Trump’s project of mass deportations inspires copycats in the West

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When President Donald Trump first ran for office, he borrowed from Europe. His maverick Republican primary bid imported wholesale the talking points of the European far right, which at the time was up in arms about a surge of asylum-seeking migrants, primarily from Syria and Afghanistan, landing on the continent. Trump seized on a grisly November 2015 terrorist attack carried out by the Islamic State in Paris as proof of the peril facing the United States. The following month, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the country, a discriminatory ban that shocked the Washington establishment.

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It also confounded analysts, given the figurative and literal gulf between the American and European experience of the crisis. Syrian and other refugees resettled in the United States already went through one of the most extensive vetting regimes around, and the U.S. was simply not seeing the same sort of influx of thousands of desperate migrants from war-torn, Muslim-majority countries arriving at its borders. But Trump’s promise of a “Muslim ban” galvanized the Republican base and boosted him toward a shock primary win.

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Now, it’s Trump’s fellow travelers in the West who are borrowing from him. Trump’s sprawling second-term project to detain and deport hundreds of thousands of migrants – the majority, though not all, undocumented – seems to have inspired many far-right parties across Europe and elsewhere. As Trump mobilized massive new funding outlays to flood the country with officers charged with rounding up migrants and to build facilities for their detention, politicians elsewhere are championing a similar approach.

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On Tuesday, Nigel Farage, a far-right British gadfly who leads Reform UK, an insurgent faction that has surged in recent opinion polls, outlined plans for the deportation of up to 600,000 undocumented migrants should his party come to power after elections, which are next expected in 2029. Some among the British public are furious about the arrival of around 28,000 asylum seekers this year alone, who crossed the English Channel on flimsy boats and, in some instances, are being temporarily housed in hotels in various parts of the country.

“The only way we will stop the boats is by detaining and deporting absolutely anyone that comes via that route,” Farage said. “And if we do that, the boats will stop coming within days.”

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Reform’s plan would see the creation of new detention facilities that would enable the removal of some 24,000 people a month – a rate of deportation that exceeds anything the British government has managed in the past. To smooth over legal obstacles, a Reform-led government would withdraw from a number of international treaties, including the European Convention on Human Rights and the U.N.’s Convention Against Torture.

Farage, who a year ago said such deportations were a “political impossibility,” is just at the tip of the spear. Across the continent, political parties and right-wing governments are adopting far tougher approaches toward migration than before. My colleague Anthony Faiola recently reported from Greece, long on the front lines of Europe’s migration crisis, where a sweeping new proposed law could revamp the country’s existing procedures for housing and processing migrants, leading to irregular arrivals being confined in prison-like conditions.

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“I think that the policy of President Trump is a good policy,” Thanos Plevris, Greece’s new migration minister, told The Washington Post, adding that it would have been “very difficult” for the Greek government to roll out its new plan if the U.S. and other countries in Europe weren’t also taking a harder line. “Europe is saying enough is enough.”

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Individual countries within the European Union are narrowing or hardening their guidelines surrounding asylum, and are pursuing similar efforts to the White House to remove undocumented migrants to facilities in third countries where many migrants could be marooned in legal limbo and physically unsafe conditions. Far-right parties in Spain, Italy and France have all intensified demands for the deportation of migrants – and public sentiment appears to align with their interests.

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Some ultranationalist politicians have also pushed the concept of “remigration,” the idea of not just repatriating asylum seekers, but also removing non-White communities that include the descendants of migrants from the country entirely. A nationwide set of far-right marches planned in Australia this weekend is set to invoke the need for “remigration” and protecting “White heritage.” Top officials in Germany’s far-right AfD, which is currently the largest opposition party in parliament, backed away in recent months from touting “remigration” in its platform only out of fear of legal censure for extremism by German authorities.

But one does not need to look at the far right alone to see a shift. In the decade since Trump embarked on his political journey, once-fringe, nativist positions on immigration and identity have bulldozed their way into the mainstream. Angst over immigration and multiculturalism has, in many places, given way to outright demands for deportations. Centrist politicians – from French President Emmanuel Macron to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer – have adopted similarly tough positions in bids to outflank their opponents, with Starmer controversially saying earlier this year that immigration risked turning Britain into “an island of strangers.”

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Anti-immigration politics even impacted the election in Japan earlier this summer, with a number of right-wing and far-right factions playing to local anxieties over influxes of tourists and foreign laborers.

“These right-wing groups’ positions are in many ways the same as the MAGA movement and are based on the concept of Japanese exclusivity,” Hiromi Murakami, a professor of political science at the Tokyo campus of Temple University, told Deutsche Welle. “The truth, of course, is that legal immigrants benefit the Japanese economy because of our well-publicized labor shortages – but these claims resonate with people who want to promote the purity or superiority of the Japanese race.”

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