Trump’s migrant fear-mongering is straight out of a European playbook
"Trump’s game of making up a migrant invading force isn’t surprising to anyone who has watched populists gain power in Europe in recent years."
Only one week ahead of the midterms, US President Donald Trump is working hard to turn a few thousand migrants who are on their way to the United States into an “invasion.” More than 5000 active US service members have been ordered to the border, as the president is spreading unsubstantiated claims that “unknown Middle Easterners” are in the caravan.
There is no evidence for a looming invasion or a terrorism risk. But Trump’s game of making up a migrant invading force isn’t surprising to anyone who has watched populists gain power in Europe in recent years. There’s no better way for populists to win an election than by announcing a national emergency that plays into the fears of voters.
Europeans still remember how Nigel Farage, then the British Independence Party leader, unveiled a poster ahead of the Brexit vote that read “Breaking Point” and showed a long line of predominantly male refugees.
Farage of course didn’t mention that almost none of those refugees had any chance of ever reaching Britain because the country is not part of the border-free Schengen zone. Only a tiny fraction of the refugees who entered Europe ended up in Britain — with most of them being carefully resettled and screened by the government — while over a million headed to Germany. And yet, it was Britain and not Germany that later decided to leave the European Union to “take back control”, as Farage said.
Then, there’s the example of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. When migrant flows into Europe surged in 2015, many arrived in the central European country — but almost nobody wanted to stay there, given the state of social services and a more hostile attitude toward migrants than in Western Europe. Regardless of the nonexistent threat of being overwhelmed by refugees in the long-run, Orban ordered the construction of a border fence and some of the toughest anti-migrant laws in the Western hemisphere. The strategy worked: Many Hungarians bought into the threat scenario Orban made up and celebrated his remarks in which he claimed that Muslims were an immediate threat to Europe’s Christian identity.
It’s somewhat ironic since Hungary in fact needs foreign workers and is now trying to recruit non-Muslims from abroad. The reason? Many Hungarians have escaped unemployment or poor social services in their own country and have moved to wealthier countries like Austria and Germany.
There has been a similar exodus among younger Italians who suffered under a youth unemployment rate of approximately 35 per cent last year. When the country’s new populist government came to power this year, the number of refugees arriving there had significantly sunk. So, Italy’s government decided to create some unnecessary drama to bring the issue back onto the news agenda by temporarily preventing its own Coast Guard members from disembarking from their vessel, after they picked up migrants at sea. The government has also cracked down on private rescue operations, arguing that it encourages crossing attempts.
Preventing a few hundred migrants from entering Italy may never have been the point the Italian government wanted to make — as is so often the case in recent years, the domestic message here was the real key to understanding what was unfolding. Artificially creating that crisis has come at a high cost, however. Human rights groups say that the crackdown on rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea has resulted in a surge in migrant deaths, even as fewer people have tried to cross.
In the case of President Trump, careful observers may have suspected a long time ago that he was keen on the European populists’ playbook. In 2016, the Trump campaign released a video ad in which a narrator warned of “illegal immigration” at the southern border and demanded the construction of a border wall to stop it.
To make its point, the Trump campaign showed dramatic footage of African migrants scaling the fences around the Spanish enclave of Melilla in Morocco, northern Africa.
It conveniently forgot to mention the events in the video took place more than 8000km from America’s southern border, just like some of the other facts that went unmentioned as populist leaders made up invasions that never occurred.