Immigration Load, Democratic Capacity, and Consent Architecture in Europe

Post-Horizon Instrumental Lineage — 4 August 2026 This record forms part of the Post-Horizon Instrumental Lineage of the Architecture of Limitation research programme. The designation and conditions governing subsequent review are established in K1 Open Concordance Phase: A Structured Validation and Evidence-Alignment Programme for the Open Research Release of AoLOS, v1.0, 2 August 2026, doi:10.5281/zenodo.21758275. The record is retained unchanged as evidence of the conditions, tools, concepts, and architectural pressures through which the programme developed. Inclusion in this lineage does not imply retrospective K1 validation or completion of article-level concordance; any proposition-specific qualification, reanalysis, companion publication, or unresolved pressure will be recorded separately through the phase’s declared review process. -- This paper analyses immigration and international protection policy in Europe using a constraint-governed analytical framework that treats policy instability as a capacity–consent problem rather than a moral or ideological failure. Drawing on European-level data and comparative case clustering, it shows that immigration functions as a secondary stressor that amplifies pre-existing pressures in housing, public services, administrative systems, and institutional trust. Where cumulative load exceeds absorptive capacity or is rendered illegible, democratic consent degrades predictably. Opposition emerges first as localized resistance, then as national polarization. The analysis further demonstrates that dissent is frequently misclassified as extremism, suppressing corrective feedback and accelerating instability. The paper concludes that durable immigration governance depends on explicit capacity accounting, rate-sensitive sequencing, visibility of mitigation, and consent scaffolding, rather than moral framing or enforcement escalation. This preprint applies a constraint-governed diagnostic framework to immigration policy, extending a previously published analysis of climate policy and democratic consent. This work belongs to the Architecture of Limitation research program.