Donald Trump has rounded off a dramatic first week in the White House by upending the consensus on migrant repatriation. America began using military aircraft to return migrants earlier in the week, and yesterday two US military planes took off for Colombia carrying returning migrants. But Colombian President Gustavo Petro blocked them from landing; in response, Trump threatened punitive tariffs and other retaliatory measures against Colombia. Petro swiftly backed down.
What was so shattering about Trump’s actions was their foundation in assumptions that have, at least officially, been long treated as obsolete: that nations have borders, and that national interest has primacy over the international kind. My first political memory was the fall of the Berlin Wall — a highly symbolic boundary — and the quarter-century that followed it only solidified a high-status public consensus that borders and boundaries were relics of the past. In their place, we’d have international rules concerning conflict resolution, human rights, trade, tax, and climate, and everything would become steadily more global and democratic.
The aspect of this post-national worldview which proved most contentious, from a non-elite perspective, was migration. Bodies such as the UN set out a post-national vision of migration simply as a fact of the coming borderless future, and something that must be accommodated by states and metabolised by their populations. But as international migration has accelerated, this view has come increasingly into tension with the preferences of local populations in destination countries.
In the run-up to Trump’s re-election, for example, rumours spawned that Haitian migrants resettled in Ohio were eating local pets, prompting a frenzied round of discourse about racism, migration, cultural difference, and “fake news”. Whether or not the rumours are true, the argument spoke to widespread popular anger and helplessness at policies that appeared to prioritise planetary “humanity” over the interests of national citizens.
The same frustration underlies now-common headlines in Britain concerning migration policy, especially where Channel migrants are concerned, and the accommodation of such individuals — mostly young men — has proved a particular flashpoint. Recently, for example, in one Northamptonshire village the police response to complaints of migrant men loitering outside the local primary school was reportedly that nothing could be done apart to “deliver some work” about “appropriate behaviours” and “cultural differences”. Locals, meanwhile, are outraged at the apparent refusal of the authorities to take their side in keeping children safe.
But this refusal is a logical consequence of the borderless paradigm, in which rulers must balance the interests of citizens against those of “humanity” in general. This approach inevitably limits the ability of police or government to be particularistic, instead viewing “migrants” and “locals” merely as different groups to be managed.
Most voters see this as a radical breach of the social contract, however. In this view, the job of government is setting and enforcing rules in the common interests firstly of citizens, and only (distantly) secondarily of the wider world. How, then, are citizens to respond to a government which seems to have decided unilaterally to discard this approach, in favour of one which sets rules designed to address the interests of “humanity” in its totality? In Britain, a mood of frustration and betrayal is now widespread. And with small boat arrivals rocketing under Keir Starmer, such tensions seem likely to escalate unless policy changes. Similar arguments have driven a sharp increase in support across Europe for “populist” anti-migrant parties.
In this context, we can expect Trump’s example to have an electrifying impact. His willingness to threaten punitive tariffs — in effect, economic sanctions — not to further any “rules-based international order” but instead America’s specific interest, will invite questions as to why other countries should not follow suit. Why, for instance, should Britain not apply its still-considerable political, financial, and regulatory leverage toward the deportation of foreign criminals and illegal arrivals?
Until this week, leaders could shrug ruefully and point to “international rules”. Trump’s actions just demolished that excuse. Concerted inaction on border control, long justified by international rules, has been revealed as a political choice all along. Now, with the hegemon itself pivoting away from such abstract universal rules, it remains to be seen how much appetite Western leaders have for sustaining them, against the clear wishes of their electorates.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeI can’t read this. A liberal progressive ‘shattered’ when a country takes steps to enforce its sovereignty and right to act in its best interests.
Please call me when the last liberal progressive in Unherd has left the sinking ship.
Feel free not to read or post… or better still leave. You’re wasting everyones time, especially your own (sock puppet).
Perhaps you should read it Richard. There’s nothing in this article to suggest that the author is “shattered” in the way you suggest.
“What was so shattering about Trump’s actions…”
Only a progressive liberal could write that or think that.
A normal person is watching a government deporting illegal aliens.
You seem to have misunderstood. It is not the author who is shattered, it is the beliefs of the ruling elite which have been shattered ie the “anywhere” people as May called them, (but she did nothing about it except be one of them…).
She is describing something which is not true and never has been. It is a fantasy of the liberal progressive mind. That there should be or could be one, country-less, world with open borders. This is the dream of communists and, today, Islamicists.
