In his lastest Substack post, Andrew Sullivan purports to explain “How Elites Have Empowered The Far Right.”
Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.
Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.
The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.
Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.
If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?
This issue is one where I’m less conservative than Sullivan but considerably more so than our commentariat. While Sullivan is by no means anti-immigrant, he’s somewhat more worried than I am about the shifting of cultures. And he’s certainly right that this issue is a key factor in the rise of right-wing populism across the West.
This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grace, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.
Of course, a single poll is meaningless. But there has been plenty of polling—and, indeed, quite a number of actual elections—over the years demonstrating a backlash against migration. And, it must be acknowledged, particularly nonwhite and unskilled migration.
Europeans will be voting this weekend for the toothless European Parliament, essentially a performative exercise that nonetheless tells us something about where the continent is heading after wave after wave of migration. And guess what? The far right is expected to do much better than in the past and, in the latest polls, may even gain more seats than the center-right coalition in the EU parliament.
In Britain this week, there was another seismic shock. Nigel Farage, the Brexit pioneer, unexpectedly reversed course to say he would run for parliament in the election next month, as part of the Reform Party (an evolution of the Brexit Party). In the polls, Farage’s party — which backed the Tories in 2019 — is now creeping closer and closer to them, just as the far right is beginning to eclipse the center right in Europe as a whole.
A ten-day rolling average puts Reform at 11.4 percent and the Tories at 23.7 percent. But a poll taken after Farage declared this week put the Tories at 19 percent and Reform at 17 percent. In other words, the great Tory achievement — coopting and moderating the far right — has collapsed, because of the Tory betrayal on immigration. It could reduce the Tories from 365 seats to 66. The lowest number of seats won by the Tories since 1918 is 165, in 1997. This will be Boris Johnson’s legacy: the near destruction of his own party in the pursuit of replacing Britain’s native population at a pace never before seen in British history. There is even a chance the Tories could come third in the popular vote.
[…]
Does Labour’s looming landslide mean that mass immigration has become popular? One way to answer that is to hear what Keir Starmer, the next prime minister, said about the subject in the first televised debate this week:
The levels of migration are at record highs. … It’s never been that high, save in the last year or two. The prime minister says it’s too high. Well, who’s in charge? He’s the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration. We’ve never had numbers like this before … This year alone, 10,000 people have crossed on boats. That’s a record number.
When a Labour party leader is accusing the Tory prime minister of being “the most liberal” in British history — just eight years after Brexit — you can see how profoundly the politics of immigration have shifted.
While I’m quite familiar with Farange, I’m much less so with Starmer. So, I don’t know whether this is a genuine stance or pure opportunistic pandering. Regardless, it is indeed quite the switch.
Or you can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.
Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.
The “non-whites . . . moving toward Trump” thing is vastly oversold, but could nonetheless be significant if the election is razor-thin. And the overlap of “mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing” with liberal democracy approaches zero, given the draconian measures that would be necessary to actually implement the policy.
Regardless, this does seem to be an issue where Western publics, seemingly across the board, are increasingly frustrated with the status quo. Neither Trump nor Fox News nor Nixon’s Southern Strategy can explain the rise of far-right parties in Western Europe.
Sullivan issues the required caveats:
I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.
While, again, I’m much closer to Sullivan on this than most of my commentators, I do think he underplays the racial aspect of this. The reaction would doubtless be less visceral were the problem Canadians and Brits overstaying their visas rather than a mass migration of brown-skinned folks from Latin America.
But he’s also right that at the core of the nation-state is the idea that there are borders in which those inside are Us and those outside Them. For that to be meaningful, states have to be able to control who gets to enter and remain. We have lost that ability, with the impact falling disproportionally on a handful of border states.
We need a new paradigm: all the investments in immigration security (yes, more wall), courts, judges, asylum officers, and detention centers that Biden says he wants; and a viable mass deportation program that Trump says he wants for those who broke the law so flagrantly these past three years.
Frankly, I’m skeptical that the problem is solvable. Our border is just too large to effectively police and the fact that we’re so much wealthier and more stable than just about every country south of said border makes us a veritable magnet for migration.
Walls are obstacles and obstacles unsupported by fire are easily bypassed. And, needless to say, shooting desperate people seeking to enter the country illegally is monstrous—a solution far worse than the problem.
As noted previously, mass deportation in practice would be horrendous. We would essentially be sending armed agents to harass everyone who looked Hispanic, demanding that they produce papers proving they have a right to be here. And, of course, their US-born children are American citizens and not subject to deportation; are we really going to take them from their families or force them from the country?
Trump, of course, was a lot of hat and not much cattle in his first four years on this topic; but Biden, having made everything far, far worse, has less than zero credibility on reform.
All that means, it seems to me, is that if you care about the issue at all, as more and more Americans do, then Trump is the obvious choice this fall. Which is one reason I fear the election result will not be as close as most people think. Our elites have had almost a decade to respond to the public mood and a new global reality. And they still don’t get it.
What’s bizarre about this close is that Sullivan has banged the drum about how awful Trump is for at least as long as I have. But here he seems to be endorsing him.
He’s right, though, that the elite class has been late to the party on this issue. It has always been the case that the upper classes are more cosmopolitan, for good and ill. The nobility and landed gentry of Old Europe had much more in common with their cousins (often, quite literally) in other countries than they did with their own hoi polloi. In the modern age, where money has largely supplanted station, the ultra-rich either deal with immigrants who are much like them—extremely successful and well-educated—or who serve them.
It’s likewise true that the Left, generally speaking, sees pride in one’s own nation and culture as xenophobic, if not racist, whereas the Right sees it as patriotism and a core function of society and government.
But, of course, what we’re seeing from the far-right “populist” movements here and elsewhere is much more like the leftist critique than the conservative idea. This is not inevitable. I’ll once again cite this exchange between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980 Republican primary debates:
Sullivan would note that the scope of the problem has changed. But it would regardless be refreshing to approach it with that level of humanity.
