The closing of the West

Has Donald Trump won his decade-long argument about immigration?

- MIHIR S SHARMA

Is the West's great experiment with openness ending? Across the Western world, in Europe, North America, and even Japan, there is less readiness to embrace foreign students, researchers, workers, and refugees than there was just five years ago. What could lie behind this trend, and what does it mean for the world? This month will mark a decade since United States (US) President Donald Trump began his political career. Is a closed West his principal achievement?

Mr Trump's actions in this sphere, because of their extreme nature and the dangerous rhetoric that accompanies them, receive the most attention. This might be justified, since it has been the bedrock of Mr Trump's political career. When he descended a golden escalator in his New York building in June 2015 to announce he was running for President, he quickly created a scandal by attacking Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. "They're not sending their best," he said.

Such rhetoric had not been heard before in US politics, and caused most on the mainstream right to write him off as a candidate. Instead, it is precisely this message that continues to swell his support. It allowed him to run an insurgent primary campaign that knocked every mainstream Republican out of the race one by one. In 2024, when he appeared to be losing a debate against Vice-President Kamala Harris, he raised the stakes by accusing refugees of eating the cats and dogs of small-town Ohio, where they were being housed. This was inaccurate, and widely mocked — but it also ensured that he got headlines from the debate that could grow his base of support. His rhetoric has only grown more startling over this decade; in the last campaign he accused immigrants of "poisoning the blood" of the US.