news Immigration fears are pushing centrists to the right in the US and Europe

[VOSS]

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It's a nightmare scenario for President Joe Biden: Just ahead of the election, a migrant commits a grisly crime that captures national attention and is seized upon by the far right.

 

For his German counterpart, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that's just what happened. Nine days before the European election this month, an Afghan migrant stabbed a police officer to death in a city square, reigniting the highly charged debate on the country's asylum policies.

 

The attack in Germany was just the kind of unpredictable incident centrist parties fear most, serving to kindle voters' long-standing fears that the right to asylum, enshrined in international law, is driving uncontrolled migration. Those fears have enervated Scholz's fragile, left-leaning political coalition, just as they have sapped political will from European and American leaders to resist calls to impose ever-stricter border measures.

 

As elections loom in the U.S., the U.K. and France, the fraught politics of migration are a key issue animating voters on both sides of the Atlantic and fueling far-right parties that promise to put an end to migration driven by asylum — just as climate change and global conflicts have propelled the number of displaced people to record highs.

 

Now Biden is trying to avoid the fate of Scholz's party, which suffered historic losses as the country's far-right party seized on the attack to help drive unprecedented support at the polls.

 

Scholz, like Biden and other centrist leaders, has sought to strike a crowd-pleasing balance on immigration, pursuing more restrictive policies while avoiding harsh rhetoric and radical measures that would alienate progressives and many left-leaning voters.

 

The question is whether such a balance can work politically, particularly as voters often cite migration as the most pressing matter facing their societies.

 

At the same time, far-right forces across the West are not only seizing upon widespread fears of uncontrolled migration — they are also stoking those fears with increasingly incendiary rhetoric and falsehoods, depicting the impact of migration on Western societies in apocalyptic terms.

 

Donald Trump has, on more than one occasion, said immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of American society — employing language that would likely constitute a crime in Germany, where a law against incitement of hatred is one of many measures in the country's postwar constitution intended to prevent a repeat of the Nazi past.

 

While there are common themes on the issue of migration in the U.S and Europe, there are key differences when looking at the EU election and what it could mean for the U.S. election come November, argued David McGonigal of National Security Action, an advocacy group making the case for Biden's reelection. For example, the U.S. economy is much stronger, and many American voters are galvanized by the issue of abortion.

 

The right to asylum, enshrined in laws around the world, is largely a consequence of Germany's Nazi past and the desire to prevent genocide and persecution. The 1951 Refugee Convention was designed to protect Europeans displaced after World War II. A 1967 protocol, signed by 147 countries, expanded protections to apply to all people fleeing conflict and persecution around the world.

 

But many voters in the U.S. and Europe perceive their asylum systems, however well intended, to be utterly broken, driving uncontrolled migration. In fiscal year 2023, a record number of asylum applications — 478,885 — were filed in the U.S., with many migrants submitting their claims after crossing the southern border. Less than 32,000 applicants were granted asylum, and a huge backlog of cases remain.

 

This year, Americans ranked immigration as the most important problem in the country for three months in a row, according to Gallup, surpassing bread-and-butter issues like the economy and inflation. That was the longest stretch immigration topped the list in 24 years, even though the number of encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped since December 2023, when it hit a single-month record.

 

It's perhaps then no surprise that Biden, ahead of his own November election, followed through on an aggressive plan earlier this month to sharply reduce the number of asylum seekers entering the country, signing executive actions that shut down the southern border in between ports of entry when there is an average of 2,500 crossings a day over a seven-day period.

 

It comes as Biden is trying to walk a political tightrope on the thorny issue. The White House has been hyper-focused on fighting back against GOP attacks, but Biden aides also believe voters want a balanced approach: A president who manages chaos at the border while also offering new pathways to citizenship for long-term undocumented people.

 

"We have to acknowledge that the patience and the goodwill of the American people is being tested by their fears of the border. They don't understand a lot of it. These are the fears my predecessor is trying to play on. And he says immigrants, and his words are, 'poisoned the blood of the country.' When he calls immigrants, in his words, 'animals,'" Biden said.

 

Scholz and other centrist European leaders have attempted a similar balancing act as the continent has experienced a sharp rise in asylum seekers. Last year, the number of crossings at the EU's external border hit levels not seen since 2016, when Europe experienced an unprecedented refugee crisis. Of EU countries, Germany received the most asylum applications by far, with 334,000 requests — about 140,000 below the number for the entire U.S. Since the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016, when Germans were lauded for their "welcome culture" under then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, centrist European leaders have moved considerably to the right on immigration.

 

"Centrist parties cannot ignore the issue of migration, but have to find their own positions and rhetoric that is distinctively different from the far right," Johannes Hillje, a Berlin-based political consultant who tracks far- and extreme-right rhetoric in Germany, told POLITICO. "Copying the far right only helps the far right."

