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Wishful thinking (Washington Post illustration; AFP/Getty; iStock)
As you’ve certainly heard by now, there’s a caravan of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers slowly walking from Central America to the United States.
President Trump has turned their odyssey into front-page news, insisting that the group is a threat to national security. And to make his point, he is offering a familiar warning to Americans: Look at the “total mess” immigration has caused in Europe.
It’s no surprise that Trump thinks Europe is a disaster area. He has previously accused London of being like a “war zone;” claimed that a mysterious friend named Jim no longer goes to the French capital because “Paris is no longer Paris;” and spoken of terrible events in Sweden that never happened.
Now, with the midterms just two weeks away, Trump is again raising the specter of migration in Europe to justify harsh immigration measures at home. But the comparison is not as fitting as he thinks.
The scale of the situation along the U.S. border is nowhere near the size of the problem that Europe faced in 2015 and 2016. To use just one metric, there were more than 1.3 million asylum applications in Europe in 2015, compared to 331,700 in the United States last year.
Much of Europe’s turmoil on immigration also resulted from arguments among European Union member states that felt that the burden of accepting and caring for migrants was not being equally shared — and that the bloc’s policy of open borders was not up to the scale of the problem. As a single country, the United States doesn’t have to deal with such divisions.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel leafs through an instructional booklet about Germany’s constitution for recently arrived migrants on Oct. 8 in Frankfurt. (POOL New/Reuters)
Needless to say, Europe has not collapsed into the kind of chaos and disorder you might expect if you read Trump’s Twitter feed. In Germany, where hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants have landed during the wave of new arrivals in Europe since 2015, official statistics actually showed a 10 percent a drop in crime last year — despite Trump’s claims to the contrary.
While refugees and migrants may be a short-term drain on European nations’ coffers, there is some evidence that in the long term, they could help. Indeed, in Sweden, they already appear to be adding to the economy. “These refugees and immigrants came at precisely the right time,” economist Lars Christensen told Bloomberg Businessweek this summer.
Politics are a mixed picture as well. Across the continent, anti-immigrant populist parties have sought to capitalize on migration. Some have achieved real electoral success — most notably the League, the Italian party that’s now part of the government — and many others have pushed mainstream parties into taking harder positions to keep anti-immigration voters in their camp.
That’s hardly a foolproof strategy. Germany’s Christian Social Union, the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, took a hard line on immigration to fight off the far-right and maintain its dominant position. Instead, in Bavarian state elections on Oct. 14, voters fled the party en masse. While the far-right made big gains, so did the pro-migrant Greens, who came in a stunning second place.
“We are the only party that hasn’t been driven crazy by right-wing populism,” said Tarek Al-Wazir, the Green Party leader in the federal state of Hesse, which holds its own elections Sunday.
However, Trump has reason to believe that anti-immigrant grandstanding is still a winning issue in America. Politico reported that the president and his polling team believe the data shows that border and immigration issues resonate with voters, particularly in competitive congressional races. “People who have spoken with him about the approach said that he’s vowed to bring up the caravan wherever and whenever he can, even when he isn’t being prompted by others,” Politico wrote.
“For Trump, the caravan represents a political opportunity,” conservative writer David Frum wrote in the Atlantic. “Here is exactly the kind of issue that excites more conservative Americans — and empowers him as their blustery, angry champion.”
There is one important similarity between the migrants trying to reach Europe and the United States — though it is one Trump may not want to acknowledge.
As The Post’s Nick Miroff writes, the “era of mass migration by Mexican laborers streaming into California and the deserts of Arizona is over,” ended by harsher policies and beefed-up border defenses. Instead, the migrants arriving in America look a lot like those who have come to Europe in recent years: Asylum seekers, bringing with them “stories of torture, gang recruitment, abusive spouses, extortionists and crooked police.”
As Europe knows, dealing with asylum seekers who have credible stories of persecution is complicated — not only in terms of morality, but also pure logistics. The number of pending asylum cases in U.S. immigration courts is now more than than 750,000, Miroff explains, and applicants face lengthy waits for court dates.
Ironically, Trump’s fixation on illegal immigration may have helped create the very problem about which he is now furious. Trump’s frequent tweeting about a far smaller caravan in March seems to have helped promote this new, larger group heading for the United States — while his family separation policy has done little to repel people.
Trump’s focus on the current caravan looks likely to compel other caravans to follow in turn. An official with the Department of Homeland Security told CNN that another group of migrants is planning to leave from El Salvador next week. Eventually, the United States might get the European-style migrant crisis Trump hopes for, and Trump himself will deserve much of the blame.
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Credit:Washington Post
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