The circumstances of my personal maltreatment by the Greek authorities are admittedly unique. But as an unexpected byproduct, they helped me understand what actually happens behind the doors of Greece’s notorious detention centers. Whichever party executes that plan here in Britain — whether Reform, Robert Jenrick’s Conservatives, or even Labour under new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood — detaining refugees and processing asylum claims in closed, Greek-style centers will only worsen the very problems these proposals are purported to solve.

In brief, I have spent many years reporting on the Kurdish political movement in Syria and the existential wars their Western-allied movement has fought against both ISIS and Turkey. My work as a journalist incurred the ire of the Turkish authorities, who in turn pressured European governments to issue me with a travel ban preventing me from entering the Schengen Zone. The first I heard of all this was when I visited Greece on holiday back in 2021, and then tried to travel on to Italy. Instead, I was halted at the Italian border by gun-toting, balaclava-clad police, locked in a room in a ferry, and deported back to Greece.

I then spent two months held in filthy conditions, including one notorious detention center — a massive ex-military base condemned by the European Committee to Prevent Torture. I was stripped and cavity-searched. I passed days in isolation while severely ill and distressed detainees rattled at their cages, and weeks sharing a room with dozens of men. Many inmates carried the scars of police beatings, and disease and self-harm were rampant. I saw one man slash himself to pieces with a razor after being denied urgent medical care. Shortly before I arrived, a Kurdish refugee died by suicide.

“You’re the Englishman, right?”, bored guards would say as they came to gawp at me. I was languishing in my cell playing solitaire chess on a contraband cardboard set. “Why are you here?” You tell me, I would think to myself. I desperately wanted to get back to Britain, and my jailers had no real reason for keeping me there; Athens, of course, is no friend of Ankara. But thanks to European interests beyond our control, there we were, gazing at one another through the bars.

This summer, Greece has introduced still harsher measures, aimed at curbing migration from North Africa, suspending all asylum applications and criminalizing those seeking asylum in Europe by detaining them in military-style prison camps like those where I languished. It’s an approach that’s gaining traction across the political spectrum in Britain, and one that Aris Roussinos wrote about for UnHerd. But it is also an approach that simply doesn’t work. Rather, it only perpetuates the problem of long-term detention in pressure-cooker detention facilities, threatening migrants with five-year spells behind bars and thus making these detention centers a permanent feature of the local landscape.

Local resentment is fueled and attention deflected from the real villains: canny politicians who weaponize the immigration crisis, distracting locals from sky-high employment and rock-bottom wages, with the result that rage once directed against the IMF and EU is now turned on handfuls of hapless Afghans. Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis implied, without evidence, that migrants were responsible for deadly wildfires that swept the country back in 2023. He thus deftly deflected accusations of government incompetence by feeding into unfounded anti-asylum paranoia. Meanwhile, the charred bodies of 18 migrants were numbered among the dead.

Today, with oversea arrivals back up to 2017 levels, the very persistence of oversea migration to Greece suggests knee-jerk crackdowns are only a temporary fix. Though Greek authorities are talking about declaring a new “state of emergency”, fast-track deportations and the use of illegal violence to deter refugees have been a fact of life there for years. Meanwhile, the first deportations under this “new” system have already been blocked by a Greek court, suggesting the intensified measures are unlikely to end the endless whack-a-mole game between European authorities, smugglers and migrants.

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Doubtless, harsh measures can suppress migrant flows to a given destination. Post-2016, for instance, refugees who were pushed away from the Aegean Islands turned to Spain and Italy, while Libyan smugglers have now set their crosshairs on Crete, after crackdowns elsewhere in the Med. Yet if the Crete route is indeed closed, another will open. A grown-up migration policy should acknowledge this reality. Instead, rival politicians across the globe compete to outdo one another with tough-on-migration proclamations as their costly detention efforts waste time and taxpayers’ money.

In Greece, the locals struggle to get by. Despite its steadily-improving credit rating, the average monthly salary in the country is reportedly 20% lower than it was 15 years ago. All the while, unemployment remains sky-high, prompting mass strikes and an exodus of educated youngsters.

Immigration can certainly suppress wages and damage the economy, and in Greece and Britain both there remains a risk of cynical business-owners exploiting migrant labor to keep wages down. But in the Greek example, this has nothing to do with the refugees passing through, who only started arriving in substantial numbers long after the financial crisis, and who tend to treat the country as a stepping-stone toward other, more robust employment markets.