 

In April, the European parliament approved a series of laws to speed deportations of failed asylum applicants at the EU's borders. That legislation, aimed in great part at halting the rise of far-right parties across the continent, was criticized by those parties as not going far enough — and by left-wing parties and activists for violating human rights.

 

If he were looking across the Atlantic for warning signs, Biden would have noted that the European legislation addressing migration did little to halt the rise of the far right in the European election.

 

In France, Marine Le Pen's far-right National Rally won over 30 percent of the vote, crushing French President Emmanuel Macron's coalition. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany party (AfD) surged to a second-place finish ahead of Scholz's Social Democratic Party (SPD), the country's oldest political party, which had its worst performance in a national vote in well over a century.

 

Exit polls suggested that immigration, as in the U.S., was one of the top issues on voters' minds. Fifty-three percent of voters in Germany said they were "very worried" about too many foreigners coming to the country, a big rise compared to the European election five years ago, according to one survey.

 

For many German voters, the knife attack just before the election likely contributed to that worry. The Afghan suspect, whom authorities say was motivated by a radical Islamist ideology, had arrived in Germany a decade earlier, and had remained in the country though his initial asylum claim had been denied — a fact the far right stressed.

 

Germany's conservative opposition, which leads by a wide margin in national polls, is hoping to retake power with a simple message: Elect us to reign in migration, or else the AfD will come instead, marking a sharp departure from Merkel's policies.

 

 

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[Karla Cabello]

centrists are retar*ed

[BGKC]

This is what they mean when they say centrism enables fascism. 

[Bosque]

Has the left tried to call them all Nazis? Surely that would help solve the problem?

[Onyxmage]

This makes no sense. The Asylum system is broken so Republicans destroy a bill that THEY helped to create dealing with....immigration and the Asylum system?  Dont think for a second that Biden wont spend the next 4 months reminding Americans that Republicans in congress scream about the Border but want to do nothing to fix it. 

[Into The Void]

Quote

the U.S. economy is much stronger

Based on what logic 

[Karla Cabello]

17 minutes ago, Bosque said:

Has the left tried to call them all Nazis? Surely that would help solve the problem?

has the right done anything to solve anything 

[Onyxmage]

16 minutes ago, Karla Cabello said:

has the right done anything to solve anything 

Quite the opposite. They created a bill dealing with immigration then Trump told them to withdraw from the agreement so he could complain about the border for the election. Of course the response will be BuT bIDEn iz PrEziDent!!? The thing is Biden wanted congress to make a comprehensive bill and they did just that until Republicans walked away from the deal.  

[Horizon Flame]

1 hour ago, Into The Void said:

Based on what logic 

Data. 

[Into The Void]

17 minutes ago, Horizon Flame said:

Data. 

The sky rocketing inflation that makes people not be able to afford household esentials? Sounds like our economy is great when people r struggling to afford basic groceries 

[Princess Aurora]

It's 2016 all over again By the way, they think the right might fix it when all the things made by the right see Brexit in the UK, the Polish government immigration scandal, and Italy's latest immigration weird deal with Tunisia increased illegal immigration just sayin'. 

Edited June 21 by Princess Aurora

[Tropez]

13 hours ago, Into The Void said:

The sky rocketing inflation that makes people not be able to afford household esentials? Sounds like our economy is great when people r struggling to afford basic groceries 

Americans have huge fat storage. They can go a couple weeks with less food. 

[Communion]

15 hours ago, BGKC said:

This is what they mean when they say centrism enables fascism. 

Bingo. 

 

Americans in particular are partisan as hell. The moment you make the head of the Democratic Party a geriatric centrist with a myriad of right-wing views, the party follows in lock-step even just out-of a knee jerk reaction to defend the party mouthpiece. 

 

Biden's conservatism has destroyed the progressive movement. Every claim liberals made about caring about the marginalized was a lie undercut by partisanship. 

[Into The Void]

1 hour ago, Tropez said:

Americans have huge fat storage. They can go a couple weeks with less food. 

Oh goodness

[harwee]

Immigration has always been a contentious issue in the US, not sure about europe, but whether its pushing people to the right, idk, since both sides are flops when it comes to immigration.

[John Slayne]

i see this is my personal life. hating on immigrants is so normalised people will just casually say xenophobic stuff around me, an immigrant, thinking i'm gonna agree with them. it sucks.

[If U Seek Amy]

Basically in times where cost of living is higher it is going to be natural for people to get extra mad when even an extra penny is spent on immigration/illegal aliens and not for their own benefit as citizens. They typically do not understand how much immigration may actually help a country in many ways and just see money going to them and get mad. I disagree with them completely, but it makes sense to me also even if I see their hate as misguided/uninformed. In the Midwest it is extremely common for people to hate on immigration from all sides honestly