According to Donald Trump and his followers, God saved him from a would-be  assassin’s bullet. “It was God alone who prevented the unthinkable from happening,” he posted on social media. 

It’s not enough that the conservative Supreme Court majority practically anointed him king by giving him virtually blanket immunity, he’s also implying a divine right to be one.

It’s typical of the MAGA flock not to give credit where it is due. Truth be told, it was immigrants, not God, who saved Trump from a getting a hole in the head. Inadvertently. 

Trump dodged a risky appearance before St. Peter ­— who’s surely not one of his beholden judicial appointees ­– when he momentarily turned his head to point to a projected chart showing a spike in illegal immigration, his favorite bugaboo.

Not only has pandering to resentment of immigrants saved Trump’s life, it also helped catapult him to the pinnacle of the Republican Party, which marches lock-step to his every command. The exclusive US two-party system’s conservative wing is now a blatantly authoritarian one. 

Trump’s xenophobic messaging had started with his “birther” claim that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. He’s waxing Hitlerian today, claiming immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

That’s red meat for his angry, purportedly white working class MAGA diehards, nearly half of whom earn at least $50,000 a year and a third have at least a college degree.

These loyal supporters are  driven by an existential fear that immigrants and non-white minorities are displacing them and diluting America’s “identity” as a white, Christian nation and eroding their presumed white privilege. Some MAGA influencers are even furious at Trump’s choice of running mate because J.D. Vance’s wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants. 

They will keep feeling victimized by the changing demographics because the US population is inexorably diversifying. Non-white minorities already make up 42% of the population and the foreign-born, 13 percent. With falling birth rates among whites, the US Census projects that they will constitute less than 50% of the population by 2045.

What lies ahead?

And because the state must inevitably face growing demands for inclusivity and equal rights for all regardless of race, religion, gender, and national origin, they will keep feeling menaced by liberal values and persecuted by constitutional restraints. They’re determined to intimidate back, and Trump who amplifies bigoted tropes, is their designated bully.

What lies ahead is bitter political strife that promises  to get worse, especially if Trump returns to the White House. The cold civil war could potentially turn hot, what with the unabated proliferation of guns.

The burgeoning MAGAverse shares hostility to immigrants with the surging Far Right in Europe. There, too, xenophobic politics will persist or get even worse because mass immigration from poor to developed countries is an inescapable upshot of global wealth and income inequality. 

The poorest half of the world’s population owns merely two percent of all wealth while the richest ten percent owns 76% of it. This ten percent rakes in 52% of all income while the poorest half earns just 8.5%. 

No wonder the number of international immigrants grew to 281 million by 2020, with 3.6% of the world’s people living outside their country of birth, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Widening economic disparity is a stronger driver of global mass immigration than political crises. No stopgaps are in sight if governments are not able or willing to guarantee public services, job security, health care, education, and other socially ameliorative measures.  

If the wealth and income gap doesn’t narrow, the exodus of immigrants to affluent countries will keep growing, heedless of borders as well as oceans, deserts, mountains, and cultural barriers. So will the appeal of extreme nationalism, racism, and isolationism in destination countries.

It’s going to be a long, bitter era of ideological conflict the world over. – Rappler.com

Rene Ciria Cruz is an editor at PositivelyFilipino.com. He edited the book A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), (UP Press), and was Inquirer.net’s US Bureau Chief 2013-2023. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific News Service, and California Lawyer Magazine