Closing of West: Has Trump won his decade-long argument about immigration?

Is the West’s great experiment with openness ending? Across the Western world, in Europe, North America, and even Japan, there is less readiness to embrace foreign students, researchers, workers, and refugees than there was just five years ago. What could lie behind this trend, and what does it mean for the world? This month will mark a decade since United States (US) President Donald Trump began his political career. Is a closed West his principal achievement?

 

Mr Trump’s actions in this sphere, because of their extreme nature and the dangerous rhetoric that accompanies them, receive the most attention. This might be justified, since it has been the bedrock of Mr Trump’s political career. When he descended a golden escalator in his New York building in June 2015 to announce he was running for President, he quickly created a scandal by attacking Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. “They’re not sending their best,” he said. 

Such rhetoric had not been heard before in US politics, and caused most on the mainstream right to write him off as a candidate. Instead, it is precisely this message that continues to swell his support. It allowed him to run an insurgent primary campaign that knocked every mainstream Republican out of the race one by one. In 2024, when he appeared to be losing a debate against Vice-President Kamala Harris, he raised the stakes by accusing refugees of eating the cats and dogs of small-town Ohio, where they were being housed. This was inaccurate, and widely mocked — but it also ensured that he got headlines from the debate that could grow his base of support. His rhetoric has only grown more startling over this decade; in the last campaign he accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood” of the US. 

As President, he has presided over a series of actions that make the US appear a difficult and hostile environment for those who do not look like he does. Immigration agents, out of unif0rm and wearing masks, are indiscriminately taking people off the streets and deporting them, without due process, to prisons in Central America that almost certainly violate their human rights. As this newspaper points out editorially today, he has also chosen to strike down the principle of birthright citizenship, trying to ensure that the US-born citizen children of future (or past?) migrants are also subject to such raids. 

But even worse might be in store. Mr Trump’s advisors, and some in his Republican Party, seek to strip citizenship rights away from naturalised Americans as well. Technically, a “denaturalisation” process exists in the law books, meant to keep Russian spies out of the country during the Cold War. If the prosecutors could prove the spy had lied on their application form, then the communist subversive in question could no longer claim the protections of US citizenship. (This might explain those weird questions on such forms asking if you are or were a member of the Communist Party.) 

Some in the Trump orbit have recognised the potential of this law, and may misuse it for mass deportation. Already, one Republican congressman has called for it to be used against the Democratic nominee for the mayorship of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who has been a naturalised US citizen since he was a child. Anyone who has expressed political ideas prior to their becoming a US citizen could theoretically be claimed to be indulging “wilful misrepresentation of concealment of material support for terrorism”, as Mr Mamdani is being accused of. 

Meanwhile, a crackdown on foreign students and researchers has expanded, and those universities — like Harvard — that have stood up to the government find their funding cut off and their right to enrol foreigners being taken away. If applying for relevant visas, you will have to make all your social media accounts public and allow the US authorities to comb them for opinions that they dislike. Most bizarre of all, stories are spreading of how even those merely visiting the US are being interrogated, detained or deported on the basis of misinterpretations of emails, memes or chats on their phones. 

Mr Trump’s aim might be to make the US a profoundly unwelcoming place for everyone who did not come over on the Mayflower. That it will also torpedo American global leadership and competitiveness is beside the point. 

But it is important to note that it is not only the US that is closing itself off. It has been a decade, also since German Chancellor Angela Merkel opened her country’s borders to 300,000 migrants fleeing the bloody Syrian civil war. Overall, in 2015 and 2016, German authorities received over a million asylum applications. Ms Merkel’s decision, and others like it across Europe, has led to a ripple effect in the continent’s politics. 

Few countries have seen as sharp and as surprising a shift as Britain. Nine years ago, the country voted — by a very slender, and since erased margin — to leave the European Union. Brexiteers claimed that the intent of the electorate — if such a thing can ever be discerned — was to “take back control” of the country, including its borders. But since then, migration into the United Kingdom from non-European countries — particularly India — has expanded manifold. Many believe, with some justification, that some of these migrant applications under special categories are a product of fraud or manipulation. 

We now have the strange sight of the right-wing Conservatives having presided over large amounts of migration while their centre-left successor accuses them of running an “open borders experiment” that will turn Britain into “an island of strangers”. Mainstream politicians across Europe are closing the continent off, slowly but surely. They will not replicate Mr Trump’s rhetoric — but to keep men like him out, they will follow hesitantly in his footsteps on immigration.