Why is there such hostility to immigrants in much of the West?

US immigration agents at a Hyundai-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Ellabell, Georgia, on September 4. South Koreans suspected of working in the US illegally were the majority of the 475 people arrested in the raid. AFPShow less

The era of globalisation as we knew it is clearly over. Systems of connectivity and free movement still exist, but they have been dealt too heavy a blow by the tariffs and protectionism of US President Donald Trump’s White House for one to say that worldwide interdependence and integration remain as strong as before. Do we have to accept as inevitable, however, what appears to be replacing it in the US and Europe – a rise in ethno-nationalism, and hostility to immigrants and “the other”, summed up in a New Statesman cover essay this month as “the age of deportation”?

Mr Trump has railed against illegal immigrants, in particular, for years. Last year he said some of them were “not humans, they’re animals”. He has said they were “poisoning our country” and taking American jobs. The crackdown he has ordered since returning to the presidency recently led to the detention of around 300 workers from South Korea at a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Georgia who were publicly shackled around the ankles, waist and hands.

Many were specialists who were there, they thought, entirely legally, to help build a factory that would have provided a huge boost to the local economy. They were flown home just under a week ago, but their treatment has caused outrage in a key US ally. “As things stand now, our businesses will hesitate to make direct investments in the US,” said South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

The Indian novelist Cauvery Madhavan has been living in Ireland so long that she wrote recently “I’ve been an Irishwoman for over 30 years now” and felt entirely at home in the country. But she noted a shocking rise in racism of late, including physical attacks. The far right has been gaining ground across Europe, with anti-migrant vigilante groups gathering in Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Iceland and Northern Ireland, while Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s Alternative fur Deutschland, has called for “large-scale repatriations”.

Mainstream politicians tend to confine themselves to talking about illegal immigration, but now even the children of lawful migrants with European or US passports are right to feel concerned. The far-right Austrian activist Martin Sellner has talked about the “remigration” of “non-assimilated” citizens. And a former British MP, Douglas Carswell, recently posted on X “From Epping to the sea, let's make England Abdul free”. If that wasn’t clear enough, he also posted about “how to facilitate the mass deportation of Muslims from Britain”.

Mr Carswell may no longer be in Britain’s parliament, but he cannot be dismissed as a crackpot or figure from the fringe. He was known as a cerebral free marketeer Conservative, and subsequently the more moderate face of UKIP, the forerunner of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party – which many believe could win the next British general election.

Something has changed – and very fast. For it was only a couple of years ago that the UK was congratulating itself...

I was shaken by his posts, which received enormous support online and no significant pushback from leading British politicians. I think of two friends in the UK I’m in touch with regularly. Both spent parts of their childhoods in India and Pakistan, respectively, but are such pillars of the community – the British community, that is – that one was asked to stand for parliament by the Labour Party last year, and the other was awarded the OBE for her services to the disabled.

Mr Carswell and his ilk, however, don’t think they belong in Britain, because they’re Muslim. For the same reason, they don’t want my wife and two sons in the country either. Forgive me if I can’t avoid taking this personally.

The “Unite the kingdom” rally in London last weekend showed that Mr Carswell is no outlier. Organised by the far-right activist and convict who calls himself Tommy Robinson, the crowd were addressed by Eric Zemmour, a former candidate for the French presidency who spoke of “the great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture”. He said: “You and we are being colonised by our former colonies.”

Something has changed – and very fast. For it was only a couple of years ago that the UK was congratulating itself on being so unbothered by the fact that the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, the Scottish first minister, Humza Yousaf, and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, were all of South Asian heritage. Now you have a section of the population who are unafraid to say openly that at least two of them should be sent “home”. Whatever happened to the apparently increasingly tolerant country I left for Malaysia and the Gulf in 2010?

The answers to that, and to the causes of the same trend in Europe and the US, are too lengthy to go into here. For Europe, the Italian philosopher Lorenzo Marsili singles out the self-realisation of the continent’s relative decline compared to the rest of the world. “It is against the shock of a world that sees Europe and judges it to be irrelevant that the far right can brandish the proud ‘nation’ as its place of refuge,” he wrote in an essay last December. “It is the nationalism of the provincialised, the demoted, and the exhausted.”

Although the US is still the world’s primary superpower, many in the Maga movement might recognise the analysis – and argue that this is why they are right to be angry. In Europe or the US I would suggest, however, that it is not the Abduls or Aadityas, the Korean Kims, or the Mexican Miguels, that they should aim their fury at. It is the elites and politicians who presided over decades of increasing inequality who deserve their ire. Why are people in some of the richest countries in the world having to use food banks? Why is there an epidemic of homelessness throughout the western world?

Rather than scapegoating immigrants or their descendants, lessons could be learnt from multicultural countries that prioritise social harmony, while emphasising the centrality of national culture and history, such as the UAE, Singapore and Malaysia, where I live. I fear, though, that it may take a monumental regaining of confidence for generosity to “the other” to return. And the speed with which it vanished leads one to question the degree to which it was ever there in the first place.