BY NOW, everyone would have heard of US President Donald Trump’s deportations, his confrontation with those countries that would not accept their own citizens back, and the wailing of many illegal migrants on social media. This was the mandate that got Trump elected and he seems eager to fulfill it.
For people who are used to the notion that America is meant to accept migrants, it’s important to remember that this wasn’t always the case. Recent mass migration into the Western World correlated when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had defeated the Soviet Union, and the West believed that they have reached the end of history and that the future will only lead to prosperity and a bright future as presented in Star Trek.
This trend started after the Second World War, but it really ramped up after the fall of the United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and when the Baby Boomer generation finally came to their own.
The prospect of never-ending peace coupled with a strong demographic triggered the phenomenon we call globalization, which in turn help trigger mass immigration. With nothing left to fight, the only threat left to contend with were reactionaries who had authoritarian tendencies, and holdout regimes like Iran or North Korea.
This was short sighted and delusional, but that was one of the main reasons why Western countries started allowing large numbers of migrants into their borders, unlike say Japan or Singapore.
As it turned out, the post-Cold War moment would not last. China and Russia would become geopolitical threats, while American and European open travel policies face problems from Western natives. They could no longer sustain the informal empire of network nongovernment organizations (NGOs), soft-power based institutions and strong economic growth. The prosperity and openness of the post-War and Post-Soviet moments was the time of the baby boomers, and they are dying off.
Trump is the first and most obvious of these symptoms of these problems but he is not the only one. The closing of the Western World is nothing special, it’s a return to the historical average./PN
