Across the globe, governments facing economic turmoil are turning to a familiar scapegoat: immigrants. From the UK to the USA, and across African nations, leaders are quick to deploy anti-immigration rhetoric and policies as a tool to deflect blame, stoke nationalism, and maintain public support – often at the expense of truth, equity, and basic human rights.
In May of this year, The UK Home Office released its closely watched policy paper on immigration, which Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised will lead to the numbers of people arriving in the UK dropping “significantly” by the end of this parliament. The paper contains policies which will: tighten the skilled worker visa route by raising the qualifications required to obtain a skilled visa to degree-level (RQF6), end all overseas recruitment for social care work, reduce the amount of student visas sponsored by academic institutions, increase English language requirements, increase the wait for settlement from the current 5 years to 10, make it easier to remove immigrants with criminal records, implement a 32% increase in the immigration skills charge paid by employers when they take on an employee via a skilled visa, and introduce a new electronic identity system for overseas nationals.
The Prime Minister, alongside Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, has claimed that the rate of immigration has put immense pressure on public services without helping economic growth. A ludicrous assertion, as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports that migrants have not only been “increasingly successful in joining the workforce” but, in many cases, also outperform workers of UK origin, boosting the economy.
It is quite the coincidence when Labour chose the moment to target immigration, little more than a week after Reform cleaned up at the local elections, while the unemployment rate in the UK hits its highest level in almost four years with inflation rising sharply. “It’s time to take back control,” Starmer has declared, a phrase he has gone on to frequently repeat, voicing his concern that the UK would soon become “an island of strangers”. This phrase [take back control] is borrowed from the Conservatives and Reform, and is also suspiciously similar to Donald Trump’s infamous “make America great again”. His speech, in summary, professed that his views on immigration were not steeped in bigotry, they were instead, about fairness and while he was all for foreigners coming to the UK, there was such a thing as “too much”.
Meanwhile, net migration to the UK has nearly halved over the course of the year to 431,000, the largest numerical drop for any 12-month period according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The drop from 860,000 in December 2024 follows a series of policies implemented by the last Conservative government that have been continued by the present Labour government. Evidently, Starmer’s sudden fear-mongering campaign centred on the UK turning into an “island of strangers” isn’t quite based on fact. It is, however, able to distract UK citizens from the ongoing unemployment crisis while providing them with a scapegoat on which they can pin their frustrations.
Trump’s anti-immigrant, borderline racist stance is pretty well established at this point, and in his second term, he (alongside political sidekick Elon Musk) has gone on a rampage aimed at “protecting the American people against invasion”. This “protection” has thus far included; defunding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) protections, casting people of color as lacking merit, and channeling more funds into border control than has been the case in any other moment of U.S. history.
His latest move targets international students, deterring them from enrolling in American universities. On the 28th of May, Politico reported that the State Department had instructed embassies and consulates to hold off on scheduling new student interviews while the administration considered expanding the vetting of prospective students’ social-media accounts, likely for perceived anti-Semitic or pro-terrorist posts. Since Trump retook office, the government has quietly terminated about 4,700 foreign students’ ability to study the U.S. In June, the administration announced that it had revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, accusing the school of harboring antisemitism – a move that the university has since contested in court, winning a temporary order blocking the government’s attempts to prevent international students from enrolling at the school, while the court case continues.
While Trump’s rhetoric is framed as a heroic effort to uplift America, the numbers show that targeting international students does more harm than good for the country. In the 2023–24 academic year, international students contributed almost $44 billion to the U.S. economy. They supported 378,000 American jobs, and they founded companies; about a quarter of the billion-dollar start-ups in America were founded by someone who came to the United States as an international student.
So this begs the question – what are the Trump administration’s real motivations for targeting international students?
The answer to this question is similar to the rationale behind Starmer’s anti-immigration policy – to garner public approval, to placate citizens with the country’s centuries long tradition of white privilege and to present the illusion of good governance.
Trump’s first 100 days in office have been marked by the American economy nearing crisis – trillions of dollars have been wiped off stock markets. Airlines are cutting flights, top firms are trashing their own annual forecasts, legal blocks have halted his catastrophic tariff sweep, the International Monetary Fund has cut US growth forecasts; the Federal Reserve says some businesses have stopped hiring and the CEO of Walmart told Trump his policies will seize up the supply chain by summer.
In a warning sign of a possible slide to a recession, consumer sentiment has plummeted and was in April at its fourth-lowest level since 1952. CNN’s Fear and Greed Index has been registering “fear” or “extreme fear” in the markets for the last month.
What better time than now to lean into conveniently inflammatory white supremacist ideologies?