Only a liberal progressive would think that this is what Trump has shattered. He is doing a sensible thing. Protecting his country. Only a liberal progressive would think Trump has shattered anything. Only a liberal progressive would think this dream of one-world without borders became mainstream, became officially sanctioned by the whole world. That is nonsense. It is just more leftist projection from basket case UK onto the whole world. Projection of a liberal progressive mindset onto everyone else.
Which other countries have followed UK into a post-nation dystopia? Only Sweden and Canada. No one else.
Germany?
Only since Merkel opened their borders to the Syrian refugees.
As usual, you’re just reading into something – having barely read it anyway – according to your own limited thought process, and getting it very wrong… again… and again… and again…
The UK needs intelligent analysis and action thereupon. You repeatedly demonstrate that it needn’t trouble you for help.
And I reply as I always do to you. Where am I wrong?
What the UK needs…. fewer trolls.
If you think Mary is a progressive liberal you clearly haven’t read any of her work, on Unherd or elsewhere.
Please do us all a favour and take your obsessive ranting to another platforrm. It’s not only childish but tedious in the extreme.
I’ve read this article. It tells you a lot about the author.
If he reads the article Chris, he’ll find it that much harder to post his preconceived rant about UnHerd. So he won’t. Education is NOT what he’s here for….
Nice to see a government actually delivering on its campaign promises. Doubt it’ll catch on in the UK.
Colombia accepted 475 deportation flights from the US from 2020 to 2024, fifth behind Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador, according to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flight data. It accepted 124 deportation flights in 2024
“A migrant is not a criminal and must be treated with the dignity that a human being deserves,” Mr Petro said. “That is why I returned the US military planes that were carrying Colombian migrants… In civilian planes, without being treated like criminals, we will receive our fellow citizens.”
Petro – “A migrant” “deserves” “treated like criminals”
I can’t speak for USA, but in UK there are two types of migrant – legal and illegal. The latter includes those entering illegally and those overstaying their legal time limit. If you break the law, you are acting in a criminal manner, deserve no sympathy and should be treated as a criminal. Why no sympathy? Because anyone has the opportunity to apply legally to enter UK, and also to extend their visa. Behave properly and you will be treated with dignity.
I’m not sure how the type of plane a “migrant” arrives back in his country of origin in matters when it comes to his “dignity” as a human. Mr. Petro doesn’t believe a “migrant” is a criminal. In fact, entering another nation’s territory without its knowledge or consent is a criminal act in 124 out of the 195 nations on Earth. The United States is incredibly lenient with people who do this but the times are changing.
Have you been trained by the DMV? Do you have a position or are you just repeating boilerplate terminology.
Trump’s four years in the wilderness were not waisted.
It just might be the best thing to have happened to the US for several generations.
He can now have no illusions about what he is up against.
So it seems. I would say he’s done more in a week to advance the basic principle of democracy, that is that the power of government is derived from the people, the citizens of the country, not from everyone who happens to be there, or all people everywhere, or the UN, or even directly from God almighty than anyone since FDR at least. That’s really what this incident highlights. America belongs to Americans, not the world. American taxpayer dollars should be spent American wants and needs, not every human being on the planet. The American people can elect whoever they choose to exercise their authority and that person and those people determine policy. The President of the United States answers to the people of the United States and nobody else, not the EU, not the UN, not the WHO nor any of the other alphabet soup of international organizations.
I find it incredibly sad that it took Donald Trump to reestablish and reassert the primacy of the democratic principle enshrined in the Constitution that each and every President swears to uphold and defend. More than any of their policies which can be argued for and against like anything else, what I find disgraceful is that that successive Presidents, from the first Bush to Obama have regarded the Constitution as an obstacle to them achieving their political goals rather than as the foundation of all American law and of America itself, a nation that doesn’t have its own unifying culture, or race, or even a national language. Our nation has gotten by without these things because of the wisdom of the founding fathers, the government they designed and the principles they founded it upon, and the efforts of subsequent generations to expand upon and extend those principles further and to correct some of the mistakes that were made without undermining the Constitution itself. That very same Constitution leaves no doubt that the President has the authority, and indeed the duty, to enforce the law as written until the Congress sees fit to make changes. Any judge or lawyer who says otherwise should be disbarred for rank incompetence.
