New enemy in the West is the illegal migrant

In most western democracies, which are struggling to sustain their liberal multicultural models from being overrun, the concept of national security threat has been reformulated to refer to illegal immigration rather than to any revisionist foreign enemy

- Sreeram Chaulia

In 1992, the American political strategist James Carville coined the catchphrase, "It's the economy, stupid." It conveyed that the singular issue which mattered the most to voters in the US was the condition of the economy and how it impacted on their personal finances. Today, economic considerations continue to remain crucial determinants of voter choice, but the other issue which has risen to the fore is immigration.

During the 2024 US presidential election, concerns about high levels of inflation (a proxy for the economy) and fears of humongous inflows of migrants from the southern border with Mexico combined to ensure the stunning return to power of President Donald Trump for a second term. Trump's bare-knuckles election campaign rhetoric against migrants galvanised a large segment of Americans to rally around him as the last saviour who can regain control over their country and harden what they perceived to be dangerously loose borders.

Although Trump's allegation that his predecessor President Joe Biden had "allowed 21 million illegals to pour in from all over the world" may not be accurate, the message of keeping America safe from unwanted hordes echoed deeply among conservatives and boosted the appeal of his Right-wing populism, which combines economic anxieties over losing out to other countries through foreign trade and globalisation with cultural insecurities about erosion of the social fabric and core racial identity due to opening the floodgates to migrants by liberals.