Earlier this month José Antonio Kast, the son of a former Nazi officer who is also an admirer of the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, won the Chilean presidential election on a familiar platform. Riffing on fear, he promised a return to greatness, to be tough on crime, and—of course—to deport migrants.
Kast is a fan of Donald Trump. He wants to ban abortion, which is already highly restricted in Chile, and is against “gender ideology” and gay marriage, which became legal in 2021. His supporters wear “Make Chile Great Again” caps, while he says he will build a border wall with Peru and Bolivia. Around 8.8 per cent of Chile’s population is from abroad—the second-highest rate in Latin America. Of the country’s 336,000 undocumented foreign nationals, most come from Venezuela. Kast campaigned with an ultimatum: irregular migrants who don’t leave the country before he assumes the presidency in March will be kicked out.
The hard right’s victory in Chile seems a fitting coda to a year in which populists have strengthened worldwide, and in which migrants, and indeed immigrants, have been the scapegoat of choice. For much of the year, news has been dominated by stories of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rounding up migrants on the streets—or even from their homes or schools—and of the US ignoring court orders and due process to send people to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.
Throughout 2025, the American right has nurtured links everywhere from Latin America to Europe, bolstering a poisonous global ideology. In May, 400 delegates attended a conference in Italy calling for “remigration”, a euphemism for forcibly deporting people from countries where they have built a life. According to DeSmog, the summit was co-organised by the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC). The NYYRC also hosts an annual gala, where Nigel Farage gave a speech last year. This year the event (which was reportedly co-organised by a think tank linked to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán) honoured a politician from the AfD, the far-right pro-remigration party that has been classified as extremist by the German government.
The UK has not been spared. Here, the Overton Window has moved so far to the right on immigration that the governing party is now trying to outbid its hard-right rival on policy to reduce the number of foreign-born people living here.
This rightward shift has been building for some time. A stream of front pages about foreigners and invasions made the argument for turning inwards in the years before and after Brexit; the hostile environment policy introduced by Theresa May’s Home Office in 2012 brought much misery and fear, reaching its apotheosis in the Windrush scandal. But in 2025, it is as if something clicked, or broke. Extreme ideas claiming that the UK’s ills can be blamed on migrants, or that migrants somehow dilute Britishness, have permanently decamped from the fringes. Consider the response of the Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch, herself an immigrant, to Labour’s strategy on tackling violence against women and girls: “Let’s also stop pretending that all cultures treat women equally. They don’t. We need to crack down on immigration from cultures that don’t respect women and deport foreign criminals as soon as they commit crimes. No ifs, no buts.”
In summer 2024, anti-immigrant riots followed the horrific murder of three young girls in Southport by a British teenager, Axel Rudakabana. In the aftermath, politicians and newspaper commentators could not resist the logic of “legitimate concerns” over immigration. Just over a year later, in August 2025, after various protests outside asylum hotels, Nigel Farage announced his party’s Trump-inspired mass deportation plans. In September, he followed up with a pledge to get rid of “indefinite leave to remain”—the main route to permanent residency in Britain.
The new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, clearly wants to communicate that she is hearing “legitimate concerns” about immigration. Her department’s language seems calculated to balance some semblance of humanity with projecting a proper toughness towards incomers. A recent Home Office post on X declares that “Britain welcomes migrants who contribute to our economy and society. High earners, entrepreneurs and skilled frontline workers like NHS staff will be fast-tracked to settlement—rewarding those who give, not take.” The first reply—on a platform owned by a man with a penchant for remigration policies and ethnonationalism—illustrates the abyss into which the government is sending its messaging: “No we don’t. Total remigration. Every single one.”
At this point I should probably declare an interest: I am a foreign-born British citizen, an immigrant who grew up in the UK. My husband, the father of my daughters, is an immigrant with indefinite leave to remain—the immigration status that has become far better known since Farage mooted abolishing it. In recent months, my partner and I have found ourselves wondering out loud whether one day we will not be welcome here. Whether he should hurry and apply for citizenship to guard against the possibility—surely absurd—of our family being ripped apart. Or whether we should come up with a Plan B.
We are not the poor, desperate people who have risked their lives on boats, or otherwise, to seek asylum or to make a living. We are not from a country denounced by the right as so different as to be incompatible with “British values”. That means that we are, relatively speaking, and in theory at least, far more secure than many other migrants. And yet, we don’t feel it exactly. We live caught between various threads of pernicious discourse—about white Britishness, English nationalism, migrant criminality, migrants taking from the state.
There is a parallel here with Jewishness, another aspect of my identity that has of late been getting too much of the wrong kind of attention. Jews are the perennial other, not wanted, not trusted. And today’s hard right is steeped in the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which has it that certain Jews are conspiring to replace white people with darker-skinned foreign nationals (the Jewish philanthropist George Soros is one such bogeyman, including in his native Hungary). In an even greater twist of non-sense, right-wingers in Israel—the world’s only Jewish-majority state—make common cause with the extreme right elsewhere. Recently, Israel’s diaspora affairs minister, Amichai Chikli, invited the British far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon for an official visit because, in the eyes of many further to the right, in Israel and outside of it, the country’s enactment of a genocidal war in Gaza is part of a civilisational battle between the west and Muslims.
These notes of extremism are so ubiquitous that they have become almost expected. Such as JD Vance telling a crowd at a conference held by Turning Point USA, the conservative organisation co-founded by the assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, that “in the United States of America, you don’t have to apologise for being white anymore”. Or such as the British commentator Connor Tomlinson, in an exchange on social media with the Tory peer and journalist Danny Finkelstein, confirming that he advocates for “remigration” both of British citizens who were born abroad, and their children according to certain “criteria” (a cohort that could, in theory, include me and my family, though mostly Tomlinson’s anti-immigrant ire seems reserved for Muslims).
As this year of the migrant comes to a close, will those moved to appease “legitimate concerns” be able to see the anti-migrant turn for what it is? Will they note what has happened in countries like the US, El Salvador, Hungary and Israel, where democracy has ceded ground to a dark, cruel authoritarianism? Will they understand that when extremist politicians say they want to do unthinkable things, they tend to mean it.
