Authoritarian strongmen are torturers searching for pain points

Why they love to exploit illegal immigration

An American Putin? Trump at a military parade in Washington on Saturday

It is too easy to say that the bullies who push our world around are fools – even though they are fools for much of the time, as Putin proved when he invaded Ukraine and Trump proved when he imposed tariffs.

Nor should we go for the other easy options of saying that they are senile – even though Trump looks to me as if his second childhood is just seconds away – or that they are fantasists who surround themselves with yes men – even though Farage, Trump and Putin do just that

However well-merited the derision it ignores the truth that the Trumps and Putins win, and maybe soon the Farages and Le Pens will be winning too.

They win because for all their folly, deceits, senility and delusions they are geniuses at identifying the pain points of liberal democracies and attacking them with the relish of a torturer drilling into a raw nerve.

If you want to beat them, you must accept that they display a dark genius in finding issues societies have ignored for decades, and exploiting them to build their power

As Donald Trump is showing.

Yesterday he looked to all the world like an American Putin as he reviewed a military parade in Washington. Before that, state goons arrested an opposition politician after he tried to ask a question at a regime press conference. And before that Trump proved how well he understood the pain points of American society when he sent the National Guard and marines into Los Angeles to quell street protests against immigration raids.

Governments get away with double standards about illegal migration. Trump’s knows it and knows how to exploit it.

Illegal immigration – or “undocumented migration” to use the preferred term of liberals who believe that changing language can make a problem go away – is a largely unpunished crime.

Once an immigrant has made it across the border illegally, they will probably be free to spend the rest of their lives in their new country. Tacitly governments have accepted that the economic and social costs of tracking down every illegal immigrant would be too much to bear

They would need to impose something like a police state. Agents would rip men and women away from their new partners, split up families and then wonder what on earth to do with the children.

The UK has between 800,000 and 1.2 million unauthorised migrants – no one knows the precise number because, by definition, they do not make themselves known to the authorities. In most circumstances, they have either entered illegally or stayed on when their visa expired or the authorities turned down their asylum application. In the year ending 30 September 2024, the government returned about 31,500 people from the UK, either forcibly or voluntarily. That is around two to five percent of the total.

Meanwhile the US authorities estimate that there are around 11 million illegal migrants in their country. They deported 271,000 immigrants in the 2024 fiscal year, which is again somewhere around two to three per cent of the total.

Mainstream politicians never explain that the only way they can deport every illegal immigrant would be by turning their societies into Stasi states. They don’t take the public into their confidence.

It is this raw nerve that Trump is inflaming with his dark brilliance, and I expect that every other right-wing leader in Europe will follow his example.

Here is why.