In contrast to the Greek case, many asylum seekers to the UK want to start working here immediately, as I myself heard from my fellow detainees. Whether fleeing persecution, insecurity or both at home, they hope to improve their English, build a life and contribute to the economy. This could be made to work to our favor by allowing asylum-seekers to work while their applications are processed — rather than crowding them in hotels and detention centers. This way, they would demonstrate that, contrary to much political discourse, they haven’t arrived expecting a comfy, taxpayer-funded existence. Meanwhile, imaginative political thinking around strengthened worker protections and robust investment could easily mitigate the risk of suppressing wages, especially when asylum seekers are overall arriving in relatively low numbers.

Setting up more pressure-cooker detention centers or funneling people into local hotels only fuels local discontent. In Epping, as throughout Britain, clout-chasing politicians seize on tensions, and genuine examples of criminality among asylum seekers, to fan fears of violence and sexual abuse committed by new arrivals. A focus on these individual incidents, accompanied by massaged statistics, obscures the fact that the vast majority of asylum seekers are law-abiding and hard-working, just like most ordinary Brits.

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A political party that acknowledged that reality, rather than inflaming the debate, could then start improving the lives of everyone in the country. In England as in Greece, prior generations of migrants have proven themselves perfectly willing to work and integrate into society, once given the chance. Yet in both countries, ordinary people have been let down by the calculated degradation of the public sphere, with the political class knowing they can rely on cheap shots at newcomers to distract from their own generational failures.

I myself remain strongly critical of the British authorities for continuing to violate my rights as a journalist and perpetuating the Middle Eastern conflicts which drive so many refugees to Europe to start with. Nonetheless, once my ordeal in Greece was over, I felt a great sense of relief once I set foot on British soil again. And I feel confident enough in the life and community I have here to want others to share in that too.

As I learned during my sojourn in Greece’s migrant detention centers, those who want to travel will find a way. Neither the cold fact of the deadly Mediterranean crossing, which claimed over 2,000 lives last year, nor the harsh reality of the British or Greek migration systems, will dissuade the desperate from attempting the journey. As I heard in countless conversations, migrants beaten and abused at one border simply assume things will be better at the next, so desperate are they for a new life. Ultimately, the emotive debate over whether migration is a “right” or a crime misses the point: migration is a fact of life, and our political representatives need to start treating it as such.

Speaking about the refugees the Government spirited into the UK, Defence Secretary John Healey said that anyone who has come into this country “is checked carefully” in advance, telling Times Radio that known criminals would naturally be precluded from coming. I’m sure Healey speaks in good faith, having been assured by Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Home Office officials that the correct protocols were followed. 

But there are reasons to worry. Robert Clark, a former soldier who worked on the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) suggests that many of this latest cohort weren’t properly vetted. They are here purely because their data was leaked. The suggestion, then, is that there haven’t been adequate checks to establish whether individuals had been radicalized or had extremist connections. Even the individual who threatened to leak the dataset to the Taliban has apparently been allowed into the UK, along with his family. I would suggest he has already provided ample evidence of his character. 

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Not that vetting is an exact science. As a counterterrorism officer, I held “DV”, or developed vetting status, for over 20 years. This clearance allows someone to routinely handle top secret material unsupervised in order to assess intelligence. I worked in anticorruption, the department responsible for investigating suspect officers and recruits. I know, in short, how the process works, and it’s a far from watertight process — and that’s before you factor in the data abyss that is Afghanistan. 

Vetting foreign nationals allows authorities to assess risk. But without access to basic records from a newcomer’s place of origin, Britain is unable to perform even the most basic due diligence. Especially given this country’s rising community tensions, you don’t have to be especially cynical to suggest this might explain Whitehall’s frantic attempts to keep this operation secret. 

At the outset, it’s worth emphasising that the British authorities aren’t completely blind when it comes to the Afghan arrivals. Operation Herrick, the UK military deployment to the country, operated for 12 years. British intelligence officers, from the military and Secret Intelligence Service, ran a range of local agents and informants in-country. At the same time, the Army has a proven, professional intelligence capability — UK police forces closely followed their intelligence corps model when developing their own information management models. And, to be fair, Afghans arriving on other refugee schemes do seem to have been checked out. 

