The Force Shaping Western Politics

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The recent elections for the European Parliament are the latest sign of the political potency of immigration. The elections’ biggest winners were right-wing parties that promised to reduce the flow of migration.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why this subject is shaping Western politics and what may happen next.

Rapid change

The first thing to understand is how unusual the modern migration boom has been. In nearly every large Western country, the foreign-born share of the population has risen sharply since 1990:

It’s not clear whether immigration has ever previously risen so quickly in so many different countries. (If anything, the chart here understates the trend because it ends in 2020, the last year with available data.)

This migration boom has had big advantages. It has allowed millions of people to escape poverty and violence. It has diversified Western culture. It has brought workers into Europe and the U.S. who have held down the cost of labor-intensive businesses.

But the boom has also had downsides. More labor competition can obviously hurt the workers who already live in a country. Governments have strained to provide social services to the arrivals. And the rise in immigration has been so rapid that many citizens feel uncomfortable with the associated societal changes. Historically, major immigration increases tend to spark political backlashes.

The pattern has held in recent years. The shockingly successful Brexit campaign in 2016 emphasized immigration. So have Europe’s fast-growing, far-right political parties. In the U.S., polls show that immigration threatens President Biden’s re-election.

For years, mainstream Western politicians, from the center-right to the center-left to the left, have dismissed voters’ concerns about immigration. Some politicians describe it as a free lunch, with only economic benefits and no costs. They portray worries about immigration — worries shared by millions of people of different races, especially those with lower incomes — as inherently ignorant or xenophobic. Some politicians claim that governments are helpless to control their borders.

Many voters responded by drifting to the only parties that promised to reduce immigration — parties on the extreme right. To be clear, these parties do traffic in racism, as well as conspiracy theories, violent rhetoric and authoritarianism. To many voters, though, the parties were also the one part of the political system willing to listen to public opinion about rising immigration.

Andrew Sullivan, the political journalist (and an immigrant to the U.S.), points out that the disconnect has been particularly stark over the past few years. “As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa and Washington chose to massively accelerate it,” Sullivan wrote on Substack. “It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: Well now, how can we really get it to take off?”

In the elections for the European Parliament this week, the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s far-right party, won more votes than any other in France. In Germany, the AfD, an ultranationalist party, finished second, ahead of the left-leaning party that governs the country. In Italy, the right-wing party that already runs the country finished first.

A new tack?

It wasn’t so long ago that the political left and center took a different approach to immigration.

They treated it as a complex issue that required moderation. President Barack Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders both fell into this category. They were part of a progressive tradition dating to labor and civil rights leaders who celebrated immigrants — but also supported tough border security, believing that unchecked immigration could destabilize society and increase inequality.

There are some signs that the center-left and center-right are returning to this approach and becoming more respectful of public opinion:

Biden, after loosening border rules early in his presidency and watching migration soar, has reversed himself.

In Britain, the Labour Party has criticized the Conservative Party as lax on immigration. During a debate last week, Keir Starmer, the Labour candidate for prime minister, described Rishi Sunak, the Conservative incumbent, as “the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration.”

In the E.U. elections, center-right parties finished first partly by adopting a more restrictive stance on immigration, my colleague Matina Stevis-Gridneff notes. (I recommend her succinct summary of the results.)

The clearest example may be in Greece. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, an establishment conservative, has taken a hard line, refusing to allow some migrants to land there after years of surging migration. Even as other center-right parties struggled in the E.U. elections, Mitsotakis’s party finished first in Greece.

Japan and South Korea are moving toward a moderate position, albeit from the opposite direction. After decades of highly restrictive policies, they have begun to admit more immigrants, largely for economic reasons.

The moves by Japan and South Korea are a recognition of immigration’s unavoidable complexity. Very high levels of immigration can cause political and economic problems. So can very low levels.

What’s next? Britain and France will hold domestic elections in the next month. Those elections will be more telling than this week’s, Matina says, because voters typically care more about their own government than about the E.U.

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