False narratives

'So, was Trump's entire campaign based on a false narrative'', asks author

Adolf Hitler was a great believer in the usefulness of the “big lie” — a lie so colossal that few would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. Does the fact that Donald Trump’s most iconic campaign pledge was not to reopen the coal mines, but to have a wall built to prevent Mexicans from entering the United States, suggest that he, too, believes in the “big lie”? Did he ride to power on false claims about Mexican immigration?

To be sure, following the liberalisation of US immigration policy in the 1960s, the number of Hispanics in the US rose from nine million (half of them Mexicans) in 1970 to 50 million in 2010 (two-thirds of them Mexicans), and their share of the US population went up from six per cent in 1980 to over 16 per cent in 2010, outstripping even the black minority (under 14 per cent).

Paul Morland, a demographer at Birkbeck, University of London, says in the just-released The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World, that since 2012, more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving, improving standards of living in Mexico prompting them to relocate back home. At the same time, the post-2008 economic downturn in the US has reduced the demand for cheap labour, which many of the latest Mexican arrivals were satisfying. Morland says one estimate suggests that since 2010, there have been half a million fewer Mexicans in the US than in 2007.

And, The Economist reported in its April 13 issue that the number of Mexicans apprehended on the US border in recent months is “far below their levels of a decade ago”.

The Economist reported in its April 13 issue that the number of Mexicans apprehended on the US border in recent months is ‘far below their levels of a decade ago’

So, was Trump’s entire campaign based on a false narrative? It certainly served its purpose, in that the backlash among white voters against the changing ethnic composition of the US — though their share of the population declined from 85 per cent in 1965, they were still dominant at 62 per cent in 2015) — saw Trump elected president in 2016.

Trump considers the immigration issue central to his re-election strategy, and is preparing to up the ante. According to The Economist report, during his visit to the Mexican border earlier this month, Trump reportedly told border policemen to prevent asylum-seekers from entering (which is legally untenable), declaring: “Our country is full. We can’t take you any more…so turn around”.

Morland describes Trump’s aim not so much to “make America great again” as to “keep it white for as long as possible”. In a comment on US and European voters, Morland says several serious studies of contemporary populism suggest that “it is not, in essence, the cry of the dispossessed or of those losing out as a result of globalisation, but rather the protest of a single ethnic group that has long been retreating from global predominance and now sees itself declining at home”.

A day before Trump was elected, Britain’s Independent newspaper had argued, noting the rapidity of ethnic change in the US: “Racial anxiety is deep in white American ethnicity. Now Trump has weaponised it.” Areas most unsettled by mass immigration were the ones most likely to back Trump, it noted, while rapid ethnic change rather than Rust Belt economic resentment is a better explanation of populism in the US, because in 2016 median wages were rising and unemployment was below five per cent.

Changes in the ethnic composition of societies caused by immigration have had far-reaching consequences in Europe, too. Support for the now-disbanded UK Independence Party and the Brexit vote in 2016, the far-right Front National party (subsequently renamed National Rally) in France, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and their counterparts in other European countries, Morland argues, can be best explained as a reaction to ethnic change rather than as a response to economic woes.

Far-right parties in Europe may garner more support in the future, with their populations poised to undergo a change in ethnic composition, owing to the pressure of increasing migration by sub-Saharan Africans (whose numbers are rapidly growing) coinciding with a decline in their own populations. By the year 2100, Bulgaria and Moldova will have lost half their populations, and Germany and Italy 10 per cent and 20 per cent of theirs, Morland says.

As for the US, with the share of the country’s white population projected to dip below 50 per cent by mid-century, the Republican Party appears in danger of going into terminal decline. Trump’s triumph may be among its last hurrahs.