxed out you become controllable. And now I live in a country where fear is wielded and turned into policy.

As a result of this fear we gravitate toward our in-groups. We categorize faces instead of seeing people. We're too stressed, too tired, too depleted to override those automatic responses.

Every dystopian regime in history has understood that segregation isn't just policy, it's neural infrastructure. Keep people apart long enough and their brains finish the job for you.

The counter-hack is stupidly simple and infuriatingly difficult.

Spend time with people who don't look like you, sound like you, or hold their thumbs the way you do⁴. Not because it's virtuous. Because it's the only intervention that actually rewrites the threat-detection software fascism runs on.

Your brain can't maintain "dangerous outsider" classification for someone whose name you know, whose kids annoyed you at the block party, who helped you move that couch.

I wish I could tell you there's an easier way. A policy solution, a clever media campaign, a perfectly worded argument that will make everyone's amygdala stand down. But your brain doesn't work like that. Mine doesn't either.

If you want to change our country start with changing your relationships. I know that's not the answer anyone wants. It's slow. It's unglamorous. It doesn't scale to policy or fit in a campaign slogan. But it's what the neuroscience shows, and right now what we've got.

So I'll keep making pierogis for the block party and checking in on my immigrant neighbors. You do whatever your version of that is. It won't fix the system. But it might rewire a few brains.

And, if you're very lucky, it may even rewire yours.

References

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Footnotes

The eastern European equivalent of crossing your fingers. The more you know. 🌈
It was early in the Iraq war, and Europeans weren't thrilled with Americans.
Interestingly, it's the left amygdala showing increased activity in people with higher implicit prejudice (Kawata et al., 2019). This matters because the right amygdala handles rapid, automatic threat detection (your gut reaction) while the left amygdala is linked to slower, more sustained emotional processing. Whatever's happening here, it's not just a quick startle response. It's sustained attention. Perhaps that also implies it is meant to be challenged.
To be explicitly clear in a way that doesn't fit my flow… I think this means making friends with a variety of people different from you. The immigrant. The conservative. The liberal. Especially people you disagree with. Fight segregation in all its forms.