But the question I would ask here is how much their intelligence-gathering envisaged a situation like “Operation Rubific”. Presumably, while in Afghanistan, army sources would have been pointed towards operations against insurgents, not harvesting routine data of the sort often invaluable to vetting officers — the sort which would include employment and family histories, as well as financial records. Yes, there might be tangential or collateral intelligence, whether criminal records or local gossip. But there will also be gaps.

Then there’s the problem of local recordkeeping. Even if we were able to access pre-Taliban police records, I doubt that would yield a great deal of useful information. Add to this cultural differences, whereby matters considered noteworthy here would never be recorded in Afghanistan. This is a country with an unenlightened attitude to women and safeguarding. 

If, meanwhile, relocated Afghans have ever been to the EU, or have family there who they might seek to bring here, we’ll also need to access foreign records. That poses yet another information headache for hard-pressed British officers, especially when European standards aren’t always great. I remember dealing with the Polish police force and receiving an impressive amount of data, including criminal records and case files, allowing me to make an informed assessment of risk to an individual. On the other hand, asking the same questions of a police force in the Low Countries or Romania only got me the basics. 

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There’s a broader problem here too. Basic police checks run the names of individuals through a range of systems. As someone’s vetting level increases — in other words, the risk their role or presence poses — inquiries will include character references and financial disclosures. “Developed Vetting”, the highest level, involves officers holding intrusive one-to-one interviews with candidates. The point here is that all these procedures rely on the quality of data available. And, again, that poses real challenges for arrivals from somewhere like Afghanistan, especially when Operation Herrick was wound down over a decade ago, leaving a significant information gap.

The data gap, then, is full of risks — and that’s before we consider the broader political dimension. As former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace assures us, his motives for hushing up Operation Rubific were primarily for those of operational security. But concerns around the public reaction — including serious disorder — would surely have featured. As one Cabinet Office official noted, “15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots” during last summer’s riots were in the 20% of local authorities hosting the highest numbers of resettled Afghans.

Might this explain why the superinjunction lasted so long? Our politicians know our multicultural model has the potential to turn into a powder keg. They would surely have been keen to prevent Operation Rubific from lighting another fuse.

This may be about to change. The French Ministry of the Interior told AFP that they want a change in the rules to allow officers to venture up to 300 meters into the water. Both UK and French governments hope this new policy will be in place before the Anglo-French summit in July. It would mark a new stage in the cat-and-mouse game between authorities and smuggling gangs, but will it solve the small boats crisis?

Last year, 38,023 people arrived in the UK on small boats, a 22% increase on the previous year (though still less than the peak in 2022). Small boat arrivals make up 86% of detected irregular arrivals. But this does not necessarily mean that 86% of irregular entrants come on small boats. Far from slipping unseen onto empty beaches, the overladen and unseaworthy vessels are the most visible and best detected route of arrival.

The busy waters between England and France are so well monitored that “not a single migrant has reached the UK on a small boat undetected” since new surveillance aircraft began patrolling in 2024. The De Havilland Dash 8 planes are equipped with radar, cameras, and other detection equipment, feeding data to a control center at Lydd airfield in Kent. Patrolling continuously during peak crossing season, they are also used against drug smugglers and other criminal and security targets.

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These are just the latest additions to the high-tech surveillance arsenal. In 2019, the Home Office entered a £1 billion contract with drone company Tekever, whose low-flying AR5 UAVs use video and infra-red sensors, as well as more conventional ship-tracking technologies, to monitor small boat movements in real time. Footage from one of the drones was used to convict Iraqi people smuggler Rebwar Ahmed in 2020, after the inflatable boat on which he was ferrying 20 passengers was intercepted by a Border Force cutter.

Rishi Sunak’s 2023 deal with France included nearly £500 million towards joint operations, including more drones and a joint Zonal Coordination Center to bring together all the intelligence gathered by the many eyes in the sky. Drones equipped with infra-red night vision are now operating over the French coast.

Since November 2024, the UK Home Office has also been using a satellite monitoring system provided by Luton-based Telespazio UK. Their SEonSE (Smart Eyes on SEas) platform claims not only to detect vessels, but also to show their “estimated size, speed and direction… historical track analysis… list of anomalous events in which the vessel was involved, and aggregated risk assessment”.

