In a recent comment on the social media platform X, President-elect Donald Trump confirmed that he intended to put the U.S. military to use to enforce his nationwide deportation plans, generating renewed anxieties among immigrants, their advocates and, well, anyone who retains hope for the rule of federal law and barriers to domestic militarization.
The president-elect and hardcore anti-immigration advisors like Stephen Miller promise a deportation campaign of historic scale. They have ambitions to remove not only the estimated 11 to 13 million residents without documentation in the United States but also hundreds of thousands of people who had been offered temporary protected status during the Biden administration because of abysmal conditions in their native countries. Mr. Miller has even declared birth-right citizenship an eventual target and said he would pursue recently naturalized citizens, accusing many of them of achieving citizenship fraudulently.
But the furious focus on people Mr. Trump dismisses as “illegals” and “criminals,” even as millions of immigrants with irregular status have lived and worked and raised children in the United States, is part of an emerging global trend. Around the affluent world, new hostility, resentment and anxiety has been directed at immigrant populations that are emerging as preferred scapegoats for all manner of political and socio-economic shortcomings.
A global anti-immigrant tide
Catholic catechism and other social teaching supports a human right to migrate to escape poverty, oppression and violence, and U.S. church leaders have announced their intentions to defend immigrants against the president-elect’s deportation proposals. But Catholic teaching also “acknowledges that there are limits on immigration,” says J. Kevin Appleby, a senior fellow at the Center for Migration Studies in New York. “The question that nations are confronting is where those limits lie.” Mr. Appleby blames persistent economic insecurity among the native-born in the United States and Europe for the rising anti-immigrant tide.
World economic powers have made binding commitments like the Global Compact on Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees to protect and resettle migrating people. Despite those “best intentions,” Mr. Appleby says, “what we’re seeing is more of a turn to enforcement strategies to try to prevent illegal migration, but [E.U. and American political leaders are] not combining that with legal avenues that are needed to bring people in safely and securely.”
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, attentive perhaps to sharply diminished support for his Liberal Party as national elections loom in 2025, announced a “pause” on new immigration in a YouTube-side chat on Oct. 24. In a public act of political contrition, he acknowledged that his government had “made some mistakes,” allowing too many newcomers into Canada and failing to anticipate loophole-artists who exploited the nation’s too-generous visa regulations for temporary workers and overseas students.
Canada’s population surged past 41 million people in April. In 2023, 98 percent of the nation’s population growth was attributable to immigration, the government reported last month in a statement detailing its plan to curtail new immigrant numbers. The Trudeau government intends to reduce permanent and temporary immigrant inflows from 500,000 to 365,000 by 2027, “a plan that will pause population growth in the short term to achieve well-managed, sustainable growth in the long term.”
Two out of three Canadians complain that the government was admitting too many immigrants, according to a survey conducted in September. Reuters reports that hate crimes in Canada have more than doubled from 2019 to 2023 and that 45 percent of the hate incidents reported in 2023 were motivated by race or ethnicity.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is also on the rise across Europe. The general public in both the United Kingdom and Ireland were startled last summer by a series of disturbances that followed the murder of three school children in England, erroneously blamed on an immigrant.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is leading the way on efforts to prevent new immigrant arrivals and dislodge existing immigrant communities. She proposes warehousing people who irregularly emigrate in Albania, where Italy has constructed a detention facility for about 36,000 people.
Spain and other European nations are pondering if “improved” conditions in Syria provide enough cover for them to begin returning refugees to the smoldering conflict and deep poverty of their homeland. These and other deportation schemes, like Mr. Trump’s intentions for people from Haiti or Venezuela, border on acts of refoulement—the return of refugees and migrants to conditions in their home or third-party states that are unsafe or likely to lead to human rights violations—which is illegal under international humanitarian law.
Record percentages of foreign born
What the rising swells of anti-immigrant sentiment around the developed world have in common are often historic rates of foreign-born temporary and permanent residents. In February, an analysis of the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey by the Center for Immigration Studies found that the number of foreign-born persons in the United States—51.4 million—reached a historic high of 15.5 percent of the total population. That percentage is more than triple the 4.7 percent foreign-born recorded in the United States in 1970.
Foreign-born residents account for about 9 percent of the population of the European Union, but many E.U. countries have essentially closed their borders to migrants. That means some E.U. states have accepted substantially higher percentages of newcomers, absorbing especially large influxes of migrants from the Middle East and Africa and refugees from Syria and Ukraine.
In Ireland, a nation that finally restored its population to pre-famine levels in 2022, the foreign-born percentage is above 20 percent. Cyprus, Austria, Germany and Belgium are at or near that 20 percent level. According to the last census in Canada in 2021, more than eight million foreign-born residents made up almost 23 percent of the population. As in the United States, that figure represents a historic high.
As percentages of foreign born reach double-digits, it is perhaps no surprise that the native born in nations that have accepted large numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants become uneasy about accepting more. The effects of xenophobia and racism are always evident when it comes to setting immigration policy, Mr. Appleby says, “but I don’t think that there would be as much anxiety or consternation, if people didn’t feel economically insecure.”
