Parts of the MAGA movement are unhappy with President Trump’s migration strategy. The administration has softened its policy on deportations following a public uproar over the ICE killings in January, it is said. The focus has been on removing only the most violent offenders.
“The truth is the first year was not a year of mass deportation,” says Mike Howell of the Mass Deportation Coalition. “A conscious decision was made to go after the worst first, which was, we’ll call it a deviation, from the central campaign promise of mass deportations.”
Such criticisms miss the point. The Trump administration has tackled the worst offenders to shore up support for its wider migration crackdown. And that crackdown has been wildly successful. Net migration is negative for the first time in half a century, with more than a quarter of a million people leaving last year. The real success has been in stopping people from entering the United States in the first place. No other nation can claim to have addressed its immigration problem at such scale and speed.
The fact America’s political system is able to act on immigration shows a flexibility other nations lack
In so many other ways, the second Trump presidency appears to be going awry. The Iran war is a strategic quagmire. The upcoming midterm elections look extremely challenging for the Republican party, as voters find themselves turned off by the return of inflation and the unpleasant resurgence of a cost-of-living crisis that for most citizens never really went away.
Recent polling suggests that 77 percent of Americans blame Donald Trump for higher gas prices, and 70 percent disapprove of his handling of the economy. Asked if skyrocketing prices might lead him to end the Iran war, he said: “Not even a little bit… I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation” – a crass remark that will be used in Democratic campaign videos from now until November.
But the Trump administration can point to immigration as a reason to vote Republican in November and beyond. Donald Trump was elected on a promise to fix the border, and southern border crossings fell by 93 percent last year. During Joe Biden’s term, nearly nine million illegals entered the country. Biden was asked in 2024 whether he would close the border, given the extraordinary numbers pouring into the southern states. His answer was telling. “We’re examining whether or not I have that power.” Later that year, monthly figures for illegal crossings reached a high of 302,000.
Today, there are just 10,000 recorded incidents a month. The border has effectively been secured, and nobody outside a shrinking faction of NGO workers and Democratic ideologues cares about the finer technicalities of the presidential prerogative.
There have been missteps: Kristi Noem was a clearly feckless Secretary of Homeland Security. But she has been removed. Overall, the Trump administration has treated immigration as a key national security issue across all its departments – and asserts border control as a national security priority that must be addressed throughout the western hemisphere.
That is no mean feat. Migration hawks may wish for the President to go further, but that wish should not obscure the progress that has been made. In fact, the rhetoric has hardened to a degree that was unimaginable just a few years ago. The White House, following up on a similar statement from the State Department, recently published an image in which the words “Replacement Migration” were crossed out and replaced with the word “Remigration.”
Such language still troubles the liberal conscience, but it reflects where the majority of Americans stand on the issue of illegal migration. Two thirds of those who intend to vote in the midterms say they want to see every person who has illegally entered the US removed. The fact that America’s political system has proved able to act shows a degree of democratic flexibility that other western nations lack.
French cities regularly succumb to riots among competing migrant groups. More than a third of suspects in German criminal cases are foreign-born, while rape cases are on the rise – driven, again, by migration. Sweden has experienced gang violence unlike anything in its history, with firefights and grenade attacks in the suburbs of Stockholm, Malmö and Gothenburg.
Britain, too, is moving toward a new sectarian politics. Cities such as Birmingham have chosen Members of Parliament based on their ethnicity, Islamic faith or support for a global intifada. There have been street fights between Hindus and Muslims in parts of the country with high levels of immigration. Organized crime is now effectively run by migrants, with the British government admitting that Albanians are the main suppliers of cocaine. Multiple asylum seekers, housed at public expense, have been found guilty of sexually assaulting minors. And the country is still coming to terms with its grooming gangs scandal, in which thousands of children were systematically abused by Pakistani migrants while police, doctors and local government all looked the other way for fear of being deemed racist.
The Trump administration has not been shy about criticizing its western allies for getting into this mess. J.D. Vance put it most plainly in his Munich Security Conference speech last year when he spoke of Europe’s “threat from within.” “No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants,” he said. That is equally true on the American continent. The difference is that the Trump administration is putting a stop to the madness.
Comments