Trump & the art of milking the ‘immigrant invasion’

Washington: The world and its many ivory tower pundits are still struggling to come to terms with the shock victory of Donald Trump. The pollsters said it was dead heat between Trump and Kamla Harris. The only one saying he would win with a wide margin was Donald Trump. Not only did he win the electoral votes of the swing states, but he carried the national, popular vote as well – a feat a Republican US presidential candidate last achieved 2 decades ago when George W Bush beat John Kerry in 2004.

The democratic vote – these days becoming increasingly difficult to predict – is the final outcome after a cocktail of hopes, aspirations, fears, anti-incumbency pulls and identity assertions furiously churn and deliver a verdict. Sometimes, a single factor dominates.

With hindsight, the pundits say Trump succeeded in convincing people the US economy was far worse than it was 4 years ago; that the Biden administration was a failure in securing the borders; that immigrants had taken over the country; and that the Democrats couldn’t find a solution to the wars.

Hindsight analysis is easy because there is no accountability; but for this writer it was crystal clear Trump’s single-mindedly focus on the ‘immigrant invasion’ was a clear winner. Despite all his rambling at rallies, Donald Trump hammered out his ugly rhetoric on one, and only one thing – America being swamped by the ‘great unwashed’; and the Biden administration failing to do anything about it.

The picture he painted extended from falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating pet cats and dogs in a small Ohio town of Springfield, to spreading lies that American universities had been taken over by jihadists “who want to blow up our streets, our malls and everything America stands for”.

Never mind the ludicrous story of cats and dogs. Scapegoating migrants struck a chord even among Latinos, themselves ‘immigrants’ years ago.

He played on the worry that the demography of the country was changing, that peoples jobs, whatever they had, would be taken away. Trump effectively turned economic despair, high prices and all the other ills into a single deadly package of racial hatred.

His narrative is false, but who cares! The latest figures from the Department of Homeland Security and Pew Research show there are around 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the US, and that this number has remained relatively stable since 2005. It is also proven these immigrants don’t take away American jobs; they do the jobs which Americans don’t want to do. The US economy won’t work without them.

Converting anti-immigrant paranoia to votes is an old playbook. Trump had used in the 2016 polls too. Then his focus was on building a wall along Mexico’s 750 km border to keep out the rest of South America. He won the elections, but the Trump Wall was a failure.

Immigration – the movement of large formations of people – from one region to another and one country to another has existed since the beginning of humankind. There are those searching for a livelihood; and there are economies undergoing rapid development requiring large inputs of labour not available locally. Immigration is the natural playing out of the demand and supply of labour.

In recent years though, immigration has cascaded to become large swathes of humanity fleeing wars and conflict, and hunger. It’s a race for survival illustrated by the terrible sea voyages from North Africa to Europe across the Mediterranean that is claiming thousands of lives each year. For the ‘receiving’ communities though immigrants are an ‘invasion’ – a threat to the local culture and demography.

In India, we have our own Trumps who have been focusing on the large scale immigration of Bangladeshis who have crossed borders to earn a living. That they are Muslims only has sharpened the aggression against them. In recent election campaigns in West Bengal and Tripura, Bangladeshi ‘infiltration’ has been the single point agenda of the BJP. It has failed in West Bengal, but succeeded in both Assam and Tripura.

Currently, deporting Bangladeshi immigrants is on the table for the first time in the Jharkhand elections. The narrative is simple: the tribal population is being diluted by the large influx of Bangladeshis; and that the locals have everything to lose – ‘Roti, Beti, Maati’ – if they don’t eject the Congress government in the state.

Who knows, the BJP may pull it off in Jharkhand! But nobody is asking who is responsible for the ‘infiltration’. After all, India’s borders with Bangladesh are in the able hands of the Border Security Force (BSF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) – both under the Union ministry of home headed by Mr Amit Shah. If there is ‘infiltration’, the home minister must answer.

Europe too is seeing waves of immigrants pouring in to escape the worsening wars in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Chaos in the border communities has fueled the hard-right, semi-fascist parties into ascendant positions. Georgia Meloni, who heads the ‘Brothers of Italy’ Party in Italy, lead a right-wing coalition 2 years ago to become Prime Minister. Her agenda is to stop migrants using Italy as a landing point from North Africa.

France too is in the midst of an immigration crisis with President Emmanuel Macron just about holding on to power against a resurgent anti-immigration National Rally party.

The picture on the horizon is not good. Increasing conflict in West Asia is spurring more ‘survival’ immigration; and Donald Trump and others are threatening to institutionalize deportation of millions. What will follow is uprooted families and misery.