Although strong anti-immigration rhetoric is more readily associated with the West, African countries are no strangers to the sentiment and have often employed similar scapegoating tactics in the face of governmental breakdown or economic trouble.
On the 4th of April 2025, Libyan authorities made an order expelling about 10 international aid groups including Doctors Without Borders, The UN Refugee Agency, and The Norwegian Refugee Council, accusing them of trying to alter the country’s genetic makeup by promoting migration, particularly from Sub-Saharan Africans who flee the stifling poverty of their home countries and flock to Libya in search of better opportunities. These migrants already suffer grave human rights abuses and dehumanization in Libya, including enslavement, murder and repeated rape. The Internal Security Agency has also suggested that the organisations were suspected of money laundering because they avoided transparency in how financial transfers are made for their projects.
The reasons for the anti-immigration stance are obvious. Libya, who overthrew its president Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 has seen a thorough breakdown of government since then. The country has been divided into two, each half run by a rival administration and the April 4th order was made by the internationally recognised government based in the capital city, Tripoli as a means of diverting public frustration from the government and focusing this frustration on a common enemy, immigrants.
Libya’s move echoes a similar order made by Tunisia in February 2023, as part of a crackdown on migrants. The order, which was criticised as anti-black racism by human rights groups, saw dozens of Sub-Saharan African immigrants subjected to detention, abuse and eviction from their houses. This was following xenophobic comments made by president Kais Saied who, under extreme political scrutiny as the country’s economic situation unraveled, urged ministers to “take urgent measures to halt the illegal migration into the country, specifically targeting Africans, many of whom see Tunisia as a jumping off point to a better life in Europe.” Although the president rejected accusations of racism, stating a week later that “Tunisia is an African country and Africans are our brothers”, his remarks caused a spike in xenophobic attacks on foreigners in the country, even causing the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea to evacuate their citizens to safety.
One cannot comment on anti-immigration sentiments in Africa without mentioning South Africa, whose brand of xenophobia stands out as particularly violent, resulting in 669 deaths, 5,310 looted shops and 127,572 displacements between 1994 and March 2024. This xenophobia isn’t targeted at white people, but is instead targeted at migrants from other African countries (mostly Sub-Saharan Africans), who they blame for increased crime, economic hardship, and high rate of unemployment in the country. In recent years, this xenophobia has been embodied to its fullest extent by ‘Operation Dudula’. This operation, the name of which translates to ‘force out’ in Zulu, was founded to force African immigrants who make up about 4% of the country’s population out of South Africa. They harassed immigrants, taunted them and provided whistleblowing services to the government to facilitate their removal. The views they hold are common amongst the South African people, 88% of whom believe illegal immigrants are taking their jobs and resources, 86% believe they are driving up the crime rate, and 85% want immigrants forcefully removed, according to a survey carried out by Reuters.
Ghana also carried out large scale deportation of immigrants in the 1960s, by which time its economy had started to decline and pressure began to mount on the government to take action against the unemployment crisis. Unsurprisingly, the then government blamed the economic hardship on immigrants, especially those of Nigerian origin. In July 1969, all foreign embassies in Ghana were ordered to register their citizens and facilitate their work/residence permits. Shortly following this was the Alien Compliance Order of November 1969, which required all immigrants without permits to obtain these permits within 2 weeks or face deportation. With such short notice, several immigrants were unable to get the required visas within the stipulated time, and in a mass deportation, they were all forced to leave Ghana.
14 years later, Nigeria responded to the mass deportation carried out by Ghana, which specifically targeted its citizens. By the 1970s, the majority of Nigeria’s immigrants were Ghanaian, and in the aftermath of the oil market crash in the 80s, Nigeria was facing economic hardship and increased cost of living, resulting in public scrutiny of the then president, Shehu Shagari, who had finished his first term and was seeking re-election. In a bid to increase public confidence in their administration, Shagari’s government focused on a common enemy – immigrants. The Minister of Internal Affairs, Alhaji Ali Baba, stated, “Ghanaians, Togolese and Nigeriennes have been involved in a lot of criminal activity in Lagos within the last three years”, and in 1983, Shehu Shagari ordered all undocumented immigrants to leave Nigeria or face imprisonment in an Undocumented Aliens Order. By January the following year, 1.5 million immigrants had left the country carrying as much of their belongings as they could, while several others were stranded with no way to get home.
Ultimately, the resurgence of anti-immigration policies across continents reflects a deeper pattern: the use of fear and division to mask governance failures. Whether in Western democracies or African nations, blaming immigrants serves as a convenient distraction from economic mismanagement and social unrest. But while the rhetoric may win short-term political points, it risks long-term damage to economies, to communities, and the fundamental values of justice and inclusion.