If Starmer was a US citizen he would be defending all the deported migrants alongside his friend the Attorney General, who would very carefully not remember doing this in the future.
Just more clear water between US and UK. What a basket case the UK is.
This is not about internationalism or nationalism, it is about the imperial right to tell inferior countries what to do. The only thing that is shattered here is the idea that a country like Colombia should have a say in who gets into the country.
I’ll read another article or two by you, Mary, to see if you get off the strong-man worship and back to writing interesting things. Then I’ll give you up as a lost cause.
Seriously, you don’t think a country should be able to demand of another country that it takes back its citizens? Why the bell not?
Depends. If Colombia has the right to follow its national interest and police its own borders, it must also have the right to determine who gets in, and whether or not to accept military deportation flights. If the US can override that then national sovereignty is worthless. All that remains is the right of the stronger to trounce the weaker. If that is what you favour, at least call it by its right name.
Do not expect this discussion to continue for long. Seeing how fast it is accumulating downvotes, very shortly my post will be shadow-banned – disappear for a couple of days while I am blocked from making new comments.
You believe Colombia has the right to refuse entry to Colombia to its own citizens?
You mean that there is an international norm for how nations must behave, that overrides their sovereign right to police their own borders? If that is what you think, then we could have an interesting discussion on what that norm should say. Meanwhile you had better not tell Trump what you are thinking; he is not going to like it.
I didn’t mean anything. I asked you a question.
I believe that Colombia, according to international norms, has the right to refuse to accept US military flights, and to put conditions on how its citizens are treated. If you accept that right, then you can say that Colombia has a duty to accept entry from its citizens – as indeed they have generally done. If you think that Colombia has to do whatever Trump happens to want, then there are no rules, and Colombia has the right to do whatever they can get away with.
Do you think that they thought they had a prayer of getting away with this? It was just foolish behaviour from Columbia.
Is that the same advice you give to women? “He is stronger than you, so it is foolish to try to resist. Just relax and enjoy the inevitable”.
So sending citizens back to their own country is equivalent to rape…certainly an interesting concept…
Receiving some of your own (criminal) citizens back is not a fate worse than death, no – but then, neither is sex. What makes it like rape is Trumps insistence on forcing people to submit even when there is no need for it. In Colombia (as in Greenland) he could have got 95% of what he wanted simply by asking politely. Use civilian planes, put in a request and wait a couple of weeks. Colombia would not have said no, but Trump has to do it this way because it makes him feel more macho.
In fact, Trump is very much like a major rock star who is into rape. He could get almost anything he wanted by just asking, but he prefers to use force instead because it is not properly exciting unless the victim hates it.
Most of the people on those flights are criminals. Trump is right to a degree that these countries have used Obama/Bidens’ open borders policies to empty their jails.
The real culprits in all this are the Democrat elites, starting with the Clintons, who have sold their party to Wall Street globalists.
Rasmus, I’m struggling to see any consistency in your position. You seem to be saying that Columbia has the right to let it’s citizens enter another country illegally and very much against the wishes of the recipient country’s citizens – but that it also has the right to refuse to accept them back.
Have I understood you correctly?
Colombia is not ‘letting’ it’s citizens enter the US. Colombia is letting it’s citizens travel, that is all. Where they choose to go is not within Colombia’s control. You can hardly expect Colombia to close its borders and build a new Berlin wall to keep people in, can you now? Anyway it is not Colombias responsibility to enforce US immigration law, any more than it is the responsibility of the US to prevent people from disparaging the Chinese Communist Party or insulting the Prophet.
And just to cap it, Colombia was not even refusing to accept its citizens, they were just putting some conditions on how the process was to be handled. They had accepted a lot of civilian deportation flights before, and they were not threatening to stop.
No, I certainly do not expect Columbia to imprison it’s own citizens. But I do expect it to accept responsibility for them.
If they break the law in another country and that country chooses to deport them back to their own country, the latter has no grounds to refuse them. If they DO refuse them, the deporting country has the right to exert any pressure it can to persuade them to change their minds. As has happened.
If your argument has now reduced to objecting to the conditions in which the lawbreakers were repatriated, ok. But it didn’t sound like it to me.
That is where you are wrong. If there are rules that nations have to follow, they have to be binding on both sides. If the US is free to ignore the rules to get what it wants, then so is Colombia. You cannot permit yourself to get all outraged that Colombia is not living up to its obligations, and at the same time refuse to accept that there are any obligations that apply to the US.
