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.
This was a really interesting argument about the differences in how anti-immigrant sentiment has evolved in Western Europe and the US. I found it compelling how you distinguished between religious differences of the people coming to Europe and the US, but I thought that race likely also was an important component to this. Many immigrants coming to the US are Christian, but from Latin American countries, and I believe that race likely plays a more significant part in many Americans’ beliefs about whether someone fits into “national identity.” I think it was valuable to focus on religion for the scope of this post as you provided an interesting case of how religious fundamentalism is a factor in western Europe’s movement towards the far-right, but not in the US.
I also think that the race of immigrants could play into the latter part of your argument when you explain how Trump has pushed anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies, despite the trends that the US is actually facing. In a similar way that Europeans do not see more religious Muslim people integrating into their countries, I think many people in the US would see Latino immigrants as “too different” from their understanding of America and this could potentially explain why Trump has successfully pushed his immigration agenda. Acknowledging that the rationale in the US is less clear made your argument stronger, and I appreciate how you brought up key examples in France to illustrate your point.
Hi Ethan! Thank you for carrying out this thoughtful case comparison – your point about provoked vs. invented threats is fascinating – I can absolutely see how the balance between migrant rights and national security can, and perhaps should, shift in these different contexts. In the case of France, I think I can offer another twist to the equation of balancing religious freedom and national security.
France was certainly rocked by genuine threats driven by Islamic terror groups, notably in 1995, with the Paris metro bombings, and in 2015, with tragedies at Charlie Hebdo, a Hypercacher, the Stade de France, and the Bataclan theater. However, I would push back on the conclusion that anti-migrant sentiment is driven by security concerns. The article below includes some fascinating polling data on the far-right’s rise in France. The author contends that major terrorist attacks, 9/11 and the wave of French tragedies in 2015 had little impact on support for the Front National (now the Rassemblement National). The FN actually pivoted to anti-migrant sentiment back in the 80s, after Jean Marie Le Pen’s anti-semitic stances had started to be more publicly reviled (forgive me if I’m repeating what you already know – didn’t fit it into my blog and now I’m excited to have a place to talk about it!)
You’ve definitely convinced me that the far-right in Western Europe has offered up a more logical and coherent anti-migrant platform. Your point about how fundamental Islamism does prioritize religion over the state has really made me think about laïcité in a more nuanced way. But I would still argue that anti-migrant rhetoric is only nominally related to the reality of migration, at least in France – instead, the far-right has pivoted to target a different group on a consistent platform of populist, exclusionary rhetoric.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/muslims-and-the-secular-city-how-right-wing-populists-shape-the-french-debate-over-islam/
Hi Ethan! This was a very interesting argument comparing the anti-immigrant ideologies that are plaguing Western Europe and the US. You made an excellent case comparison about how religion can be a a source for the anti-immgrant sentiment. You are spot on with the notion that governments are using national security as a reason to instill anti-immigrant policies because they are using the waves of migration as a security threat. In cases such as France, I believe that the religious differences can be a tool that governments are using to spread their anti-immigrant policies. For individuals who might not be passionate, either way, regarding the migration surges within the last ten years, using a controversial topic such as religion can help persuade individuals to join in on the anti-immigrant sentiment.
However, I do feel that the sentiment is more broad than religiosity. The original 1951 Convention on Refugees was created as a post-war resource for migrants within Europe to receive protection after the war. The idea that it was migration within Europe by Europeans that has still been part of international law is a big part of why there are so many issues now. Within Europe, there are already so many cultural differences in all identifications of race, religion, and ethnicity. The West, in general, has a history of not accepting people that are “different;” therefore, the overwhelming amount of migrants coming from countries such as Syria and Afghanistan with completely different cultural systems would be a reason why European governments would see the waves of migration as a national threat.
In regards to the US, even though migrants are coming from Central and South America, the sentiment is similar. In President Trump’s recent release of Executive Orders in regard to migrants, he stated how he only wanted to accept migrants that could fully assimilate into US culture. The West has a superiority and wants to maintain it, therefore these policies have outrageous uses of language to discriminate against anyone who does not fit the “Western framework.”
I think you have an excellent argument about the far-right policies and I am now interested in doing more research on the similarities between Western Europe and US far-right parties.
Hi Ethan – thanks for your article! It was an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.
There’s definitely an interesting dynamic at play here. The US is, in many ways, a nation ‘of migrants’, making it unique. European countries, however, have historically been more homogeneous and can thus be considered ethno-states. Yet both are experiencing similar political responses to migration. At its core, your article seems to attempt to explain this by arguing that, while the negative externalities of immigration in Europe are real (for lack of a better word), making far-right political backlash a logical consequence, in the US, the issue has been entirely constructed rather than emerging from actual conflict.
Ultimately, I would disagree with this framework. You rightly highlight the interesting ways immigration, race, religion, and politics interact differently (and sometimes similarly) across the US and Europe. However, I would argue that we are witnessing the same basic phenomenon in both contexts: the unsupported scapegoating of migrants by the right wing. I agree with your assessment that Trump largely fabricated the immigration “crisis”; where we differ is that I would also extend this characterisation to European far-right politicians like Farage and Meloni and still consider it perfectly accurate. Their success, too, relies on false portrayals of immigration as a threat.
Despite the evidence you reference suggesting there are legitimate issues with Muslim migration to Europe, at the end of the day, right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric is just that – rhetoric. It’s a hollow collection of exaggerated and isolated examples. Is the selective citing of religiously motivated violence by Muslim immigrants in Europe any different from the Trump administration’s political exploitation of Laken Riley’s murder? As you rightly note, in the US context (where such examples are used to imply that millions of immigrants are criminals), these sorts of narratives are fallacious; I would argue it’s the same in Europe.
The far right, for as long as it’s existed, has opportunistically and parasitically latched onto vulnerable, discernibly ‘different’ populations to manufacture threats. Today, in Europe, it’s Muslim immigrants – not because they present any legitimate danger to European society as we know it, but because they just so happen to have had the misfortunate of falling within the sights of the far right’s proverbial rifle. Scapegoating is, and always has been, a core tactic in the playbook of authoritarian-minded politicians. Muslim migrants are just the latest convenient target.
Is there a cultural clash between Islamic fundamentalism and European secular society? Of course. Any time an immigrant enters a new land, there will be an adjustment, and I think it’s true that this adjustment will naturally be to be more tenuous when the immigrant in question follows religious teachings which contrast with the social practices of their new home. So I don’t deny that this phenomenon of migrant-native tension exists in Europe to some degree. But I believe it’s a reach to suggest it meaningfully explains the rise of far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric in Europe. That rhetoric is popular not because it reflects real conditions, but because politicians have made it so – both in the US and Europe.