Migrants become scapegoats for the loss of an imagined homogeneous national past.

Evidence

His argument is keenly alert to the extent to which, given the necessarily uncomfortable stresses and strains of multicultural societies, migrants (undermining, as they do, certainties previously thought to have been indelibly inscribed in the soil of the nation) so often come to function as scapegoats for the loss of that imaginary Golden Age of settled homogeneity. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 155

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities and to the reader’s Module 2 building block on the nation; ‘imaginary Golden Age of settled homogeneity’ is Hall’s version of the mythic national past that anti-Muslim rhetoric weaponizes. — connects to: Depression converted immigrants from assets into scapegoats in business eyes — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 414; Scapegoating fuses immigrant groups, voter fraud, and partisan opposition into one conspiratorial target — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 143; Blame shifted from children to their poor and immigrant families. — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 488
• ADDENDUM: This scapegoating mechanism — migrants blamed for undermining an imagined national certainty — is the exact frame the Islamophobia readings will operationalize against British Muslim communities.