So, by all means live by “ we are stronger, so we do what we want, so screw you if you do not like it!“. Only spare us the outrage and the claim that you are right to do it because other people do not follow the rules that you despise for yourself.
Where you’re wrong is that there are no “rules that nations have to follow”. There are rules that they might agree to follow but they are free to change their minds and withdraw from such agreements. This may incur penalties of course, that’s their choice if opting out of the rule is important to them.
You seem to think I am outraged that Columbia is not living up to it’s obligations. I don’t know where you got that from. I see no obligation here on either side. I am just amazed that some people seem to be outraged at what the US has done.
Why are you talking about what the US “has the right” to do to Colombia, then?
The UK already pays France millions to ‘manage’ immigration on our behalf. Perhaps we should reduce the payments in line with increasing illegal immigration? Share the pain, as it were.
Unfortunately recent UK governments have found too many ‘reasons’ not to take a tough line.
Well, you can try. Tell France to take back all the migrants, and threaten to impose huge tariffs or take military action if it does not obey. Just like Trump does. Do you think France will comply?
The UK doesn’t have the sway that the US does, obviously. But the UK could slow-walk French citizens visiting the UK, or put tariffs on particular products that they get from France. Perhaps there is a way to block financial transactions from France?
Besides, the migrants are not from France, merely passing through. Send them back to their native countries. The UK might have more leverage there.
At a minimum, shut the border, including sending small boats away to fend for themselves.
We are importing lots of electricity from France at the moment – especially when the wind isn’t blowing. I would expect to see the interconnectors suddenly stop working if we start playing tough on small boats
You are forgetting that the massively indebted EDF needs the revenues and that we pay over the odds for the electricity. We should generate the electricity ourselves.
Remember Brexit? How the EU was going to fall over itself to offer Britain a good deal, because the EU needed Britain to keep buying German cars?
What makes you think it will work any better this time?
We should have stopped buying German cars after Brexit – or at least disincentivised their purchase. The £40 billion we waste on them every year is a big part of why our economy is in the t0ilet.
Sounds like Russia’s leverage over Germany. Start building some small nuclear plants pronto.
I suspect it might if we imposed travel bans on French elites, as Trump also threatened to do. Apparently that was key factor in the instant Colombian climbdown.
Pas de shopping à Londres? Ca, non!
I suspect that the real reason the Colombians backed down is that the President received a lot of very unpleasant phone calls from some very wealthy owners of coffee plantations who stood to get decimated by these tariffs over the short term as their competitors sold more and they sold less at a lower price and over the longer term as well since American coffee buyers might conclude Colombia isn’t a reliable source and shift more of their business to more compliant countries on a permanent basis. I would pay a lot of money for a recording and translation of the telephone conversations of the Colombian President in the last 48 hours. I imagine it would be quite an interesting listen.
Well there is a difference between a Trump and Starmer for starters.
Good observation. Geopolitics is not remotely fair. It is based on the relative wealth and power of nations which is not equal and never will be, just like relations between human beings are often unequal because they aren’t equal in strength, intelligence, authority, or wealth either nor will they ever be. The US is wealthy and powerful enough to demand quite a lot and get it. Between France and the UK, France has the greater leverage because of the UK’s energy deficit. France wisely invested in nuclear power generation over a long period of time and stands to reap the benefits of having a stable supply of power to sell to neighbors and use as leverage. Also the UK’s military and France’s as well, probably couldn’t threaten each other without the approval of the US. Yeah, it’s unfair, but since they build nearly all the weapons for Europe’s defense and pay most of the bills, they don’t just get to demand things for themselves, they also can intervene in their client states’ dealings with each other aand they can threaten all sorts of things. I suppose Starmer could prostrate himself to Trump and appeal to Trump’s dislike of immigration and speak to the principle that the UK’s citizens should get to decide who enters their country and use US power and influence to push France because he has no power to do so. It might even work. Trump is notoriously mercurial and impulsive. I doubt it happens though because I doubt Starmer actually has any genuine desire to take the harsh measures necessary to stop illegal immigration nor is he humble enough to beg the aid of a man he detests like Trump to do it.
We should be paying them (the French) nothing. They should be paying fines for not doing their job. Trump would send them back with a bill for the handling fees.
Why is it the job of France to protect Britain’s borders?
You see ‘Starmer has a different philosophy’. God help us.
