Seeing Through the Fog of Immigration

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If she was not already the bête noire of British liberals, UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman’s recent string of statements has cemented her image as a nationalist bigot. Despite facing criticism from within her own party, she has doubled down on her anti-immigrant, anti-refugee rhetoric.

In a recent speech in Washington, Braverman claimed that multiculturalism in Europe had failed, that uncontrolled immigration poses a threat to Western civilization, and that the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention – which the United Kingdom ratified under Winston Churchill – is outdated. Braverman went on to claim that refugees facing persecution in their home countries for their gender or sexual identities are “bogus asylum seekers” who should no longer be allowed to enter Britain.

This is a mixture of callousness, straw dogs, and nonsense. In some countries, people can be executed for being gay. In other countries, women are not even allowed to go to school. Few serious people advocate «uncontrolled» immigration. And the British Refugee Council issued a report claiming that 74% of people arriving in Britain by boat in 2023 would be recognized as asylum seekers. This figure is based on statistics compiled by Braverman’s own Home Office.ъ

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Braverman herself was born in the UK to immigrant parents of Indian descent. Her Christian father migrated from Kenya in the 1960s, and her Hindu Tamil mother arrived in the UK from Mauritius. Given her own family’s history, one might have expected Braverman to avoid stoking an anti-refugee panic.

But this is not the first time a second-generation immigrant has sought validation through hypocritical displays of chauvinistic nationalism, and Braverman went a step further in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference on October 3, invoking her family’s immigration story to promote an anti-immigrant agenda. «The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the twentieth century was a mere gust compared [with] the hurricane that is coming», she warned.

The prevailing belief among British political analysts is that Braverman is simply courting the hard-right factions within her party in a quest to become its next leader. Much like the Republican Party in the United States, the Tories, who once considered themselves the champions of middle-class centrism, are now being pulled to the right by populist agitators.

While it is possible that Braverman is just a political opportunist, her anti-immigrant diatribes resonate far beyond Britain’s borders. In portraying immigrants and asylum seekers as criminals and threats to Western civilization, she is tapping into the same right-wing populist current that has propelled Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, and former US President Donald Trump’s GOP.

But does the rise of xenophobic populism mean that Western populations are becoming increasingly racist? The data suggest otherwise. More than 70% of Britons believe that a wide variety of ethnicities and cultures is part of British identity, and 75% support mixed-race relationships. Such sentiments were not common in the UK 50 years ago.

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Moreover, most British people who fear a «hurricane» of refugees have likely never encountered any, given that asylum seekers are confined to designated camps and not allowed to work or interact with the general public. And citizens of cities with the largest number of non-Western immigrants tend to be more accepting of them than people in areas where there are relatively few.

But today’s populist revolt is not really about refugees. The greatest resentment among supporters of the hard right is reserved for the so-called «liberal elites», the highly-educated urban folks who Braverman, in her conference speech, called «the privileged woke minority, with their luxury beliefs». These elites are generally blamed for everything from the loss of industrial jobs and uncontrolled immigration to the alleged «tyranny» of international institutions such as the World Health Organization and the European Union.

Braverman herself, incidentally, is a Cambridge-educated King’s Counsel who studied at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University with an EU scholarship. But the grievances she is exploiting are not entirely unfounded. Historically, both left and right-leaning elites have encouraged immigration – the right motivated by the prospect of cheap labor, the left by multicultural idealism. It is also true that the global free-trade policies embraced by Western leaders sometimes harmed the interests of workers in many developed countries. The EU itself is widely seen as a product of European elites.

Mostly, however, these resentments are driven by real or perceived loss of status in a fast-changing world. Industrial workers and miners may have faced harsh working conditions, but they could take pride in their unions, social groups, and cultural activities. Many of these have vanished.

Similarly, just as many Americans grew up believing that the US was the world’s greatest country, Britons were once the proud subjects of a global empire. In the US, there is sometimes a racial element in popular anger as well; white people, especially in the southern states, sense that their dominance over people of color is waning. And it is often liberal elites, not immigrants, who are blamed for diminishing «our» stature, looking down on «us», and destroying the values and traditions that «we» hold dear.

The sense of loss fuels today’s politics of resentment. It hardly matters whether the demagogues who exploit such feelings are the children of Indian immigrants from Africa, or crooked businessmen and fraudsters. People will support them, as long as they manage to articulate a shared rage.

© Project Syndicate 1995-2023