A cold shoulder
US president faces backlash over ‘negative’ changes to Europe claim
Protesters march through the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, on Saturday, the third day of US President Donald Trump’s four-day visit to the United Kingdom.
WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump’s lament this week that immigration is “changing the culture” of Europe echoed rising anti-immigrant feelings on both sides of the Atlantic, where Europe and the US are going through a demographic transformation that makes some of the white majority uncomfortable.
Historians and advocates immediately denounced Trump’s comments.
“The way he put this argument about changing our culture ... about Europe becoming less nice than it is, in other words, these people are here and they are making the culture crappy and making the place lesser, that’s straight out of the white supremacist/ white nationalist playbook,” said Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.
Trump, in an interview with the British newspaper The Sun, blamed immigration for a changing culture in Europe: “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.”
Trump, the grandson of a German immigrant and the son of a Scottish immigrant to the United States, repeated his contention at a news conference with UK Prime Minister Theresa May.
“I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said. “I think it’s very much hurt other parts of Europe. And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that, but I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture, you are changing a lot of things.”
Claire M. Massey, a scholar at the Institute for British and North American Studies at Ernst-Moritz-Arndt University in Greifswald, Germany, said Trump’s comments were “awfully painful”, especially for the United Kingdom, where immigration has played a key role in rebuilding the country after World War II.
“England and the United Kingdom wouldn’t be what it is today without immigrants,” she said.
Meanwhile, May said Trump advised her to “sue” the European Union in the negotiations over Britain’s exit from the bloc.
Trump told reporters on Friday at a joint news conference with May that he had given the British leader a suggestion that she found too “brutal”.
Asked on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday what that suggestion was, May said: “He told me I should sue the EU. Not go into negotiation, sue them.”
Trump has been in the UK for four days ahead of Monday’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
After large-scale demonstrations in London, the protests moved to Scotland, with thousands turning out across the country as the US president played golf at Turnberry on the west coast.
A dozen demonstrators staged a “protest picnic” while a line of police, some on horseback, separated the protesters from the golf course. Snipers were also perched atop a nearby tower overlooking the vast property.
On Sunday, police said they had made an arrest after a paraglider on Friday night flew a Greenpeace protest banner over the resort.