An inhospitable world

In November 2016, the United States Republican nominee, Donald Trump, was elected to become the country's 45th President. The night that his victory was announced, former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader, David Duke, described the event as ‘one of the most exciting nights of my life’. Shortly after his inauguration, President Trump signed an executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries from travel to the United States. Although the original order was forced to be rescinded after it met with immediate protests and severe criticism, the United States Supreme Court eventually upheld a moderated version of the ban that settled on immigration restrictions against people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

In the year leading up to Trump's election, Britain's vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) was steered by a campaign that relied heavily on anti-immigration rhetoric. In June 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at the time, issued a poster where ‘BREAKING POINT’ shrieked in red lettering across a photograph of thousands of refugees fleeing war and persecution in Slovenia in 2015, imploring voters that ‘we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders’. Although this poster, which bore a startling resemblance to an anti-Semitic Nazi campaign, was widely condemned by politicians, the message tapped into an emotional undercurrent of nationalism flowing beneath this once voracious empire.

Enshrining figures like Trump and Farage in positions of power legitimized a virulent backlash to change. At a white nationalist rally in August 2017, an attendee drove his car into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, fatally injuring social activist Heather Heyer. In his response, President Trump condemned what he described in his statement as ‘hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides’, generating the impression that he saw the white nationalists and anti-fascist counterprotesters as equally culpable in the violence.

Following the Brexit vote, police statistics showed a significant increase in race-based hate crime including verbal abuse and death threats, physical assaults, arson attacks and stabbings. The targets of such attacks in the UK were primarily Eastern European migrants and Muslims. Islamophobia meanwhile remains a firm feature in the United States.