Forced Liquidity: Identity Fragmentation and Structural Precarity in Contemporary Migration

There is a form of migratory suffering that clinical practice tends to attribute to the individual and that, nevertheless, is produced outside them. It is not in their family history, nor in their psyche, nor in their defences. It is in the conditions that the host country imposes on them: the legal precarity that prevents them from projecting themselves, the professional deskilling that forces them to start from scratch, the stigmatising representation that returns to them an image of themselves they do not recognise, the impossibility of putting down roots in an environment that demands they adapt while closing its doors to them. This article addresses that structural dimension of migratory identity fracture. Three concepts are articulated: asymmetric adaptation, specular identity, and hyperliquidity. The first describes the contradiction between the demands of integration and the barriers that prevent it. The second designates the process by which the receiving society returns to the migrant an image of themselves that does not coincide with their lived experience. The third describes the aggravated form of liquidity that the migrant suffers: ephemeral jobs, superficial bonds, identities in permanent reinvention, absence of anchoring. The article forms part of a broader research line on identity fracture in migratory contexts (Martínez, 2026a, 2026b, 2026c, 2026d), and focuses here on the social and political dimension that the other contributions address only tangentially. This article draws on the author's clinical experience with migrant populations over two decades.