As the United States and Western European countries confront historic surges in migration, the backlash-fueled success of far-right parties has increasingly been characterized as a global phenomenon. Indeed, where nations have seen spikes in anti-immigrant sentiment, right-wing politicians have seen success. 

But the comforting notion that no country is alone — and is instead part of a global trend — obscures vast differences among the arriving migrants and native-born residents on opposite sides of the Atlantic. 

These stark, but overlooked differences exist in the realms of religion, religiosity, and national identity. The differences in these three arenas are stark because most migrants headed to Europe are Muslim, while 70% of migrants to the U.S. are Christian; because these predominantly Muslim immigrants are far more fundamentalist than the secular, yet Christian Europeans receiving them (while rates of fundamentalism are similarly high among both American Muslims and Christians); and because America is a nation of immigrants and Western European countries largely are not. 

While it may be comforting to bill these claims of differences as American exceptionalism, the compatibility of these surges in the U.S. with the country’s national identity — to which a third of Americans say includes Christianity — is troubling in a different way. 

These differences are evidence that the global rise of the far-right reflects two separate phenomena: in western Europe, anti-immigrant sentiment has driven voters to far-right political parties; conversely, in the United States, the increasingly far-right Republican party has fomented and fueled anti-immigrant sentiment as a path to electoral victory. 

Western Europe’s migration backlash is much easier to explain than the United States’. It largely boils down to a clash between the secular native-born Europeans and the comparatively fundamentalist Muslim immigrants who are migrating at historically high rates. In France, where hijabs have effectively been banned in schools since 1994, the 2020 beheading of a teacher for showing depictions of the prophet Mohammed represents the uniquely European brand of anti-immigrant backlash. The beheading, which continues to dominate French media, came five years after Islamist gunmen killed 12 at the offices of a French satirical magazine that published cartoons of the prophet.

State secularism, or laïcité, is a core component of France’s national identity — which also includes “liberty, egalitarianism, and fraternity.” In 2004, the hijab ban was extended to all religious symbols. For the state and many of its residents, schools are one many public institutions that ought to be free of religion.

The clash between religious expression and freedom of speech also came to a head in Germany last April, when the President warned of “consequences” after more than 1,000 fundamentalist Muslims rallied for the imposition of sharia law and the establishment of a caliphate. The United States has experienced no such beheadings or seen large rallies in support of Islamic law, nor have such feverous debates over religious speech captivated the nation. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion are constitutional bedrocks, diverging from the French mantra of “freedom from religion.” 

Granted, xenophobia and islamophobia are by no means acceptable, nor should they be, under widely subscribed-to European belief systems. But comparatively widespread levels of Islamic fundamentalism among resettling migrants provides a rational explanation for the rise of the far right that is conspicuously absent in the United States. Far-right candidates across Europe won support because their argument that migration is changing the largely Judeo-Christian “fabric” of their countries is mostly true. While easily written off as anecdotes, the beheading in France and protests in Germany, just to name two examples, reflect a real support for fundamentalism among arriving migrants. The perceived incompatibility of Islamic fundamentalism with Western European norms and laws logically lends itself to growing support for far-right parties that promise preservation of secularity and crackdowns on immigration. 

In the United States, immigration is woven into the nation’s fabric. Where the migration-fueled backlash has provoked crises of national identity in Western Europe, it’s simply an affront to the United States’ professed values that most Americans — including supporters of President Trump, would likely claim to support.  

It is important to note that the homogeneity of arriving migrants’ and native-born Americans’ religion may explain a pro-immigrant national identity. Even as immigration increased, Americans’ attitudes towards immigrants were consistently becoming more positive until recently — around the time when President Biden took office. Herein lies the major difference in the direction of the causal relationship between right-wing success and anti-immigrant backlash. 

Since President Trump first ran for office, he has espoused anti-immigrant rhetoric and drummed up opposition to immigration. This rhetoric is not just exaggeration, but instead runs counter to the trends and realities of the immigration the United States is experiencing. 

Most of the time, it is false. The “migrant crime wave” simply does not exist, and violent crime has consistently been falling. Moreover, migrants commit crimes at far lower rates than native-born citizens. The President’s assertions that illegal immigrants are both stealing Americans’ jobs and relying on taxpayer-funded welfare are, to an extent, mutually exclusive. Foreign-born unemployment rates in the U.S. are actually lower than the native-born unemployment rate. In Europe, the opposite is true. 

Still, these falsehoods have proliferated in conservative media and gained traction among American voters. Immigration has now become a crisis and a threat to American values because Donald Trump has effectively been able to increase the issue’s salience.

There are a number of other reasonable explanations for the recent wave in anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States that are not mutually exclusive with the notion that the far-right has conceptualized and spread anti-immigrant views to win political office. Voters express markedly more negative feelings about immigration when they face poor economic conditions. Moreover, encounters at the southern border were rising for years before they reached an all-time high in 2022, under President Biden. Millions of illegal crossings certainly had a real, discernible effect that strained border towns and cities who received hundreds of thousands of these migrants, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. 

Regardless of whether one, both, or none of these explanations account for attitudes in the U.S. today, the rise of the far-right is a symptom of a consistent, coherent, and logical backlash in Western European countries. In the United States, President Trump’s creation, and far-right conservative media’s propagation of immigration falsehoods is more accurately described as the cause — instead of a symptom — of this backlash.