On the eve of last October’s Conservative party conference, its press office highlighted the week’s key announcement. As part of its plan to “tackle the crisis at the borders”, a Tory government would establish “a removals force” that would round up and remove people who were “in the UK illegally or whose visas have expired”.
“Legal barriers” would be removed, resources would be doubled, and the number of people deported each year would rise from 34,000 to around 150,000. The Tories were playing catch-up. Two months earlier, Reform UK had announced its own “mass deportation” plan.
For the past two decades, much of the immigration debate in Europe has been about borders – preventing people from coming in the first place. But over the past year or so, the emphasis has shifted towards deportations. The idea of “remigration” has moved from the far-right fringe to the rightwing mainstream in several European countries. Too many people have come to Europe, they argue, and many of them don’t share what they euphemistically term “European values”.
What began as a threat to those who are undocumented swiftly shifted to encompass those who have followed every rule and have a legal right to live in their new country. In the words of Katie Lam, a Conservative MP who has been tipped as a future leader, some people who are legally entitled to live in Britain “need to go home” in order to ensure the UK remains “culturally coherent”.
It doesn’t take much, then, to call into question those who were born in Europe, but whose parents came from elsewhere. The ethnonationalist direction of this logic is clear.
Until recently, this “debate” – if we can label the racist discussion about the lives of millions of people in such a sterile manner – has been theoretical. But on the streets of Minneapolis, it is very real.
Thousands of armed, masked officers have invaded the city against the wishes of its democratically elected leadership and police force. They are rounding up thousands of people – snatching them off the street, pulling them out of their cars, forcing their way into their homes. They are lying in wait outside nurseries and schools, picking off staff at shops, turning up at construction sites.
People are being targeted because of the colour of their skin or the language they are speaking. The agents are using reckless violence, pepper spraying protesters in the face, employing dangerous choke holds and, as we are all too aware following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, unafraid to shoot whomever they want.
This is what a mass deportation programme actually looks like.
Unsurprisingly, a policy of masked paramilitaries killing civilians is not popular. The issue of immigration helped Donald Trump regain the White House, but a majority of Americans now disapprove of ICE’s actions.
NewslettersChoose the newsletters you want to receive
Clear, calm analysis on the stories driving the day’s news.
The very best of our journalism, reviews and ideas – curated each day.
A dispatch from The Observer’s kitchen table – from Nigel Slater’s recipes to interviews, features and hot tips.
For information about how The Observer protects your data, read our Privacy Policy
As do a majority of Europeans. The question for Europe’s rightwing and far-right parties is whether they double down on their own mass deportation plans or back away, now that voters can see where it leads. It has been a bad month for Trump-friendly Europeans. The US president’s ambition to conquer Greenland, even if it means invading an ally, has forced Reform, Germany’s AfD and France’s National Rally to publicly criticise him. His dismissive words about Nato soldiers led to another wave of anger from his allies.
Until now, they have all welcomed the support of a US president who has made clear he sees far-right parties – “patriotic” parties, as they were described in the US national security strategy – as the only saviours of a continent he believes has been ruined by immigration.
But Greenland and Minneapolis show the political dangers of being seen as a European Trump. The challenge now for leftwing, centrist and liberal parties in Europe is to help voters join the dots.
When the Tories launched their policy, they said it was “modelled on the success of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE)”. Labour should make sure we don’t forget that.
Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images