“There are a multitude of factors at play here.” Mr. Appleby cites a few: Climate change is propelling vast numbers of migrants escaping drought and climate-wrecked economies; the world economy is still struggling to shake off the global slump caused by the Covid-19 pandemic; around the world but more pointedly in the U.S. neighborhood of the Western Hemisphere an unprecedented number of failed and foundering states is pushing migrants across borders.
“And I think the last factor is that in a lot of ways, the chickens are coming home to roost,” Mr. Appleby says. “For decades, if not centuries, the major powers have usurped resources in the [Global] South, and that’s led to a smaller piece of the pie for many countries, which leads to unrest [and] violence.”
Resource conflicts in Africa and other regions annually drive hundreds of thousands of people from their home nations. A decades-long global displacement crisis that first came to prominence in 2015 when thousands of refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria attempted to find a safe harbor in Europe shows no sign of abating.
Asylum seekers reaching the U.S. border are fleeing oppressive, dysfunctional or failed states like the Republic of Congo, Nigeria and Haiti, authoritarian clampdowns in remnant-Marxist states like Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and China. Others escape drought-driven poverty, government corruption and gang violence in sputtering Central American states like Honduras and Guatemala. The conditions contemporary migrants seek to escape are so dire that even heightened efforts to criminalize or raise barriers to their passage to Europe or the United States pale in comparison to the cost of staying put, Mr. Appleby says.
Back to enforcement only?
“We’re at a spot where enforcement is going to be the priority despite the fact that over the last 35 years, enforcement-only policies have failed,” Mr. Appleby says. He argues that more aggressive border management has to be matched with improved channels for legal immigration and diplomatic and economic investments that create conditions that allow people contemplating migration to remain in the nations of their birth, something most would prefer to do.
“We need to do an honest self-examination of how our actions, both economically and politically, in our hemisphere have created these states where dictators rise and are able to exploit the people,” he says. U.S. policymakers “do have a hand in this” and a responsibility to recalibrate strategy that is contributing to migration.
He is pessimistic about the short-term chances of it, but Mr. Appleby hopes global leaders may eventually recognize that the migration crisis, properly managed, can be viewed not as a problem but as a historic opportunity. Mr. Appleby points out that despite all the current anti-immigrant bluster, immigrants are shoring up America’s aging workforce and helping to keep its economy humming even as other advanced industrial states have faltered since the pandemic.
Immigrants make up almost 20 percent of the U.S. workforce and participate in the labor force at a higher rate than native-born workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It is hard to imagine the U.S. agricultural sector, reliant on 2.5 million immigrant workers—about half of them undocumented people—surviving the vast purge contemplated by Mr. Trump and his advisors.
Racist “great replacement” anxieties notwithstanding, native-born birth rates continue to fall. Without immigrants, overall population figures and U.S. workforce numbers would also be falling, a threat not just to the current vibrancy of the economy but to the future of the Social Security system on which elderly Americans rely. Shutting down immigration now will surely lead to higher inflation as employers “scramble” to fill job openings, Mr. Appleby warns.
Defenders of immigrant communities will have to buckle up for a rough ride in Washington in the coming years. “Advocates are going to have to play defense until we get back to the point where we can have a more balanced approach to immigration reform,” Mr. Appleby says.
He thinks they may have the most success in protecting DACA recipients, the so-called “dreamers” whose status remains unresolved more than a decade after the program was created during the Obama administration. He holds out some hope, too, for improving opportunities for better legal openings to migration and naturalization.
Chances for incremental progress would improve if U.S. bishops spoke clearly and frequently on the issue, he suggests, noting many American Catholics erroneously believe the U.S. church supports “open borders.” U.S. bishops and Pope Francis need “to talk a little bit more about the right of the sovereign to control borders,” Mr. Appleby says. “The church is not against sovereignty, but we have a particular view of how borders are managed, that there has to be an emphasis on human rights and human dignity.”
U.S. bishops are already issuing warnings to the incoming administration that they would defend immigrant families in the event of a mass deportation effort, particularly if gruesome strategies like family separation or attacks on birthright citizenship accompany a national immigrant purge. The Center for Migration Studies reports that 5.8 million U.S. households include at least one undocumented resident and that 5.5 million of them include U.S.-born children who presumably would be left behind or dislocated with their parents to countries they do not know. According to the center, over half of the U.S. undocumented population in the United States have been in the country for at least 10 years.
The church’s support for immigrant communities must “go beyond words,” the Most Rev. Mark J. Seitz of El Paso, Texas, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Migration, said on Nov. 20 in remarks to Catholic immigration advocacy groups. “The church is unequivocally on the side of a community in fear right now, and stands with the migrant community,” he said.
There is plenty of evidence that the bishops can anticipate a sympathetic hearing from U.S. Catholics should they come out forcefully on deportation. Most of the purported public support for mass deportation falls off sharply when alternative approaches to manage immigration are noted. Poll respondents are especially troubled by tactics like family separation or the removal of immigrant residents who have lived for years without incident in the United States.
“You’re always going to have nativists stirring the pot, looking for advantages where they can to impose their will or their policies, and we’re in that period now,” Mr. Appleby says. “Hopefully, we’ll figure it out, and we’ll go back to an environment where immigration is looked upon more favorably because, and I know it’s cliché, immigrants have helped build this country.”
He thinks that is a historical principle that future generations of Americans can continue to rely on.
The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.
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