The facts and the numbers are irrelevant: Donald Trump and Nigel Farage just find new excuses and increase the toxicity
A few weeks after the Brexit referendum, a leave-voting friend of mine told me what the biggest benefit would be. “We will never hear about immigration again,” he said. If you give the people the control over the border they want, the logic went, then Brexit will finally dissolve immigration as an issue that politicians can exploit, and the country can crack on with all the other important stuff that needs doing. And, well, let’s just say that this prediction did not pan out on such a colossal level that no follow-up conversation has been necessary.
Because that’s just not how the whole immigration thing works. The goalposts always move. Nothing clarifies that more than Nigel Farage getting everything he has said he ever wanted, the country heaving itself out of the EU and ending free movement, only for another boil to fester around the issue of immigration – and guess what, only Reform UK can lance it! Nothing is ever enough. One only needs to look at the escalating crackdowns in the US to see how the net keeps getting wider and wider. In a matter of months, immigration crackdown has expanded so rapidly that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are afraid to leave their houses to buy groceries or go to work, as the national guard patrols the streets.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
