By R.W. Johnson
The politics of the entire Western world is currently dominated by the issue of migration or, more precisely, by the politics of resistance to immigration. Donald Trump has twice ridden that issue to power in the US, and he had no qualms about telling Keir Starmer publicly that he must do more to stop illegal immigration including using the military. Or anything that works. Because, he claimed, such migration destroys societies from within. The same issue dominates politics in Britain and right across Europe. It has even risen to prominence in Australia and Canada, both “countries of immigration” par excellence.
The oddity about this is that the liberal bien pensant elites who have controlled politics in all these countries until now have almost all walked into this crisis despite plenty of forewarning. They have persistently presided over much higher immigration figures than their own grass roots found tolerable, turning aside objections with bland reassurances that immigration was good for the economy and that anyone who opposed it was simply a racist.
In Britain, this produced a major electoral earthquake after Enoch Powell’s adoption of the issue in 1968, causing both the major parties to tighten up somewhat on immigration controls. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen finally broke through politically in the 1984 Euro-elections and even more in the 1986 parliamentary election when his Front National won 35 seats. In Germany, there were a number of aborted starts for the hard Right before the AFD finally broke through. But in all these countries there is now at least one major anti-immigration party securely anchored in a commanding position. The same is true in most other European countries.
In fact, Britain passed a milestone in the debate last week when Nigel Farage, the Reform leader who is riding the anti-immigration wave, made a key move. Farage successfully used the immigration issue to help win the Brexit referendum in 2016, but until now he has resolutely argued against the more radical voices demanding not just immigration control but the deportation of migrants already in the country. It just wasn’t practical to demand deportation, he said, for most of the migrants had already acquired British citizenship. Recently, however, he swung round in favour of deportation and promised to deport 600,000 in his first term in government.
The Flag of England (Cross of St George) displayed on a house in Bath. The English flag and the UK flag (Union Jack) are being displayed across the country as a form of protest against immigration.
Why the change? Well, there is increasing competition from Ben Habib’s Advance UK (supported by Elon Musk) and from Tommy Robinson, whose enormous London rally (Robinson claims as many as two million attended) showed the power of the issue and Robinson’s popularity. Secondly, those who support Farage are discontented with the present situation. They don’t just want less future immigration, they want to change the country’s demography back more to the way it used to be. Finally, there is the everyday example of Trump’s ICE and its success in deporting large numbers of immigrants. This makes it difficult to say it’s impractical.
This also brings Farage into line with what has become the European norm. In Germany, Alice Weidel, leader of the AFD, sought until this year to distance herself from calls for “remigration”, but this year has adopted it as policy. Weidel, who is gay and an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, wants Germany to leave the EU (“Germany must be sovereign”) and wants to “tear down” wind farms (“windmills of shame”). She also wants to leave behind all EU schemes for dealing with migration, to encourage skilled migrants and leave behind “this asylum paradise”. (Interestingly, she also wants to “throw out” professors of gender studies.)
The AFD, also enthusiastically supported by Musk, is on a roll. In the last election its vote doubled from 10.4% to 20.8%, only just behind Friedrich Merz’s CDU/CSU (28.5%), and it now has 152 seats in the Bundestag. It seems completely established as Germany’s second party, and it is difficult to see how the ban on all other parties collaborating with it can last. In January, Merz, to the horror of Angela Merkel, openly colluded with the AFD to pass a new set of restrictions on immigration. But the era of Merkel already seems like ancient history, and almost no one is now willing to defend her decision to welcome more than a million Syrian immigrants in 2015. Earlier this month, the AFD tripled its vote in Germany’s largest land, North Rhine Westphalia.
The AFD wants to return all Syrians to Syria now that the war there is over and to “reduce immigration to its absolute minimum”. Migrants, it says, should be sent back to their own countries or to the first country they entered in the EU. Countries which refuse to take back their own migrants should be subjected to “massive pressure via economic sanctions, by holding back development aid or by visa policies”. Within Germany there will be a policy (strongly influenced by Denmark) of not allowing huge immigrant ghettoes to develop. So migrants will not be allowed to settle in areas where non-EU migrants form 25% or more of the population, where there is “a high level of criminality” or where the AFD judges “integration hasn’t worked”.
Germans were shocked when the events of 7 October 2023 led to pro-Palestinian demonstrations and an upsurge of anti-semitic incidents. Germany’s strong relationship with Israel has been a pillar of its foreign policy and a key way in which the country takes its distance from the Third Reich.
Olaf Scholz, the then Chancellor, said it was clear that Germany would have to deport anti-semites on a large scale – for, of course, Turks, Syrians and other Muslims were prominent in these demonstrations. But Scholz made no move to follow through. so in the recent election the AFD printed huge numbers of flyers made up as airline tickets and sent them to pro-Palestinians.
The government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Rwanda for the external processing of asylum applicants, but this has not yet been actualised. As it is, all residence permits granted on humanitarian grounds are now temporary, and there is an expectation that all young Syrian women can be deported back to Syria. (The situation of young Syrian men awaits resolution of their military obligations.) Merkel, who had been silent since her resignation, popped up to say that Germany’s problem was not “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity”.