From drones to orbiting satellites, there is no shortage of data about who and what is moving on the waters around the British Isles. Smuggling in people, drugs, or anything else has never been harder.

Nevertheless, record numbers of people are arriving on UK shores via dangerous sea routes, and record numbers are perishing in the attempt. In 2024, 73 people are known to have died, more than the total of the previous six years. All this data may help border authorities to understand patterns of movement, and to identify the gangs and individuals organizing the crossings, but meanwhile the little boats keep setting off, overloaded with their human cargo.

One problem is that moving from observation to intervention is risky, a fact which the people smugglers (and their passengers) can use to their own advantage. Many of those who have perished, either by drowning or being crushed in overloaded boats, do so within sight of the French coast. One reason for the policy of non-intervention once people are in the water, however shallow, was that French police have been unwilling to risk being blamed for causing deaths while trying to prevent departures.

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Trying to turn back overloaded boats once at sea is also potentially dangerous. Greek coastguards who intercepted a fishing vessel laden with hundreds of would-be migrants to Europe in 2023 now face criminal charges for “causing a shipwreck” and “exposing others to danger” by attempting to tow it, after monitoring its movements for 15 hours. Most of the people on the fishing boat drowned when it capsized.

This leaves border forces in a difficult position, as the obligation — legal and moral — to protect lives at sea outweighs the imperative to prevent irregular entry to the UK. Knowing this, people smugglers can presume on the duty of coastguards and other vessels to take their customers ashore for processing. However, they can also refuse to cooperate with French authorities, who may not risk endangering lives at sea by attempting to turn back boats or take individuals into custody.

People smugglers also adapt their methods to changes in policing. Instead of piloting the boats themselves, they will offer a free passage in exchange for steering the boat. In 2024 would-be asylum seeker Ibrahima Bah was convicted of manslaughter, after accepting a free passage in return for piloting an overloaded and unseaworthy boat in 2022. At least four men drowned when it sank.

Some have blamed the increasing overloading of the small boats — now carrying an average of 53 passengers, compared with 13 in 2020 — on the success of French and other authorities in confiscating or destroying them before launch. Boats are harder to come by and more expensive, and every launch brings greater risk of detection, incentivizing fewer launches with more passengers per boat.

In response to increased surveillance of French beaches, people smugglers have resorted to launching boats elsewhere before collecting passengers who wade out to meet them, sometimes watched by police officers who are not authorized to stop them. It is hoped that the new French policy will impede this development, though fears of endangering lives by doing so will remain.

Improved intelligence and observation is only part of a long, strategic game between the authorities, the people trying to cross the Channel, and those making a lucrative business out of getting them on the water.

But is the focus on small boat crossings misplaced? Most small boat arrivals apply for asylum on arrival, and over two-thirds of those applications are granted, a higher proportion than those applying from other routes. This suggests that most small boat arrivals intend to seek legitimate status to remain in the UK, unlike arrivals by less visible routes, who may seek to stay unofficially and work in the gray economy.

Small boat arrivals also make up only a third of all asylum claims, and around 10% of total net immigration. Other irregular arrivals include people arriving at ports or airports without correct documentation, or entering illicitly — concealed in freight lorries, for example — and only detected later, if ever.

Over a third of asylum claims are made by people who travelled to the UK legally on a visa, to work, study or visit, and subsequently claimed asylum in order to stay. Others who arrive with a visa may simply outstay it, without claiming asylum. Over three million visas were granted in 2024, over a million visitors got an ETA (Electronic Travel Authorization) for a short stay, and others did not need either to enter the country.

All of this suggests that high-tech surveillance of the UK’s sea borders is no solution to concerns about uncontrolled inward migration. Even so, another technological solution is being proposed: the BritCard. A digital ID card “issued free of charge to all those with the right to live and work in the UK” the BritCard “could be instantly checked by employers or landlords using a free verifier app”.

This would certainly make life harder for people overstaying their visas or failed asylum claims, as well as those who have slipped into the country undetected (probably not on a small boat). Unable to get legitimate jobs or rented accommodation, they would be forced into the “informal economy” and find it difficult to make the better life that drew them to the UK.