The Attorney General has made it very clear in recent speeches that international law and any resolutions made against UK’s interests will be supported by UK government.
You won’t read about that in Unherd. Why is that?
High walls make good neighbours. The iron curtain kept people in the communist prison. Secure walls keep undedirables out of one’s home. It prevents murder, rape and theft.
The British welfare and NHS was based on improving the quality of the lives of people from poor backgrounds who fought in WW1 and WW2.
Importing unskilled labour who exhibit a higher than average level of criminality reduces the quality of lives of the unskilled and semiskilled through the following
Reduces wages.
Pushes up the cost rents /mortgages.
Allows children with minimal langauge skills, IQ below average, and often violent behaviour into schools so disadvantaging the children of the poor.
Increases crime.
Increases squalor.
Increases demand for health services.
Affluent can move out, the poor cannot.
Increases welfare costs to the nation.
I have yet to see middle class parents move to an area where there the schools contain a large numer of violent immigrant children with low IQ who have low levels of language skills
Agree with most of your points but there is no evidence of lower IQ.
Look at areas where people come from. Read Nicholas Wade “Troublesome Inheritance ” . There is significant variations in IQ. The average in NW Europe is 100. West European Jewish people have an average IQ if 105 or even 110. Brahmins, Singaporeans, Japanese and South Koreans also have average IQ of about 105. This makes a massive difference to ends of bell shaped curve; lower IQ is reduced and high IQ above 145 greatly increased. West Europeans who have IQs of 145 or 150 account for 0.2% but West European Jews it is about 0.6%. There is also increases levels of violence by men with IQs of 70 to 90. The USA realised in the Vietnam that it was impossible to train people with IQs below 85.
A Troublesome Inheritance – Wikipedia
IQ tests were brought in post WW2 to select for grammar schools. It was said articulate middle class papers were passing 11 plus whereas less articulate working class pupil’s were failing. Hence IQ was designed to test fundemental intelligence. There was extensive IQ in the UK post WW2 which showed regional differences. Once it was discovered there were racial diiferences in IQ , testing appears to have been greatly reduced.
Really? In addition to well-attested global IQ differentials, for groups in which cousin marriage is common (eg Pakistanis) there is an added burden at the bottom end (and the top/bottom ends really matter). Exactly where IQ differentials come from and how far they can be overcome I don’t know, but there is strong correlation between group IQ differentials and group outcomes.
Wade said cultures which select for intelligence result in more children of intelligent parents reaching the age of sexual reporuction. Examples are Protestant ministers, bankers of Florence, West European Jewish rabbis and merchants, Indian Brahmins and Chinese Mandarins. The result is an increase in IQ over many generations. In effect a creative class, say 15 % of the population is created.
If middle class parents won’t move to where the problems are then let’s move the problems to where the middle class parents are. A couple of large migrant reception centres in Putney and Richmond and a big camp on Hampstead Heath would be a good start.
Worth remembering Trump returned less in his first term than Obama in his 2nd term. What we’ll see more of is the visuals- red meat for the Base – but watch the numbers. And watch what happens if he can’t get his deportation funding package through the House because he’s prioritising the Billionaire tax cuts.
Returning to a Colombia of course quite different than to a Taliban Afghanistan or a Gangster ridden Libya. Tariff threats won’t work so easily. And Mary volunteering some pilots to fly them is she? Do you reckon they’d get back out?
No US got it much easier in truth.
That’d said if Syria continues to settle return deal there may not be far away.
Joe Biden would never have tried to impose tariffs on Colombian exports to the United States. Hunter would have been able to explain the problem to him.
The rules-based international order only survived while the West was able to enforce the rules through, primarily, economic strength. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, South Africa, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, in fact 80% of the countries of the world ignored the rules, except when they thought they could use them as leverage against the West.
Now, the RBIO is in its death throes but Starmer the Harmer and Hermer the Squirmer are too thick to see it and will keep needlesly damaging Britain until they are kicked out of office.
Opting for the moral post-nationalist righteousness of favouring ‘humanity’ over citizens is all well and good except that it’s citizens that are expected to pay for it and there’s nothing post-nationalist about taxes.
