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Over the weekend, former president Donald Trump conjured a new metaphor in his anti-migrant demagoguery. He said undocumented migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States, in language critics immediately associated with the ideological worldview and obsessions with racial purity of earlier 20th-century fascists. Despite a backlash, Trump doubled down later in the week, repeating the line at another Iowa campaign event that those participating in illegal border crossings are “destroying the blood of our country.”
This is, on one level, familiar terrain for Trump. In 2015, he launched his first presidential bid by casting Mexican migrants crossing the U.S. southern border as “rapists.” He then moved on to suggesting all potential Muslim refugees were terrorist threats and called for a ban on Islamic immigration. The rhetoric appalled many but played to a galvanized far-right base that helped bring him to power.
In office, Trump attempted to follow through on his campaign promises with a limited travel ban on a few Muslim majority nations, a costly and dubiously effective border wall and harsh policies on asylum seekers. Some of those measures were thrown out by President Biden, who has tried to take a more humane approach while enforcing border laws and deporting hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the year.
But the Democratic administration faces a desperate political battle in 2024 during which Republicans are expected to leverage anxiety over major recent influxes of undocumented migrants crossing the border. Trump will be leading the attacks and, no matter his extremism, will have plenty of Americans on his side.
Migration debate pushes Europe to the right as attitudes harden
In this maelstrom, the United States is hardly alone. In Europe, too, fears over migration are morphing the political landscape and boosting right-wing parties. It loomed over the results of recent elections in the Netherlands (where the far right came shockingly first) and is contributing to the steady rise of Germany’s far-right AfD party in the polls.
It also saw France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron join forces with parliamentarians on the right to push through legislation on migration this week that, among other things, would set quotas limiting arrivals to France and curtail benefits and state support to foreign-born migrants. The bill, parts of which were deemed by Macron’s own prime minister as unconstitutional, was hailed as an “ideological victory” by French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. She remains a strong contender to be France’s next president after Macron’s term ends.
On Wednesday, E.U. leaders in Brussels announced the clinching of a major package of reforms on migration after years of disagreements within the bloc. “The deal, which must still be formally ratified, aims, among other things, to share the costs associated with new arrivals more evenly between member states, to stem new arrivals and to make it possible to deport people more quickly,” my colleagues reported.
Politicians in the continent’s liberal establishment and the technocrats recognize the urgency in these measures, as far-right parties seek to exploit widespread anxieties ahead of E.U. parliamentary elections next year. “In a big election year — in the U.S., the E.U. and the U.K. — migration is shaping up to be a big issue,” Catherine Barnard, a professor at the University of Cambridge who specializes in European politics, told my colleagues.
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In both the United States and Europe, the data points to significant increases in arrivals of those seeking asylum. “EU border agency Frontex said this month there were more undocumented arrivals into the bloc so far this year than in any year since 2015, over one million migrants and refugees arrived at the EU borders, many fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan,” Politico noted. “In 2022, nearly one million people applied for asylum in Europe.”
In the United States, officials are reckoning with a pre-holiday surge in undocumented arrivals. “The broader U.S. immigration system is in similar tattered shape after decades of congressional inaction and recurring migration spikes — including record numbers of illegal crossings this month,” my colleague Nick Miroff wrote on Wednesday. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection is surpassing 10,000 encounters with migrants along the southern border per day, an influx likely to exacerbate strains on New York, Chicago and other cities already swamped by newcomers seeking shelter, food and assistance.”
The sense of crisis inflaming the political conversation on both sides of the pond is inescapable. Rights groups and immigration reform advocates lament what gets tossed aside in the process, in an age when natural disasters and social instability may become all the more common in parts of Africa and Latin America.
“This agreement will set back European asylum law for decades to come,” said Amnesty International in a statement about the E.U. reform. “Its likely outcome is a surge in suffering on every step of a person’s journey to seek asylum in the E.U.”
“There is nothing humane about turning back asylum seekers at the border, and deterrence policies have long been known for their deadliness,” Human Rights Watch said in a statement this year, after the White House tightened policies on asylum seekers. “Biden should stop copying Trump at the border and finally follow through on his promises to create rights-respecting border policies.”
U.S.-bound migrants are overwhelming Mexico
But, as in Europe, the right is winning the conversation, as a complex matrix of border protocols struggles to cope with the numbers of arrivals. No matter the real need for immigrant labor in many nations in the West, the sense of anxiety over the influxes obscures all else. And so “poisoning the blood” can go from sounding like a Nazi echo to a potential winning slogan.
Some Republican politicians brushed off Trump’s language as just “talk.” My colleague Philip Bump parsed its power and ahistoricism. “The most obvious and immediate response to the idea that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the country is to point out that the United States is inextricably constituted of immigrants and their children,” Bump wrote.
Trump’s intent, he added, is not complicated: “He’s simply amplifying his base’s fears of the perceived decline of traditional White Christian America.”
In Europe, it’s the same story.