But what about the rest of us? The BritCard would be mandatory, universal, and “become a familiar feature of daily life for everyone in the country,” or so its designers hope. They seem undeterred by the 40% of people they polled who worry that “the technology could be misused by the government down the line”. A reasonable fear, given that the card would be integrated into the Government’s digital systems, enabling cross-checking with HMRC, the National Landlord Database, and in future benefit claims and the NHS.

Financially, the cost is estimated at £140-400 million, which is a bargain compared to the billions spent on surveillance systems for the UK’s sea borders. Socially, however, the price of tracking individuals when they attempt to work, rent a home, or interact with state services, would be a universal identity card (albeit one carried on a smartphone) that everyone would be expected to produce in more and more situations.

Governments today are increasingly keen to turn to technology to solve big social and political problems, and a lot less keen to consider what new social and political problems the high-tech solutions may cause.

All the surveillance technology and intelligence-gathering on small boat crossings have reduced neither the arrivals nor the tragic deaths. Turning instead to technological surveillance of everyone already in the country, regardless of immigration status, is no more likely to resolve a complex problem that the UK shares with most advanced economies. It would, however, move us a step closer to being, if not a “papers please”, a “QR Code please” society.

The White House was responding, most obviously, to the passage through South Africa’s parliament of the Expropriation Act, a bill allowing the state to confiscate land for reasons of public interest. This includes the pursuit of racial equity, and in some circumstances it will now be legal to seize land without compensation. Though my cousin’s comment was ironic, it also conveyed a hint of nervousness. As her husband put it, somewhere at the back of their minds there does lurk the possibility that one day the state will simply confiscate their land. Prominent politicians have been threatening to do so for years — and not just firebrands such as Julius Malema of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. In 2017, to give one example, then-President Jacob Zuma promised to strip white landowners of their property.

Understandably, then, many Afrikaners will feel relieved to have Trump’s support. And yet, by singling them out as victims, the American President is effectively claiming them as members of a Western civilization that he is now the guardian of. This doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the Afrikaans identity, and nor is it likely to win them many friends in the country where they reside.

Indeed, in South Africa as elsewhere, Trump’s comments were immediately mocked. The rebuttal was obvious: the country’s white minority, which includes English-speakers as well as Afrikaners, still enjoy a vastly higher standard of living than their black and colored compatriots. It has been widely reported that white South Africans, despite making up just 7% of the population, own over 70% of the country’s private land, though the import of these figures is not primarily about economic justice; in England, for comparison, half the land belongs to less than 1% of the population.

The issue, rather, is historical and cultural. Apartheid, the system of white minority rule that ended three decades ago, is still regularly invoked in political discourse. Though often dressed up in Marxist jargon, land redistribution is both promised and demanded as restitution for historical dispossession. At the same time, land carries a special significance for many Afrikaners as well, since farming is a profession and way of life with which they identify to a unique extent. “Boer” — the colloquial term for Afrikaner — literally means farmer.

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More importantly, I’m not sure that people in the West citing ownership statistics genuinely understand the situation of South Africa’s white farmers. Take my cousin again. In some ways, she and her family enjoy a very high quality of life. But 15 years ago, her first husband was murdered during a robbery at their farm, and she was dumped in the wilderness with her six week-old infant. Then she married a man whose first wife had also been murdered, on the same farm where they live now. The actual business of agriculture entails a constant struggle against a corrupt, disintegrating and ideologically hostile state. A few years ago, an illegal settlement sprang up in their area, consisting of improvised housing and such basic services as the inhabitants can provide for themselves. It now numbers thousands of people and will, they fear, soon spread onto their land.

These experiences are far from unusual: South Africa regularly sees the murder of 50 farmers each year. Over the past decade, such crimes have invited wider interest in the Afrikaner question. In particular, Western conservatives who suspect mainstream institutions of anti-white bias claim that the attacks are being ignored or downplayed. Elon Musk — himself born and raised in South Africa — has referred to the farm murders as genocide. The issue is inherently muddy due to the inconsistent nature of the crimes, and the very high levels of violence in South Africa more generally. But there are certainly many Afrikaners who resent their own government’s failure to even recognize the problem. “White farmers are regularly characterised as ‘criminals,’ ‘land thieves,’ ‘rapists,’ ‘oppressors,’ by high-ranking politicians,” Ernst van Zyl, spokesperson for the Afrikaner interest group Afriforum, tells me. “Farm murders are often characterised by incredibly brutal levels of torture. In many cases nothing is stolen.”

