This chapter explores the political psychology of migration and multiculturalism. In so doing, it pays attention to those studies that have demonstrated how both majority and minority communities in immigrant-receiving countries have been shaped by patterns of immigration and regimes of citizenship. It further explores how the political agency of those citizens and denizens1 has contributed to the development of narratives, discourses and identities of belonging and exclusion, as well as community relations. As with other facets of globalisation and globalism, political agencies, from citizens through states to transnational governance organisations, have been both agents of change and subject to change that has occurred elsewhere. The practices of political agencies are both recursive and reflexive (Giddens, 1984). They are recursive because through their practices they reproduce consciousnesses, cultures, discourses and the material conditions and structures that support and condition their agency. Such recursivity may be either banal and taken-for-granted or purposeful and strategic. Irrespective of the intentions of the agent, however, recursivity reproduces social structures. On the other hand, agents have the capacity for reflexivity. This is the self-aware and purposive monitoring of the circumstances that have conditioned and shaped one’s agency and the capacity to engage in practices that either reproduce or modify those conditions (Giddens, 1991).
