Brexit vote echoes Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric

WASHINGTON: To US voters who have witnessed the rise of Donald Trump, the campaign urging Britain to abandon the EU may appear eerily familiar.

There’s the nationalism, the romanticised nostalgia for an earlier time, the mistrust of political and financial elites, and the fears that migrants are bringing crime and stealing jobs. Call it Trumpism minus Trump.

If British citizens vote tomorrow in favour of exiting the EU, it would allow Britain to negotiate its own trade deals and better control who enters the country, among other things.

Both sides in the polarised debate have mounted extensive campaigns and polls show the vote could be close.

Trump, who will travel to Britain this week, supports the “Leave” camp, popularly known as Brexit.

“I would personally be more inclined to leave, for a lot of reasons like having a lot less bureaucracy,” he told The Sunday Times newspaper.

He has spent much of his presidential campaign warning of the dangers posed by undocumented immigrants from Mexico and refugees from the Middle East and has proposed building a wall along the southern border of the US.

Syrian refugees have also been centre stage in the Brexit debate, with pro-exit forces arguing that Britain must do more to curb the flow of economic migrants from the Middle East and elsewhere.

“I see similar themes on both sides of the Atlantic – a strong sense of threatened national identity, anti-globalisation, nostalgia, and a sense that elites aren’t accountable,” said Wendy Rahn, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied Trump voters.

Trump’s campaign and the Brexit movement are two of the starkest examples of a new strain of conservative populism that stretches beyond the US and Britain, into Sweden, France, Poland and elsewhere in Europe.

As with Trump’s candidacy, the Brexit forces have been marked by accusations of xenophobia. Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party – and like Trump, a businessman turned politician – earned widespread scorn last week for a poster showing a swell of Syrian refugees and warning Europe is at a “breaking point”. – Reuters