Arguably, though, Trump’s concern with Afrikaners has less to do with their daily lives than their status as symbols. According to the framework of post-Seventies liberal thought, Afrikaners were the archetypal villains: white invaders who subjugated the indigenous people of a foreign land. It is on this basis that it became unthinkable to express sympathy for them as a group. Trumpism is all about attacking such taboos, and overturning the moral hierarchies they imply. In this case, he is turning the logic of progressive liberalism against itself: are Afrikaners not also an ethnic minority, with all the protections that is said to entail? Can they not also suffer discrimination, and be granted the sacred status of refugees?

This tendency of outsiders to view the Afrikaners in terms of political symbolism, though reductive, is nonetheless made possible by their peculiar history and identity as a group. For centuries, they have inhabited a position of existential ambiguity, understanding themselves by turns or even simultaneously as an endangered minority and divinely sanctioned masters; as humble land-dwellers and custodians of a higher civilization; as fundamentally both African and European. This is one of the paradoxes of the Afrikaners: their situation is singular and unclear, yet they have become a common point of reference for the expansive and passionate convictions of others.

As the historian Hermann Giliomee has written, South Africa was “unique in the world of European colonization”. White settlers didn’t form their own self-sufficient society (as in North America or Australia), nor did they remain a small administrative and commercial elite (as in India). Rather, they dominated only in certain places, often only precariously, and even there were dependent on African labor. This last point cannot be stressed enough. The relations between Afrikaners and the peoples they encountered in Africa, whether the Khoisan inhabitants of the Western Cape region or the Bantu-speaking tribes inland, were extremely varied. Yet they were usually defined, at least in part, by the contradictory dynamic of trying to remain socially distinct while also needing these groups to serve as workers and fighting auxiliaries. This meant that Afrikaners frequently engineered situations — including, arguably, Apartheid itself — in which they exploited other populations while seeing themselves as an endangered minority.

No less important, the Afrikaners were not the only people of European descent in southern Africa. From the early 19th century, when the region began to be incorporated into the British Empire, they endured an uneasy coexistence with British settlers, numerically fewer but in most other respects much more powerful. Supremely confident in the superiority of their customs, manners and laws, the Victorians in southern Africa often looked down on the Afrikaners as primitive and backward, and sometimes even as an inferior race. The English South African writer Olive Schreiner remarked that, as a child in the 1860s, it would have been unthinkable for her to eat food or sleep in a bed that an Afrikaner had previously touched. As late as 1946, the average Afrikaner’s income was less than half that of an English-speaking South African’s.

The British had their own bitter conflicts with African peoples, and much of their involvement in southern Africa was driven by land speculation and the mining of gold and diamonds. Yet the British at this time were also a liberal superpower. Inspired by Evangelical Christianity, they were radically committed to the welfare and basic rights, as they saw them, of non-Europeans in their empire. A major source of friction with the Afrikaners was the British insistence on protecting their workers, who included Khoisan peons and, until 1838, slaves of South Asian and African origin. In a foreshadowing of more recent events, some Afrikaners felt they were unfairly discriminated against. One of their leading figures, Piet Retief, complained in the 1830s of the “prejudice” stirred against them by “dishonest persons, under the cloak of religion, whose testimony is believed in England, to the exclusion of all evidence in our favor”.

The struggle for independence from Britain would provide crucial moments in the Afrikaner nationalist mythology. One of these was the Great Trek, when groups of Afrikaner pioneers fled the Cape Colony in their wagons through the 1830s. Some of these were wiped out by disease and battle, but others managed to establish a pair of Boer Republics beyond British grasp. Another milestone was the Boer War, fought 1898-1902, in which these states fought unsuccessfully to maintain their sovereignty from the British Empire. The people who would later become the world’s most famous oppressors were, ironically, also the first anti-imperialist freedom fighters of the 20th century.

Yet Afrikaner identity was late in finding a definite shape, and its eventual contours were far from inevitable. Even in the late 19th century, the word “Afrikaner” was used loosely and inconsistently. Few regarded Afrikaans — essentially a simplified and creolized version of Dutch — as a distinct language. In the Cape, many Afrikaans elites were loyal subjects of the British crown. As one leader put it: “I am, I hope, a patriotic Dutch-Afrikaner, but if anyone dares to touch the English flag I shall shoot him point blank.” An influential proponent of the Afrikaans language, S. J. du Toit (no relation), ended up supporting the British in the Boer War. Today, Afrikaners are not even the largest group of Afrikaans speakers. That would be the coloreds, whose mixed ancestry includes the Khoisan people of the Cape and Asian slaves from the early colonial period.

