The recent European Parliament elections are the latest sign of immigration’s political influence, with the biggest winners being right-wing parties promising to reduce immigration.
In today’s newsletter, we explain why this issue is impacting Western politics and what might happen next.
Rapid change
The first thing to understand is how extraordinary the modern immigration boom is: In almost every Western country, the share of the population that is foreign-born has risen sharply since 1990.
It is not clear whether immigration has ever increased so rapidly in so many countries before. (If anything, the graph understates the trend because it ends in 2020, the last year for which data is available.)
This immigration boom had great benefits: it enabled millions of people to escape poverty and violence, and it diversified Western culture. It brought workers to Europe and the United States, lowering the costs of labor-intensive businesses.
But the boom has also had downsides. Increased competition for labor has obviously hurt workers already living in the country. Governments have struggled to provide social services to immigrants. Immigration has increased so rapidly that many citizens are uneasy about the social changes it will bring. Historically, large increases in immigration have tended to spark political backlash.
This pattern has continued in recent years: immigration was highlighted in 2016’s shockingly successful Brexit campaign, as were the burgeoning far-right parties in Europe, and in the United States, polls suggest immigration is threatening President Biden’s reelection.
For years, mainstream Western politicians, from the center-right to the center-left to the left, have ignored voters’ concerns about immigration. Some politicians portray immigration as a free lunch, with only economic benefits and no costs. They portray concerns about immigration (especially those shared by millions of people of different races, including low-income groups) as inherently ignorant or xenophobic. Some politicians argue that governments cannot control borders.
Many voters flocked to the only parties that promised to reduce immigration: the far-right. To be clear, these parties peddle racism, conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric, and authoritarianism. But for many voters, these parties were also the only part of the political system that listened to public opinion on increasing immigration.
Andrew Sullivan, a political journalist and US immigrant, points out that this disconnect has become especially pronounced in the past few years. “While the public has tried to express a desire to slow demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa and Washington have chosen to dramatically accelerate it,” he wrote on Substack. “It’s as if they looked at the growing popularity of the far right and said to themselves: Now, how can we really make it work?”
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally won more votes in France than any other party in the European Parliament elections this week. In Germany, the far-right AfD came in second, beating the country’s governing left-wing party. In Italy, the right-wing party that already governs the country came in first.
A new way?
It wasn’t that long ago that the left and the center had different approaches to immigration.
They treated the issue as a complex one that required moderation. President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders both fit this category. They came from a progressive tradition that went back to labor and civil rights leaders who celebrated immigration, but also supported strict border security because they believed unchecked immigration could destabilize society and increase inequality.
There are some signs that the centre-left and centre-right are returning to this approach and becoming more respectful of public opinion.
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Biden reversed course after loosening border restrictions early in his presidency and seeing a surge in migrants.
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In the UK, the Labour Party has criticised the Conservatives for being soft on immigration. In a debate last week, Labour prime ministerial candidate Keir Starmer described the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration”.
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In the European Parliament elections, centre-right parties came out on top thanks in part to their tougher stance on immigration, as my colleague Matina Stevis-Gridnev points out (I recommend her concise summary of the election results).
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Perhaps the most obvious example is Greece, where conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has taken a hard-line stance, refusing to let some migrants into the country after years of a surge in migration, and his party came in first place in the country while other center-right parties struggled in EU elections.
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Japan and South Korea are moving in opposite directions, but towards more moderate positions: After decades of highly restrictive policies, both countries have begun to let in more immigrants, mainly for economic reasons.
The moves by Japan and South Korea acknowledge the inherent complexity of immigration: too many immigrants can cause political and economic problems, just as too few can.
What’s next? Britain and France will hold national elections next month, and Mattina said those will be more meaningful than this week’s elections because voters are generally more interested in their own governments than the EU.
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