And FWIW, Trump is merely enacting what should be the accepted first rule of immigration: “You can’t come here from any place we can’t send you back to”. And what was Petro’s actual complaint anyway? That the deportation on a military transport wasn’t ‘dignified’. What? No pillows or meal service? Or maybe Petro was hoping that Colombia wouldn’t have to get stuck with a planeload of lowlifes because obviously he would otherwise be glad to welcome home a group of his nation’s ‘best and brightest’ even at the awkward expense of explaining why they wanted to leave home in the first place.
Gustavo Petro saw some news reporting that showed Brazilian deportees who had hand and ankle restraints when they got off the flight. They complained that they were not given even water to drink and could not use toilets in flight. The flight had inadequate air conditioning and some people fainted from the heat.
That plane, however, was a civilian passenger plane, so Gustavo Petro balking at the use of military transport gets no support from the Brazilian plane. And it has long been standard practice for deportees to be cuffed at hands and ankles to prevent any disruption. Typically the deportees are young men.
I can understand deportees not wanting to fly on military transport in a C-17. It’s terrible.
Trump’s actions appear to suit the present attitude towards illegal migrants, but it doesn’t take into account that such migration has long been tolerated and exploited in the United States. It was always cheaper to hire some Mexican chefs for your restaurant, than to pay locals protected by unions and employment laws. It will be interesting to see how the new arrangements work out.
You’re right about that. It has been easier and cheaper to hire, or outright import, labor from overseas in the United States than to train and hire US citizens. US laws make US labor uncompetitive, even within the US. We essentially have to put a tariff on foreign labor in America. We have to thin out the stock of low-skilled foreign labor in the US through tough new laws and deportations of illegal residents. We have to scrap foreign visa programs and tell the tech companies that we’ll cut regulations and let them run their companies how they want with reduced government interference, provided that they invest in training and hiring American workers and stop making their companies vectors for unwanted demographic change within the United States. You want to bring in foreign workers, it’s going to be strictly limited and you’re going to pay financial penalties that make it cheaper to train and hire Americans, which is how it should have always been in the first place. Americans should never have been made to compete with cheap foreign labor in their own country. The larger point is, the argument in the US is no longer about the dichotomy between legal and illegal immigration. It’s moved on to halting legal immigration too.
I think there’s this idea that America isn’t a real country in the sense of having a national identity or a citizenry with a sense of its own history here – it’s just a place that exists for doing business and making money. America is a “propositional” nation. You just hear the stories about George Washington and take a test and, bam, you’re an American. And, since we’re a “nation of immigrants”, populations are seen as fungible. You can swap people in from anywhere on Earth and the people living here now can shut the f**k up. This attitude is having seismic political consequences, as we’ve seen.
We in the USA have plenty of real, legitimate, respected Mexican-American citizens (and Anglo Texans as well) who can cook Mexican style food just fine. Maybe, just maybe, if we stop importing low-wage illegal aliens then teenagers will find work again in those retaurants doing the grunt work (as I did for years) and develop a work ethic.
Basically, Trump is saying that he can handle the border issue “politically” without considering “international law”. However, the only country that will suffer from a breakdown of international law is America, because its global influence relies on maintaining order. WTO and UN disappear and there is no US hegemony! Now, Trump is essentially acting as a lone rule-maker, disregarding these structures.
In essence, he is now telling everyone that they can do whatever they want. As a result, he is likely to lose influence in South America completely and the patient Chinese waiting on the coastline (who does not have to worry immigrants). By making everything political rather than legal, he has opened the door for others to do the same.
I fully support effective immigration control, but let’s not forget that many of us also live and do business in the very places immigrants are coming from. We wouldn’t want to be sent back home to the EU or the US, right? It’s a very fine line to walk.
After all, what’s good for the goose must be good for the gander.
From the perspective of those of us living in the USA who voted for Trump, there can literally be nothing worse than what the Globalist blob is doing to us. It needs to be broken now and we will deal with the consequences as we always have–but at least we will still have a chance to be the constitutional republic we grew up in, not some blended thrid world country. I think non-Americans really don’t understand the idea of us–Constitutions in their countries come and go with some regularity. But in the USA the Constitution IS the country. There is nothing else we have in common.
Not sure you’re right about the US relying on the existence of international law, MTTT. Without it, the US will easily fall back on the real drivers of it’s power and influence: it’s economy, it’s military technology and it’s cultural soft power – in that order.
It’s countries like the UK, which only have a bit of the last of these, and organisations like the EU, which arguably have just a declining bit of the first, that would really miss international law.
