Identity Preservation Is the Next Intercultural Challenge Nobody Is Talking About Yet.

I did not plan to write this post. It came out of a preparation meeting with Ruth Van Reken before our joint presentation After the Boxes Are Unpacked: Identity, Belonging, and the Parent Nobody Asks About (read the first part of the speech here) at SIETAR Valencia 2026 Congress. We were talking about identity migration, the experience of becoming someone different in a place that was not built for you, and somewhere in the middle of that conversation a question surfaced that I have not been able to put down since.

What if the hostility we are seeing toward migrants right now is not really about migrants at all?

What if it is about identity?

Here is what I mean. The people expressing the most hostility toward outsiders are often responding to something deeper than economics alone. Research in social psychology supports this — particularly Social Identity Theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner, which established that when group identity feels threatened people increase hostility toward out-groups, and Integrated Threat Theory, developed by Walter Stephan and Cookie Stephan, which found that symbolic threat to values and way of life is consistently a stronger predictor of anti-immigrant hostility than direct economic competition. Research suggests that perceived identity and cultural threats frequently play a significant role alongside material concerns. They can tell you very clearly what they are not, not that, not them, not foreign, not different.

That is negative identity. Defining yourself by exclusion because the positive version, the answer to who am I rather than who am I not, has eroded or was never fully built.

And here is where it connects to everything this blog has been writing about for the past year.

The loss of felt competence is what happens when the invisible layer of knowing that tells you who you are stops working. The inherited scorecard is the set of expectations you were handed before you were old enough to question them, still running in the background of a life that no longer fits them. Identity migration is the process of becoming someone different while still being measured by the old version.

These are the experiences of people who move countries. But they are increasingly the experiences of people who have not moved anywhere. The world moved around them instead. The job changed, the community changed, and the cultural reference points that once told them who they were became unreliable or disappeared entirely.

The migrant did not cause that. But the migrant makes it visible. That is my interpretation, not a research conclusion. But it is one I find difficult to argue against. The person who crossed a border and rebuilt an identity in a new place is evidence that the old identity was not permanent, not essential, not the only possible version of a self. And for someone whose identity is already fragile, that evidence is threatening.

Identity preservation, the active work of knowing who you are clearly enough that difference does not destabilise you, is not a luxury. I increasingly believe it may be part of the psychological infrastructure that makes pluralism possible. Without it, diversity becomes a threat rather than a resource because the person who does not know who they are cannot afford to be in the room with someone who is visibly different.

This is the conversation the intercultural field has been circling without quite naming. We talk about cultural competence, bias, and inclusion. All of it matters. But underneath all of it is the identity question. And until we take that seriously as a field, as a society, as individuals, the hostility toward outsiders will keep looking like a political problem when it also has important psychological dimensions that the political conversation rarely reaches.

The work Ruth Van Reken has been doing for decades on Third Culture Kids, the work this blog has been doing on identity migration and the loss of felt competence, the work intercultural practitioners do every day with globally mobile families, all of it is pointing at the same thing.

Identity preservation is not a niche concern for expats and their children. It may be the central challenge of our time. We just have not named it that way yet.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

References

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 23–45). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Mutz, D. C. (2018). Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(19), E4330–E4339.

Sides, J., Tesler, M., & Vavreck, L. (2018). Identity crisis: The 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of America. Princeton University Press.