US presidential candidates join global shift rightward on immigration

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.”