Opinion | Biden must fix immigration – or maybe lose ground to the far right
In each country, this increase has coincided with a collapse in support for the centre-left. And it all boils down to an issue the Biden administration would do well to take very seriously: immigration.
Giorgia Meloni, likely to be Italy’s next prime minister, is a charismatic 45-year-old politician. Her campaign was a familiar attack on the forces of globalization and a comforting narrative that she would somehow bring back the good old days before George Soros ruined it all.
In a video that went viral, she says she’s proud of everything the globalists want you to be ashamed of—being a Christian, a mother, Italian, etc. And a big part of her actual political agenda is immigration. “Nations only exist if there are borders, and they are defended,” she says, promising a naval blockade if that’s what it takes to stem the flow of illegal migrants from the Mediterranean.
The far-right Sweden Democrats’ appeal also revolves around immigration. The party talks a lot about the rise of crime, gang violence and abuse of the country’s generous welfare state. But its main campaign proposition was one 30-point plan designed to make Sweden, which arguably has one of the most generous immigration systems in Europe, the most restrictive. It is “time to put Sweden first”, says Jimmie Åkesson, the dynamic 43-year-old leader of the Sweden Democrats.
There is plenty of demagoguery in these two politicians and their parties, but there is also an important truth at the heart of their appeal. Immigration in many countries in Europe is out of control.
By out of control I don’t mean it’s too high. It is impossible to say what is the correct number for a particular country. I mean that the migration now largely happens in a chaotic way, with massive increases in flows, rampant human smuggling and crime, and a total breakdown of the legal system according to which countries evaluate and receive applicants. Sweden’s population is now approx 20 percent foreign-born, which is much higher than the United States, where that figure is approx 14 percent.
America is different from Europe. American identity is political, while the national identities of European countries, at least historically, have been based on ethnicity, religion, and culture. However, there are limits to how many people a country can accommodate.
About 5 percent of the US population were foreign-born in the 1970s. Since then, that share has almost tripled. Even so, people can be convinced that a large number of outsiders can be assimilated and absorbed. What infuriates them is the sense that people no longer become immigrants through a process controlled by the host country, but rather by crossing the border illegally, applying for asylum status, gaining entry and then simply staying. And that fear is justified.
America’s asylum system is broken. It was designed after World War II, in the wake of Holocaust, to bring in people who were subjected to immediate and severe persecution. Today, many people seeking asylum face difficulties much like those that have traditionally led people to seek a better life here: poverty, crime, disease, displacement. They are deeply worthy of dignity and decent treatment. But anyone applying for asylum for these reasons alone is abusing the system in an attempt to bypass the normal immigration process.
And that process in the US is now completely dysfunctional. Already clogged and understaffed, President Donald Trump deliberately blocked it even more, to the point that routine business visa applications from countries like India can take months; students cannot enter the US even after receiving scholarships; and work visa applications now rest on the chance that applicants will win one lottery (literally).
The Biden administration enters the midterm elections with a strong hand. It can be undone by this one problem. It has found an intelligent way to speed up the processing of asylum applications, even if it feels woefully inadequate for the backlog. There are approximately 744,000 pending asylum cases.
Biden must find a way to show that his administration is taking control of immigration in general and the border in particular. Then he can propose the obvious compromise that would appeal to most Americans: a better, faster, more predictable legal immigration system but a tougher and more effective way to limit illegal immigration. Otherwise, the populist right will use this issue to continue gaining ground in the US just like in Italy and Sweden.