By Azu Ishiekwene
I can understand if many people outside the US wish to forget about President Donald Trump and get on with their lives. However hard you try, you can’t keep up with the chaos in the White House since January 20.
It would be a defamation of the animal kingdom to call Trump a bull in a China shop. He is worse. Regrettably, Trump is inspiring copycats around the world, and it won’t be long before they start following his example, especially his anti-immigration hysteria.
Trump didn’t create the migrant crisis facing the world. He wasn’t there when the Huns, Goths, and Vandals invaded Europe, marking the first recorded significant migration and reshaping European demographics. Conquests, geography, tyranny, wars, or the sheer human desire for new frontiers have always led to different kinds of migration. Even the contemporary rise in migrations had nothing to do with Trump.
Before Trump
For example, the Syrian Civil War, the destabilisation of Central Asia, and later the conflicts in Sudan and Central Africa, all of which also had nothing to do with Trump, have been some of the biggest migration triggers in the last nearly two decades.
However, the cruelty of Trump’s approach has been different, something that otherwise civilised countries—including Britain—are surprisingly fascinated by. Deporting undocumented migrants using military planes and hunting them down in sanctuaries by executive orders that read like martial laws is, let’s put it plainly, fascist.
We saw a bit of it in his first coming, but the fragile balance in Congress restrained him. Now, there are nearly no guardrails except perhaps the courts. Under Trump, this new face of US exceptionalism may gradually gain appeal in other parts of the world, mainly Europe.
More than a report
On January 22, The Telegraph of the UK carried a story whose timing could hardly have been fortuitous. The story, published as the first batch of Mexican immigrants were being herded aboard a military aircraft at the US southern border, was entitled, “Up to one in 12 in London is an illegal migrant.”
The story said, “Government ‘must do more on deportations’ as new estimate suggests more than one million people are illegally living in the UK,” with London, the largest haven, hosting 585,000 of these illegal immigrants.
The report said these numbers may even be underestimated and blamed illegal immigrants for the pressure on the health service, public utilities and infrastructure. The Labour government must crack down on illegal immigrants, the report said, to save Britain from imminent ruin.
Stoking the flames
Immigrant bashing is not new in Britain. That was one of the main reasons for Brexit. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Co. fabricated numbers to suggest that not only foreigners from faraway places but also eastern Europeans were stealing British jobs and making the country hell when many of these immigrants were doing odd jobs that British citizens were not interested in. Farage’s Reform UK party rode on the back of this illiberal sentiment to get 14 percent of the votes in the last election. He is still stoking the flames.
In a slight reinvention of what Abraham Lincoln did with Liberia in the 19th century, UK Conservatives under Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak made a deal that could potentially ship off about 52,000 asylum seekers to Rwanda in a few years. As controversial as this deal remains, it’s considered better than the misery under which migrants, including children, were held indefinitely in detention camps.
The danger of the Trump model
However, if the prevailing Trump model takes hold in Britain or elsewhere in Europe, even detention camps in Manus or Nauru may soon look like redemption centres. Grabbing people from wherever they may be found, handcuffing them and herding them off to the airports to be deported on military flights like war criminals may appease right-wing sentiments in the short run. Still, it hardly addresses the root cause of the crisis: though the decision is hardly random, people will go wherever they believe they will have a better life if they can pay the price.
The other side of the argument is that governments must also take action to protect their citizens and their countries. Yet, in doing so, civilised countries recognise there are international conventions, including the Geneva Convention on Refugees, that protect migrants, especially those fleeing persecution. The current Trumpian model tears families – including children – apart, treating potential deportees like animals.
Mind the gap
It’s a model that Britain and the rest of Europe must resist. Trump is an aberration, even though the next four years may feel like a lifetime. It doesn’t matter how hard he tries; the US, a country with a significant immigrant gene (13 percent of the population is born outside), will hardly shed it in four years of a chaotic government.
One of the most iconic Republican Presidents, Ronald Reagan, once said, “Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”
Schengen countries, particularly Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Belgium, tend to face more significant pressure due to geographical and historical ties with non-European countries. Yet, this is the more reason Europe needs to resist being Trump’s copycats because we have seen that xenophobia has far more deadly effects on the stability of these societies than it might have in the US, with a larger, better-adjusted migrant population.
Changing attitudes
It’s fair to argue that the resurgence of violent extremism, the narcotic trade, not to mention other franchises of criminal gangs trafficking in humans, have blurred the lines between genuine migrants and refugees, putting host countries at serious risk. Yet populist politicians do severe damage by exploiting the fears and magnifying the problem.
After 9/11, attitudes towards migrants, especially those from largely poor Muslim countries, have been exploited by Western politicians often to create the trope that their culture and civilisation are under siege. Yet, in a country like France, for example, with a significant Muslim population, studies have shown that people believe the number of Muslims to be four times the actual figure. At the same time, in the UK, their presence was overestimated by a factor of three.
Historically, migration has never been in one direction, even for countries that were once major destinations. Yet Trump’s recent actions evoke Idi-Amin framing Indians and Pakistanis as the problem with Uganda decades ago, after which he brutally expelled 50,000 of them or the Nigerian government in the 1980s under Shehu Shagari expelling thousands of Ghanaians, only for Nigerians to find that the real problem was an incompetent political leadership.
Migration is not a destination
Thomas Sowell’s book Migrations and Cultures: A World View, a classic on the subject, records that even though the migrations of conquerors, refugees, slaves, and sojourners have been outstripped by those of migrants going to settle permanently in new lands, “It has been estimated that, between the mid-1830s and the late 1930s, approximately 30 million people left the Indian subcontinent and nearly 24 million returned.”
Any country anxious to emulate Trump should remember that migration is a process, not always a destination. While some sojourners never leave to return to their countries of origin, some keep moving, and others, like Trump’s grandfather, who emigrated to the U.S. from Germany to avoid military service, return despite the odds.
Migration can be harmful and good, but the single narrative that frames it as the root cause of nearly all of today’s social problems is lazy populism, which denies even the personal odysseys of its propagators.
Ishiekwene is Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of Writing for Media and Monetising It.