Trump’s no-nonsense approach reflects the attitudes of many of us who support him. We are tired of the game that the privileged have been playing and are in no mood to put up with it anymore.
Governments can take action to curb illegal immigration. The problem has been that they have not been willing to do so.
Trump’s handling of the Columbian illegal migrant / delinquent will hopefully be a wake-up call for governments in Europe!
Just last month, France faced exactly the same situation with an Algerian national but of course the French Government chickened out and France now ‘hosts’ this delightful guest in a detention centre at the expense of the French taxpayer – and he’s far from being the only one! Sheer nonsense…
Very thoughtful article from Mary. I too am old enough to just remember the falling of the Berlin Wall and the sense of global optimism that started in 1989 and carried on through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Gulf War in 92. For a nine to twelve year old, it was an earth shattering event. To my eleven year old self, a highly intelligent but inexperienced mind, the Cold War sounded like something that had gone on forever and could go on forever unless we blew each other up somewhere down the road. I was intelligent and aware enough to grasp that something very important had happened and the world would be very different than it had been. I bought into the optimism as much as anyone else did at the time. So did my parents and most everybody else. At the time, we thought the world was forever changed, that history had ended, and we could overcome war and conflict and relegate them to history. We came down from the high at different times and for different reasons.
I began to have distrust for politics and media by contrasting what I heard on the mainstream news against what I heard from Rush Limbaugh on my father’s radio in the car. I was then as now an individual who prided myself on thinking for myself and drawing my own conclusions, so I didn’t just jump on the talk radio bandwagon. Rather I questioned Rush and concluded he was mostly an opportunist getting rich by telling people what they wanted to hear and otherwise doing basically nothing about any of the problems he claimed to care about. I contrasted his views with the mainstream media and thought that these mutually exclusive viewpoints couldn’t both be correct, but my sense of internal consistency demanded I ask the same questions of both sides, and I began to distrust the mainstream narratives as well. The realities of the globalist dream, where it came from, and the forces driving it didn’t hit home until 2008, when the bank bailout was passed over the overwhelming objection of the people base on every poll that was ever conducted. How could such a thing happen in a country where the people are supposed to have the power and the politicians are supposed to listen to them. That’s when I lost my faith and started thinking in terms of revolution, not just picking one party or the other. I haven’t voted in any election since 2008, where I half heartedly voted for Obama reasoning that since the party and the policy didn’t matter and they were just going to do Wall Street’s bidding, it would be good if the nation had a black President and maybe against he’d deliver some of that hope and change he promised as a President rather than a Senator, but I didn’t have high hopes.
I’m still not sold that Trump will do much better in the end than Obama did, though I will give him credit for at least trying. He’s definitely something different, a meaningful change from what was before. Problems that took decades to build up can’t be solved in four years. At best, he’ll get the ball rolling in the right direction and lay the foundation for others to finish the job down the road. If he manages to make some incremental improvements while avoiding either a major war or an economic depression, I will declare he succeeded brilliantly and pray whoever gets elected next is equally competent and/or fortunate.
It bears remembering that there was another important world event that happened in 1989, the same year that the Berlin Wall fell and Soviet communism began to collapse. It happened in another corner of the world, far from Europe where most of our common history and recent history had unfolded, and it had a decidedly less optimistic outcome. While the Soviets were collapsing and failing to suppress protest movements there, on the other side of the world, the Chinese Communist party was brutally suppressing a strikingly similar uprising against their similarly totalitarian government. Given the subsequent thirty years of history, the Tiananmen Square massacre seems a particularly ill omen whose significance was unfortunately overlooked in the optimism of the era. It’s rather poetic that the year that marked the dawn of the globalist era also held a portent of its eventual collapse. In their optimism to realize their bright global future, the leaders of the subsequent two decades overlooked the past and ignored the warning signs. They enabled a regime and contributed to the rise of a hostile power willing and able to contest the US on the global stage a power that ignored the rules and ultimately left the maker and enforcer of the rules little choice but to rescind them. Once again, we’ll be fighting a Cold War, and our old foe is again on the other side of bitter conflict, this time the junior partner of a far more serious threat.
You can bet your boll*cks the U.K. will be the last hold out, following the rules everyone else has abandoned, or never took much notice of in the first place.
No-one is seriously objecting to deporting criminals. One of them set a woman alight on the New York subway. The Left’s argument was over after that. The remigration of criminals and abusers should be the keystone of immigration policy for the Right in Britain too.