I first watched Person of Interest a few years ago, and I recently decided to watch it again. There are so many parts of the story that really make you think, but this time, I thought about Peter Collier. So, spoiler alert, and pardon me if you have not seen the series.

Collier was working towards becoming a lawyer when his older brother, Jesse, was arrested and accused of having links to terrorism. Jesse was held without charge and without access to a lawyer, and eventually took his own life in prison. You can imagine what that did to Collier. He was angry at the government, at the surveillance system that had wrongly labelled his brother a threat, and at the fact that the people responsible could carry on as though Jesse’s life meant nothing.

Not long after Jesse’s death, Collier received a message from someone claiming to know what had really happened to his brother. That message led him to Vigilance, a group fighting government surveillance and the invasion of people’s privacy, and he eventually became the man leading it.

As far as Collier knew, he was leading Vigilance and making the decisions. Even when the group became more aggressive, he believed they were still fighting the same injustice that had taken his brother from him. What he did not know was that the person who sent that first message was still behind the scenes, giving them information and pushing them to do more.

Towards the end, Collier finally met the man who had been behind those messages, and that was when he discovered what was really happening. I remember looking at his face as he realised that Vigilance had never truly been what he thought it was. The movement he believed he was leading had been created for a completely different plan, one that had nothing to do with getting justice for Jesse.

At that point, I could only imagine what was going through Collier’s mind. His pain over Jesse had been used to draw him in, and the violence carried out in the name of his cause had helped create the fear the people behind it needed for their own plan. After everything he had done and everything he believed he was fighting for, I could imagine him wondering how much of that fight had ever truly been his and how much had been decided for him from the beginning.

Watching that scene again made me think about the way migration is discussed, especially when conversations turn to housing, jobs, schools, public services, safety and the changes people see in their communities.

And to be fair, some of these concerns come from real problems. Finding an affordable apartment can take months, parents can struggle to find school or daycare places for their children, and salaries do not always cover as much as they once did. Anyone living through these things will actually feel frustrated

Take housing for example; You can have two families looking at the same apartment, a German family and a Ghanaian family that moved there more recently. They may both have children, and they may both have spent months looking for somewhere safe and affordable to live.

The German family may look around the crowded viewing and think that finding a home has become much harder because too many people have arrived in the country. The Ghanaian family, standing in the same room, may be wondering whether the landlord will set their application aside after seeing their surname or hearing their accent. They are both struggling to find a home, but they are experiencing the same housing shortage from very different positions.

Of course, neither of them created this situation, but after months of searching and being disappointed, it can become easier to look at the people standing beside you and feel as though they are taking something that could have been yours. The decisions that led to the shortage may feel far removed from your everyday life, but the other people competing for the same apartment are standing right in front of you.

This is where politicians, media figures and the people behind certain online movements come in. They do not have to convince anyone that finding a home is difficult because people already know that. They only have to keep pointing towards migrants, and after a while, the German family may begin to see the Ghanaian family as the reason they are still searching.

This does not always happen through someone openly telling people that migrants are to blame. It could be a politician who is asked about housing but quickly turns the conversation towards immigration, or one video of an incident that is shared again and again until it begins to look like proof of how an entire group behaves. The more people see these things, the easier it becomes for them to make that connection on their own, even when the reality is far more complicated.

By the time people begin to make that connection, they may not feel as though anyone has influenced them at all. They may genuinely believe they are protecting their families, their communities and the future of their country, and the fear behind that belief may be very real. Collier’s anger over Jesse was real too, but that did not stop the people behind Vigilance from using it to get what they wanted.

Now, saying that people’s fears can be used does not take away their responsibility for what they do with those fears. People are still responsible for how they speak about migrants and how they treat them, and being influenced does not excuse hatred, discrimination or violence. At the same time, it would be dishonest to pretend that every concern about migration is simply racism. There still need to be honest conversations about how many people a country can receive, how integration is managed and whether there are enough homes, schools and other services to support everyone.

The problem begins when migration stops being one part of a much larger conversation and becomes the explanation for almost everything. Rising rents? Migration. Longer waits at hospitals? Of course, migration. Overcrowded schools? Migration. Your salary no longer lasts until the end of the month? Worried about crime? All of it blamed on migrants, even though migration is not the only reason these problems exist. Once that happens, there is less room to ask what governments failed to plan for, what was not properly funded or which decisions allowed the problems to grow.

This is why Collier’s story made me think about migration, even though what happened to him was far more extreme. He had lost Jesse, and nobody needed to convince him to be angry. The people behind Vigilance only needed to tell him where to direct that anger and keep him believing that he was fighting for his brother, while all along he was helping them carry out a plan that had nothing to do with Jesse.

And so, when people’s anger is repeatedly directed towards migrants, I think we should ask who keeps pointing it in that direction and what they gain from doing so. Maybe they want votes, attention, influence or money, or maybe it is simply easier when people are blaming migrants instead of asking what their governments have done, or failed to do, about the problems affecting them.

By the time the German and Ghanaian families leave the apartment viewing, neither of them has found a home, and nothing about the housing shortage has changed. The only difference may be that they now look at each other with more suspicion, while the people who benefit from keeping that suspicion alive may never have to stand in that crowded room themselves.

And I cannot write about this as though I have always stood outside it. As a journalist, I would not be telling the truth if I said I had always recognised these patterns immediately. There have been times when I accepted a version of events as it was presented before stepping back to ask what had been left out, whose interests it served and why I was being shown it in that particular way. Perhaps any of us can become a version of Collier, not in the violence he carried out, but in believing that because our anger is real, the fight built around it must also be honest. Now, when a story gives me an obvious enemy and tells me exactly where to place my anger, I try to ask whether I am seeing the whole picture or whether someone has found a way to make my anger useful to them.