A second Trump presidency and the divisive politics of immigration

There’s no simple explanation for Donald Trump or for why his brand of insult politics appeals. What it says about the contemporary United States or politics in general is at best conjecture.

To say he is emblematic of a new fractured politics is too obvious to pass for analysis. To paint him as a reaction to globalisation and mass immigration or the embodiment of an America at war with itself is similarly self-evident.

The populist, nationalist, isolationist tags applied to the billionaire property mogul don’t bring us any closer to understanding the Trump calculus.

Devotees to the cult of “Donald J” form an increasingly fanatical band of supporters around the former president, viewing his unfiltered rhetoric as a form of truth-telling. He’s only saying what people are thinking is the phrase trotted out in defence.

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In 2016, after describing Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and the decorated war hero John McCain as a “loser”, and having called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, his poll ratings shot up.

The slew of legal cases coat-tailing his campaign this time around appear to be working in a similar fashion, feeding “deep state” conspiracies and firing-up his base.

However, it’s perhaps the other section of Trump supporters - those who concede his mendacious nature, those who acknowledge his divisive politicking, those who will perhaps overlook his role in the January 6th Capitol riots and his attempt to subvert the election result - that provide a better gauge of the current political temperature.

[ Have globalisation and immigration depressed wages or made us richer? ]

They seem to be drawn to something else in Trump’s political make-up, to something else in the political ether.

It’s this group, who will support Trump but with misgivings, that seem to be giving him the edge in key swing states, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, which puts him ahead of incumbent Joe Biden by 4 to 10 percentage points in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The poll sent shock waves through the Democratic and liberal establishment in the US.

Even in Ireland the housing of Ukranian refugees and pressure this is placing on certain communities is generating serious divisions within the Coalition and ugly street protests.

Voters preferred Trump over Biden on immigration by 12 points, on national security by 12 points and on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by 11 points.

After Republican Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election to Barack Obama, the Republican Party conducted a postmortem that recommended an overhaul of the party’s immigration policies and what one commentator described as “a heavy dose of compassion to win over Hispanics”.

Trump ignored the recommendation, promising a more hard-line stance on immigration, pledging to build a border wall while subjecting voters to near-constant barrage of racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric mostly directed at Mexican immigrants. His stance didn’t alienate him with conservative Republican-voting Hispanics either, he won more of that vote than Romney did.

UK home secretary Suella Braverman is ploughing the same furrow, warning the UK is facing a “hurricane” of mass migration and that “Britain would go properly woke” under a Labour government.

According to one estimate, some 3.8 million people have entered the US since Biden took office in 2021 – nearly half are estimated to be illegal. Normally the flow is one million a year. The surge has sapped federal and local budgets and strained resources.

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In some states, US Border Patrol is reportedly been forced to release illegal migrants into communities to prevent overcrowding in facilities. The influx – illegal border crossing hit a record 2.7 million in 2022 alone – has impacted cities as far away as New York, which is struggling to house tens of thousands of migrants in need of shelter.

Despite rejecting Trump’s hardline stance on immigration, Biden stuck with some of Trump’s policies, including the controversial Title 42 law, the public health emergency measure invoked by the Trump administration during the pandemic, which allowed for the automatic expulsion of migrants at the border.

For decades liberal commentators have unfairly smeared those who questioned immigration as racist, when many had legitimate concern about the strain on public services or whether immigration depressed wages.

Trump used it to expel hundreds of thousands of people – including unaccompanied children. Biden stopped applying the policy to unaccompanied minors but continued – until May of this year – to expel individuals and families.

Immigration is now the most divisive political current on the planet. It has smashed the left-right politics that existed for most of the last century, resulting in strong anti-immigrant platforms even in the settled rich democracies of Scandinavia.

[ Martin Wolf: Globalisation is not dying, it is changing ]

Last week the German government agreed a cross-party deal to curb illegal migration, reduce social benefits for migrants, speed up deportations, and explore the possibility of setting up asylum processing centres outside the EU. Remember it wasn’t long ago that former German chancellor Angela Merkel was being feted for providing asylum to one million Syrian and Iraqi refugees.

The German deal comes on the back of an announcement by Italy that will soon open migrant centres in Albania and Britain’s controversial plan to send asylum applicants to Rwanda to be processed.

Even in Ireland the housing of Ukranian refugees and pressure this is placing on certain communities is generating serious divisions within the Coalition and ugly street protests.

For decades liberal commentators have unfairly smeared those who questioned immigration as racist, when many had legitimate concern about the strain on public services or whether immigration depressed wages.

Globalisation and mass immigration have undeniably coincided with increasing levels of inequality. We may not understand the true import of Trump but his careful manipulation of grievances, perceived or otherwise, related to these trends could place him in the White House for a second time.