The 'spectre of being overrun'

It was a dark vision he sketched out on stage: one of invasion and conquest, criminals and murderers.

Former President Donald Trump has long campaigned on the fears of unbridled immigration, and in Aurora, Colorado, this month, he reprised those themes, outlining his plan for the “largest deportation operation in the history of the United States”.

“We will close the border,” he told a cheering crowd. “We will stop the invasion of illegals into our country. We will defend our territory. We will not be conquered.”

In another speech in Wisconsin, Trump said undocumented immigrants would enter your home and “cut your throat”.

But as the presidential race heats up between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, some experts have noted that parties, both liberal and conservative, are shifting rightward on immigration — reflecting a global trend.

As Trump leans into nativist attacks on immigrants, Harris has responded with her own pledges for more restrictions, even at the expense of internationally recognised asylum rights.

“As vice president, she backed the toughest border control bill in decades, and as president, she will hire thousands more border agents,” one of her campaign ads says.

Experts and rights groups say that the tough talk on immigration is an indication of the growing mainstream influence of the far right, both in the US and abroad.

“There’s this spectre of being overrun by ‘the other’ that has always been there,” Petra Molnar, a lawyer and anthropologist specialising in migration and human rights, told Al Jazeera.

“But it’s no longer being expressed just by the far-right. It seems to have filtered into the entire conversation around immigration.”

The political exploitation of immigration-related fears is far from new. Rather, it has been a consistent theme of US presidential campaigns past and present.

In 1992, for instance, Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan visited the US-Mexico border and declared that the country was under an “illegal invasion”.

“I am calling attention to a national disgrace,” he said, blaming immigrants for social, economic and “drug problems”.

The speech was viewed with alarm by many in the Republican Party at the time. Buchanan was ultimately defeated in every presidential primary he participated in.

But scholars say views and policies once considered fringe have now travelled into the mainstream, at the expense of preserving asylum rights for those fleeing persecution or conflict.

“Globally speaking, there has been a weakening of the established principles of asylum and refugee determinations,” Molnar told Al Jazeera.

“There’s a fear that, if the system is too permissive, too many people are going to come.”

The trend extends beyond the US to European nations such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

In July, for instance, the nativist Reform UK Party secured the third-largest share of votes in the British election following a campaign in which party leader Nigel Farage promised a “freeze” on immigration.

Then, in September, the staunchly anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) also became the first far-right party to win a state election in that country since World War II.

It even came close to knocking German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) out of power in the state of Brandenburg that month.

Meanwhile, in France, Marine Le Pen led a coalition of parties known as the National Rally (RN) to third place in a recent national election, attacking immigration, Islam and multiculturalism.

Many centrist and left-leaning parties have responded with their own efforts to strike a hard line.

In France, the government of President Emmanuel Macron has tried to deflate the far-right by co-opting many of their ideas about immigration, promising further restrictions on asylum and prison sentences for people who illegally enter France.

Those moves come in response to conservative parties, like that of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, forming an unprecedented alliance with the far right.

“It’s undeniable that Michel Barnier seems to have, on migration, the same assessment as ours,” Le Pen recently noted with satisfaction in the newspaper La Tribune.

While immigration is a central theme among the West’s far-right parties, it is not the only factor in their growing appeal.

A study published in the Cambridge University Press in April 2023 found that economic austerity measures — often resulting in cuts to benefits and government services — have helped fuel the rise of non-mainstream parties and political instability.

But immigrants can serve as a convenient scapegoat amid feelings of downward mobility.

“Far-right populist parties have been on the rise, with ebbs and flows, in various countries across the European Union, and they’ve made immigration a real flashpoint issue,” said Judith Sunderland, the associate director of the Europe and Central Asia division of watchdog group Human Rights Watch.

The result, she added, is that parties on both sides of the political spectrum are reacting to the far-right’s newfound power.

“Mainstream parties on the right and the left have slowly, and sometimes quite rapidly, moved very far right on these issues in a scramble to obtain votes and political support, with the argument that, unless they adopt these policies, the far-right will take over.”

In response to the growing pressure on immigration, certain Western countries have embraced harsh restrictions and enforcement, shirking the international laws that uphold the right to seek asylum abroad.

In recent months, for instance, governments in Poland and Finland have approved measures temporarily suspending the right to petition for asylum entirely.

Similar restrictions, targeting asylum, are at the centre of the ongoing immigration debate in the US election.

American voters have ranked immigration high among their priorities this election cycle. An October poll from Harvard University and the market research company, Harris Poll, found that voters named immigration the second most important issue facing the country, behind inflation.

Immigration has also been a source of bipartisan criticism for outgoing President Joe Biden, whose administration oversaw a record number of border crossings last December.

The pressure ultimately forced the centrist Democrat to make an about-face on the topic of cross-border migration, as he moved from opposing restrictive policies to embracing them.

At first, as a presidential candidate, Biden pledged to be the antidote to the heavy-handed policies of his opponent, then-incumbent President Trump.

When Trump rolled back access to asylum, for instance, Biden campaigned on the idea he would “restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum-seekers”.

But after entering office, Biden adopted many of Trump’s most restrictive immigration policies and limited the right to seek asylum.

For example, his administration initially kept in place Title 42, a COVID-era public health policy Trump used to turn asylum seekers away at the border.

Only when the pandemic-related national emergency ended in 2023 did Biden roll it back, despite the policy having little to no public health benefit.

This year, Biden also placed caps on the number of people who can cross the border irregularly. If a certain threshold number is reached, the border can be closed to asylum claims.

“The Biden administration has seen a surprising continuation of a lot of Trump’s policies, or different versions of those policies,” Maureen Meyer, the vice president for programmes at the Washington Office on Latin America, told Al Jazeera.

“There’s been a combination of harsher enforcement, pushing other governments to increase enforcement, and a more favourable approach of expanding legal pathways for migrants both in the US and regionally.”

Biden was originally slated to seek re-election during the 2024 presidential race, but after abruptly bowing out in July, his vice president, Harris, took over as head of the Democratic ticket.

Harris has continued Biden’s tilt towards the right on immigration — and has even pledged to go beyond what his administration has implemented.

In September, for instance, Harris visited the border town of Douglas, Arizona, where she promised to “take further action to keep the border closed between ports of entry”.

“We will pursue more severe criminal charges against repeat violators,” she said in her campaign speech.

“And if someone does not make an asylum request at a legal point of entry and instead crosses our border unlawfully, they will be barred from receiving asylum.”

Experts like Meyer nevertheless note a difference between Harris’s approach and Trump’s. Democrats, for instance, have called for an expansion of the legal pathways to immigration.

But, they argue, Biden and Harris appear to be on the defensive — trying to defuse accusations that they have allowed unfettered immigration, with no safeguards.

“When you allow the far-right to frame this issue as ‘there are too many of them, we have to keep them out’, it becomes very difficult to have a conversation about the benefits of migration, the benefits of inclusive societies and moral obligations towards those fleeing persecution,” Sunderland, of Human Rights Watch, said.