Across Europe, from Brussels cafés to Spanish town halls, immigration has quietly transformed from a policy debate into a totalizing interpretive lens — one through which citizens now read economic anxiety, social fragmentation, and cultural unease alike. This shift, decades in the making, offers psychological clarity in uncertain times: a single cause, a single lever. Yet when one frame explains everything, it risks explaining nothing well, and the structural forces it obscures may prove more consequential than the ones it illuminates.