Immigration

You can feel the excitement in Fox News’s reports that a DHS spokesman, backing the claims that Trump has now walked back, has confirmed that the migrant caravan that has just entered Mexico includes ‘gang members’ and people with ‘significant criminal histories’, as well as people from the Middle East. How hot and uncomfortable they must be, walking all that way in an explosive vest. You can feel the disappointment in CNN’s report that by November 6, the migrant caravan ‘could still be somewhere in the middle of Mexico’, and well short of what CNN recommends as the ‘safest route’, to San Diego via Tijuana.

There have been many efforts to explain the rise of global populism, most of which posit it as a blowback against globalisation and the unequal economic effects that it has had on developed-country populations. The liberal international order has exacerbated income inequality, with middle classes rising in places like China and India at the expense of working classes in North America and Western Europe. But there has been a competing explanation for the shift that is rooted in cultural identity rather than economics. Or rather, identity becomes the way that voters interpret economic decline.