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Likewise, Afrikaners are far from homogenous today. Besides the gruff farmers of popular imagination, there are cohorts of Johannesburg hipsters, artists in the Karoo Desert and suburban white-collar professionals. The South African diaspora in places like the UK and Australia numbers in the hundreds of thousands, of which a significant proportion are Afrikaners like myself. The members of this far-flung tribe certainly do not think alike, as I discovered when I canvassed opinions on Trump’s intervention. Some regard the American president almost as divine, others as Mussolini with a toupee.

Still, I get the sense that the challenges of adapting to South Africa’s crumbling state are bringing parts of the Afrikaans community closer together. At AfriForum, for instance, van Zyl talks about the twin principles of staatsbestand and selfdoen: “state-proof” and “autonomous”. These are clear in the efforts of neighborhoods and community groups to plug gaps in basic services and infrastructure, from police patrols to road repairs. Such cooperation, together with Afrikaans schools, historical commemorations, religious belief, sports fixtures, and the all-important ritual of the braai or barbecue, have produced a kind of thick identity I’m not sure I’ve encountered in Britain.

I’ve spoken to numerous Afrikaners who have tried Europe or the United States and found life under the care of a more structured “first world” state to be suffocating and infantilizing. I remember asking one such man if South Africa’s violence didn’t bother him, to which he shrugged and said that everyone dies eventually. Others, of course, are less glib. My cousin’s husband told me that he’s still excited about the country, that there is so much to enjoy — but for his children’s and grandchildren’s sake, he worries about the volatility of South African politics and the ongoing deterioration of the country’s institutions.

The backing of Trump and his supporters may also turn out to be a mixed blessing. To an important degree, his gesture relies on an image of the Afrikaners as an embattled outpost of Western civilization, about to be swallowed by the chaos of the African continent — a metaphor for the perceived threat to traditional ideals within the West itself. Insofar as this implies that somehow, after 350 years, Afrikaners still do not fully belong in Africa, it risks deepening the longstanding ambiguity of their situation, and playing into the hands of those who really would like to turf them out.

If it were true that people were escaping to Canada from the US because they feared being deported under Trump’s harsh immigration policies, then the flow of immigrants heading north would have slowed when President Biden took office. According to government data, in the period between the tweet going out and the pandemic, which slowed crossings to a trickle, almost 60,000 people made “irregular border crossings” into Canada. But afterwards, the influx returned, reaching over 20,000 in 2022, Biden’s first year in office. By February of this year, more than 10,000 people had already crossed over into Canada.

Nor were refugees put off America by President Trump. Since 2020, the number of migrants going the other way — crossing into the US from Canada — has also shot up. Last year, Homeland Security apprehended more than 100,000 migrants crossing from Canada. (For context, in 2018 US authorities arrested only 558 people on the northern border.) There is no end in sight to these “irregular crossings”, and the public has been expressing its dissatisfaction with lax immigration controls on both sides of the border.

According to the two nations’ Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which has been in effect since 2004, refugees have to apply for status in the first “safe country” they reach. So, they cannot apply for asylum in Canada at official border crossings with the US. However, a loophole in the agreement enables migrants crossing at unofficial border points to claim asylum after they cross. And along the 9,000km-long border, there are many places to do so, the most infamous being Roxham Road, where New York state meets Quebec.

That is, until March 25, when Roxham Road was shut down by the Canadian government. Trudeau made the announcement on the afternoon of March 24, and the policy took effect at 12:01am the next day: “To address irregular migration, we are expanding the Safe Third Country Agreement to apply not only at designated ports of entry, but across the entire land border, including internal waterways, ensuring fairness and more orderly migration between our two countries.” Biden was in Canada at the time, on his first official visit since winning the presidency. It later transpired that the neighbouring countries had signed an amendment to the STCA a year earlier, but hadn’t made the news public because officials feared untold numbers of migrants might rush to cross the border before the changes could be enacted. Now, both countries can turn away asylum seekers, no matter where they cross.

