The Trump administration’s right-leaning, anti-immigration posture—now echoed in a national security strategy that frames migration and demographic change as threats—signals more than a policy preference. It marks an ideological project that seeks to reshape the global order by pressuring allies, particularly in Europe, to embrace exclusionary, right-wing politics. This is not merely about borders. It is about power, hierarchy, and whose lives and labor are deemed legitimate in the modern world.
At its core, this project subordinates Black and brown people by recasting them as risks rather than contributors. Migration is reduced to a security problem; diversity becomes a dilution; asylum is rebranded as weakness. When the world’s most influential democracy adopts this framing—and urges Europe to follow—it legitimizes a politics that sorts humanity by race, origin, and usefulness to a narrow vision of national identity. The result is a de facto new world order that strains to revive a bygone era: one that privileged whiteness as destiny and treated non-white peoples as expendable inputs.
What this worldview conspicuously ignores is history. The wealth of the West did not materialize in a vacuum. It was built through centuries of extraction—of African, Latin American, and Asian resources; of enslaved and coerced labor; of colonial domination that transferred land, minerals, and human capital to imperial centers. From sugar and cotton to rubber and oil; from forced migration to indenture; from colonial railways to modern supply chains—the global economy was shaped by contributions that this new nationalism now erases. To deny that legacy while weaponizing borders against the descendants of those contributors is not realism; it is revisionism.
The danger is not abstract. When migration is securitized and racialized, policy hardens into cruelty. Families are separated, refugees are stranded, and whole regions are stigmatized. Abroad, strongmen are emboldened. In Europe, where far-right movements have long searched for mainstream validation, American pressure to “get tough” on immigration functions as permission. It weakens liberal norms, fuels xenophobia, and fractures the very alliances that have underpinned decades of peace and prosperity.
America’s greatest achievements have come through multilateralism, not monoculture. The post-World War II order—imperfect and often hypocritical—still delivered unprecedented gains: expanded trade, poverty reduction, scientific collaboration, and collective security. Immigration powered that success at home, renewing the workforce, seeding innovation, and strengthening democracy through pluralism. To abandon this tradition is to trade strength for spectacle and cooperation for coercion.
There is also a strategic cost. In a world of climate displacement, pandemics, and transnational threats, walls cannot substitute for diplomacy. Exclusionary politics alienate partners in the Global South precisely when collaboration is essential. They hand moral ground to rivals who promise respect while practicing domination. And they erode America’s soft power—the credibility that comes from aligning values with action.
A national security strategy that treats diversity as a liability and migration as contamination is not forward-looking; it is fearful. It mistakes nostalgia for sovereignty and grievance for strength. The United States should reject this regression. Security in the twenty-first century will not be achieved by resurrecting racial hierarchies or exporting them to allies. It will be built by reckoning honestly with history, honoring human dignity, and leading—again—through inclusive, multilateral engagement.
Anything less risks undoing the progress of generations and replacing a cooperative world with one defined by exclusion, resentment, and decline.
Author
About Theodore Morgan
Theodore Morgan is a management consultant and political commentator. He is fascinated with the history of Black people and the future of the Black race.
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