The border is now, essentially, shut. In the final weeks of President Joe Biden’s administration, the Census Bureau calculated that between 2023 and 2024, roughly 2.8 million more people migrated into the United States than left. This year, the net figure could be close to zero, even negative. That is quite a drop, and everyone already seems to know the potted political morality tale it implies: Biden recklessly opened the border, after a half-decade of progressive drift on immigration, and Trump closed it off, tight as a tourniquet.
Is that story right, though? The Biden administration was slow to move, particularly on asylum policy, as its veterans and defenders now routinely admit. But Biden tripled interior detentions and increased border detentions 12-fold. He deported more than three million border crossers, and by the end of his term, border apprehensions had fallen more than 80 percent from their peak; the Trump decline has been much smaller.
And that Biden-era surge? In the United States, the number of encounters with federal agents along the Mexican border more than tripled between 2020 and 2021, a wave that so overwhelmed immigration enforcement, the existing asylum system and the cities to which new arrivals were cruelly bused that many Americans decided a liberal regime could never again be trusted on immigration.
But total migration to Canada nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023. Net migration surged, roughly tripling in Britain, despite post-Brexit limitations on immigration from Europe. Across the European Union, net migration quadrupled in a single year. If American policy choices explain the migration crisis of 2021 and 2022, why did the same thing happen in so many other places, where Joe Biden wasn’t president and politicians weren’t unwinding MAGA border policies and signaling a principled shift toward a more humane and welcoming future?
In each case, there is a just-so story with which local nativists and moderate accommodationists can explain the surge. In Britain, for instance, the blame has fallen on a bungled redesign of the immigration system, post-Brexit, which effectively closed the door on migrants from Europe, but opened it to the rest of the world. Across Europe, the invasion of Ukraine was a major driver.
But the wider pattern suggests a fact that experts have always known but that citizens of the world’s rich countries — often balanced on the knife’s edge between neurotic xenophobia and border-police nationalism — sometimes refuse to acknowledge: that contemporary migration is a global story rather than a domestic one, shaped to some degree by policy and enforcement, yes, but primarily powered by larger and harder-to-control forces that lie beyond the reach of national politics.
My colleague Lydia Polgreen has called it a “great migration”; Gaia Vince calls it a “nomad century.” Much of this movement arises from what would have once been hailed as global progress: increasing international interconnectedness, expanding internet access, new wealth affording new opportunities to many millions who might have been kept home by poverty in the past.
Political instability has played a major role, too — when Mr. Biden took office, a flood of Venezuelan refugees had already produced what the Brookings Institution has called the largest displacement of people in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Climate change, as well — on the eve of the COP30 climate conference in Brazil, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that weather disasters alone had forced 250 million people to flee their homes over the past decade.
This is not a continuous story; there was a big spike in 2021 and 2022. Why? To begin with, the shape of the pandemic recovery meant that, in the wealthy world, there was record-high demand for labor and record numbers of job openings. In the booming United States, there were almost two job openings for every unemployed person by 2022 — in fact, more job openings every month between February 2021 and August 2024 than had been open in the months before Mr. Biden took office. There were what Marcela Escobari of Brookings, who served on Biden’s National Security Council, calls “democratic shocks”— for instance, in Venezuela — and the way that deeper penetration of the internet and social media into the developing world gave would-be migrants (and those in the business of helping them) new tools to improve their odds.
There are lessons to learn about the imperfect policy response to that overwhelming surge — about asylum policy, regional diplomacy, foreign aid and perhaps above all the importance of fast response to changing circumstances. But we often tell ourselves that immigration is a simple matter of what happens at the border, when the real story is, increasingly, a global one, unfolding on a stage as large as the world.
Similar myopia afflicts our vision on other issues. Over the past year, liberals have asked themselves again and again what could explain the MAGA resurgence and the defeat of Democrats in 2024. This may be reasonable for political strategists and consultants, whose job it is to plot a course through the existing political landscape for their clients or their party. But it overlooks what is probably the most important fact about that landscape, which is that the setback was not narrowly partisan or even national, but global. Every incumbent party of every ideological stripe in the developed world lost ground politically in 2024 — a year that was called at the outset “the year of democracy,” because of the sheer volume of elections taking place over those 12 months. Many of those parties were kicked out of office; hardly any of them registered electoral losses as small as the Democrats did in America.
This is not exactly an unknown fact among professional observers, and yet it has been hugely underplayed in the rounds of political recrimination, perhaps because the lesson it offers is so disconcerting: that around the world, almost in unison, the politics of sovereign countries are being not just shaped, but sometimes utterly transformed, by forces that lie mostly beyond the reach of our conventional politics, in which most wealthy nations take a pretty narrow view of the appropriate scope of state action.
This is true not only of immigration but also inflation and the cost of living — problems made somewhat worse by American stimulus spending during Covid, but generated primarily by the supply shocks and disruptions of the pandemic itself. The energy-price spikes that followed emanated from Moscow and were felt almost everywhere in the world. And though once-prophesied bread riots did not materialize in the capitals of Europe, much of the inflation in grocery prices was, like the price of energy, determined by international markets.
A similar story applies to Covid, which many Americans talk about as a uniquely American phenomenon despite how across the globe it killed tens of millions, pushed tens of millions more into extreme poverty and initiated a new era of global political instability and war. Though immigration experts don’t tend to emphasize the pandemic itself as a driver of migration, the world’s divergent experiences illustrated the value of material wealth and good governance. By 2021, vaccines were widely available in the rich world, where the disease was visibly in retreat, while in poorer places, the pandemic continued to rage and there were few vaccines to be found.
It goes for the internet too, which in the last year has become a catchall explanation for nearly every modern pathology — mental illness and suicide and political violence; the global fertility crisis and underlying declines in coupling, sex and marriage; the death of attention and the decline of reading; widespread pessimism; and, perhaps above all, political polarization.
Why do we keep failing to remember this — that what might look like national ruptures and vibe shifts are really reflections of global patterns? Just before the pandemic, the worldwide rise of right-wing populism was often described in these terms, as a backlash to globalization and the various side effects that came along with it — the loss of national identity and financialization, as well as income inequality and educational inequality.
And then came the pandemic, which should have underlined the lesson — a novel virus upending billions of lives and hundreds of governments in every corner of the planet. Wanting to tell ourselves we remained in control, some of us tried to pin blame on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, its funders in the United States or the lifting of the Obama-era ban on gain-of-function research by (yes) the Trump administration. A more fundamental observation might have been the anti-conspiratorial one, that no one is sufficiently in charge of the world’s basic metabolism. Which may perversely help explain the appeal of strongman politics, that only some new authoritarianism would be capable of establishing control over countries otherwise bobbing like buoys on global currents.
One paradox is that, while this feeling of impotence is part of what propelled figures like Donald Trump to power, increasingly Trumpism looks like a global force against which various national politics are rebelling now, too — with backlash-to-Trump elections dotting the world map from Canada to Australia and setbacks to the MAGA-style far right in France and the Netherlands as well. Maybe nothing is inevitable in politics, after all.
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