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This was a shock to Canada’s reputation as an immigrant-friendly country. Here, eligible refugees receiving generous welfare benefits including government-assisted housing, healthcare, work permits, and financial support. A path to citizenship is available to anyone who can secure permanent residency in the country. But there is a feeling, among some Canadians, that migrants have started exploiting vulnerabilities in the system. Almost 70% of Quebec residents — the province that Roxham Road leads into — said they wanted this irregular entry point closed. With social services in the province overwhelmed by asylum-seekers, the federal government started transferring migrants to Niagara Falls in Ontario, which saw welfare services pushed to the brink as well. Since 2021, the Immigration Department has paid $94 million to book out entire hotels for months, in order to accommodate asylum-seekers.

The ease with which people could illegally enter through Roxham Road, according to analysts, was “almost an invitation for undocumented migrants to try their chances at obtaining asylum in Canada”. Specifically, migrants from Nigeria, who make up a big chunk of all those who cross over from Roxham Road. The majority actually possess a valid US tourist visa, flying into New York before making their way to Canada. “I went to search Google and I figured out this is what everybody is doing,” one Nigerian migrant said while crossing the border. A “disproportionate” number of Nigerians claiming asylum are doing so on the grounds of LGBT persecution, which is met with more sympathy in Canada than in the US. But concerns have been raised about the similarities in such applications, and one investigation by a Nigeria-based publication revealed how some Nigerians make up stories in an attempt to secure asylum. This has left some aid organisations worrying that legitimate claims are now more likely to be doubted.

Some migrants still have their hearts set on America, however. Those from Mexico and India make up the bulk of illegal crossings from Canada to the States, with many flying into Canada for the sole purpose of getting across the world’s longest international border without detection. Mexicans, who since 2016 can fly visa-free to Canada, often spend thousands of dollars flying into Toronto and paying smugglers to get to the US — hence Biden’s motivation to renegotiate the STCA.

And this phenomenon burst into the public consciousness when, in January 2022, the bodies of four Indian nationals (two of them minors) were found frozen to death in Manitoba, near the American border. The Patel family had come to Canada on a tourist visa, but hoped to reach family in Chicago. A documentary last year suggested that, in Gujarat, the Patels had been a comfortable, upper-middle class family with no financial troubles or experiences of racial or religious persecution. Why, then, would they risk crossing illegally into the US in the middle of winter with two young children?

Migrant rights groups almost always lay the blame for tragedies at the feet of unscrupulous smugglers and harsh government policy. Few acknowledge that the people who decide to illegally cross an international border almost always have agency. And for middle-class migrants, it’s usually not about security; it’s about status. In developing countries, attaining the “American Dream” — or another Western nation’s equivalent — is still highly aspirational. And while everyone has the right to build a good life for themselves, migrants who can pay their way into one North American nation in order to cross over into the other, depending on their preference, undermine faith in the immigration system.

Which is a problem for Trudeau. His Liberal government plans to welcome half a million new immigrants into Canada every year till 2025. (Like most developed nations, Canada has an aging population, a low birth rate, and is facing a labour shortage.) Almost 50% of Canadians already think this target is too high. If Trudeau doesn’t want public opinion turning against his plans, he needs to reassure the electorate that his government has a strong handle on who is being welcomed across our borders.

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Amending the STCA is meant to signal that the government is aware of the growing unpopularity of irregular border crossers, who are seen as jumping the queue, leaving those without financial means further down the list — not to mention those waiting in refugee camps around the world. John Manley, one of the architects of the original STCA, supports the new changes, claiming that most migrants around the world are in much greater danger than those who have already found their way to the US. But there has been backlash from refugee rights advocates, with the Canadian Council for Refugees, among others, arguing that the STCA is unconstitutional. But last month, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled otherwise.

The closure of Roxham Road sent a message to all those who want to migrate to Canada that the way to do so is through official channels. Two days later, the Government of Canada launched a survey to poll Canadians’ opinions. Trudeau was, apparently, ready to listen to how Canadians feel about this issue. While some advocates have been arguing that closing the loophole will have pushed people into the hands of smugglers, it’s still too early to tell what the effects of the new changes will be, though data on the past three months’ of irregular border crossings should be imminent. But whatever the outcome: the Prime Minister won’t be promoting Canada’s immigration policies on Twitter any time soon.