In France Le Pen’s Rassemblement National has successfully towed the entire political spectrum towards its views on immigration. In December 2023, President Macron’s bill on immigration was, shockingly, defeated in Parliament without even a debate, leaving Parliament to draft its own version. For the Centrist government depended on support from Les Republicains (the old Gaullists) who, facing competition from the RN, had become very hard line on the issue. So Parliament drafted a far tougher law which, inter alia, made non-EU migrants wait for five years to be eligible for welfare benefits if they didn’t have a job. This was later struck down by the courts, but the notion of “national preference” survived. Le Pen claimed a complete ideological victory.
During the 2024 election, Macron used Le Pen’s language to attack the Left for being “completely immigrationist”, meaning someone who conspires via a policy of open borders to invite an invasion of immigrants who will out-breed and replace the white French. And while Macron used to stress the positive benefits of immigration, he now discusses it as a law and order problem and emphasises the essential French notion of laicite – to which few Muslims subscribe.
By 2022 immigrants constituted just over 10% of the French population, with slightly over one third having gained French citizenship. In addition there were up to 700,000 undocumented (illegal) immigrants – half the number in Britain. The RN wants drastic cuts in immigration and to abolish the French “droit de sol” – the right to automatic citizenship for those born in France: instead, it would give citizenship only to those with at least one French parent. It favours strict conditions for naturalisation: applicants must show mastery of the French language, show respect for French law and customs, and give guarantees of assimilation. French citizenship would be withdrawn from anyone who commits “acts incompatible with French nationality or prejudicial to France’s interests”.
The RN has radicalised partly because of competition with Eric Zemmour’s Reconquete party which won 7% in the last presidential election. Reconquete is a conscious echo of the Spanish “reconquista”, the movement to expel all Muslims from Spain, finally achieved in 1492. Zemmour points to the Muslim concentration in the Paris banlieu, saying this is no longer part of France and must be reclaimed.
The RN wants to deport all illegal immigrants plus those who have committed any crime. It also wants the total offshoring of applications for immigration, the withdrawal of residency rights for those who haven’t worked for a year, and it opposes giving permission for immigrant families to join a family member who has migrated to France. It also favours “national preference” for French citizens when it comes to housing, employment and welfare.
Perhaps most crucially, the RN is not satisfied that immigrants should integrate themselves. It wants complete assimilation. Many who integrate still retain their native identity and culture – and for the RN that is not acceptable. It is difficult to see how any Muslim can qualify: Muslim leaders openly attack the goal of assimilation.
In the Netherlands the government has declared an “asylum crisis” and is taking emergency powers to cut immigration. This has attracted little attention because this is becoming a European norm. Denmark, whose Social Democrat government was among the first to adopt strong immigration controls, has become an increasingly influential model. In August 2024 a meeting of all Nordic migration ministers agreed on strengthening provision for reintegration, repatriation and greater security – all based on the Danish model which has also been influential in Germany.
Perhaps most striking is the example of Italy where the far right is actually in power. Giorgia Meloni, the prime minister, has set up 25 “repatriation detention centres” where migrants can be held for 135 days. The time limit for appeals against deportation has been reduced to 15 days. Migrants guilty of various crimes or who provide false information about themselves are liable to immediate deportation. Agreements with Libya and Tunisia have seen migrant arrivals by sea fall by 60%, and all migrants to Italy are off-shored to Albania.
The interesting thing is that Meloni’s success in this regard has been widely acclaimed – even Keir Starmer congratulated her on Italy’s “remarkable progress” on the migrant issue. When one considers that Meloni’s party openly stresses its descent from the Fascist tradition, such warmth from a Labour leader is striking.
The fact that in America and right across Europe the deportation of migrants has become practical politics signals a wholly new phase not just of the migrancy issue but, potentially, of their political systems. There is no doubt that the Trump administration has seen the triumph of the authoritarian Right to a degree not seen in America before and there is now a real prospect of far right movements taking or sharing power in a number of European states.
This is, of course, anathema to the Left and to liberals more generally, but it is their own mistakes which have produced this situation. A laissez-faire attitude to immigration has produced rapid demographic and cultural change in these societies. Nobody was consulted about these changes, or voted for them. Even as popular resistance to these changes grew liberals and the Left, instead of responding to this opposition, tried to ignore it by treating it as merely racist or insisting that immigration was good for everyone.
Joe Biden personified this attitude. Although Trump had ridden the immigration issue to power in 2016, Biden made no effort to hinder the migratory wave flowing through America’s southern border, although this was clearly feeding a second and far more determined Trump victory. Future historians will struggle to explain this almost suicidal lack of response.
It has been the same in Britain. In election after election the Tories promised to reduce immigration numbers, yet they never achieved it or even made much of an effort to do so. Indeed, under Boris Johnson, despite all the usual promises, net inward migration rose from 484,000 in 2021 to 634,000 in 2022 and 906,000 in 2023.
This, ultimately, is the reason why the Tory party now lags far behind Reform and could well be annihilated at the next election. And the Tories are the world’s oldest political party and were thought to be immortal. It’s all very well to denounce Nigel Farage’s populism and complete unsuitability for office – and the same things are true of Trump – but if those in power refuse to carry out their promises or to respond to popular feeling, they have only themselves to blame.
FEATURED IMAGE: An anti-immigration rally in Prague. (Wikimedia Commons)