President Donald Trump has insisted that illegal immigration constitutes an “invasion” justifying not only the deportation of all 11 million undocumented migrants living in the country and deploying soldiers to the borders. He and his allies have spent years demonizing them with outlandish tales of eating neighbors’ pets, seizing apartment buildings and “coming in from prisons and jails” and mental asylums.

It makes for good politics to demonize not only the undocumented but also all immigrants, a tactic deployed in parts of Europe where it has found traction. Nativists, nationalists and unvarnished racists actively promote the idea that Western civilization — Western culture and the very identity of the “white” race — faces an existential threat from nonEuropean Americans who multiply rapidly and whose only interest in immigrating is to replace the original populations.

This anti-immigrant fervor is washing away decades of tolerance and acceptance of multiculturalism. It is especially true of Germany, where the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has just placed second in elections; Italy, where the League and Forza Italia won in 2022; and France, where the National Rally nearly did.

This fear of “replacement” was originally directed not at immigrants but at what French philosopher Renaud Camus wrote in his 2011 book “The Great Replacement.” He “argued that all Western countries were reckoning with erasure by birthrate,” The New York Times noted.

“The obsession with birthrates is both shaping policy goals within the far right and serving as a rallying cry for recruitment,” The Times reported in 2019. “Experts tracking these movements say they are alarmed by the speed and strength with which the idea is spreading, especially among young radicals. The birthrate conversation — and the question that goes with it, of women’s continued freedom — has become a key recruitment tool for white supremacists. It is often the first political point of agreement a white supremacist recruiter online will find with a target, especially with young people.”

Even before The Times report, white supremacists in the United States were already obsessed with declining birth rates. “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” Iowa’s Republican Rep. Steve King tweeted two years earlier.

Over the years, this preoccupation with declining white childbirth has remained a focal point of the “replacement” idea and is echoed in statements by other leading Republicans such as Vice President James D. Vance, who is obviously obsessed with masculinity. He is married to a woman of Indian background and was obviously being circumspect about race when by conservative commentator Mercedes Schlapp interviewed him at a recent meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Vance argued that “our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, [that] you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place.” He claimed that a “broken culture” wants to turn both men and women “into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.”

But while men are urged to assert their masculinity, there must be some other target to attack that will immediately impact the drive to reassert Western values and identity: migration. Better yet, why not link them?

In his 2001 book, “The Death of the West,” Pat Buchanan, who served as a special consultant to Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, declared, as James Pogue noted in Vanity Fair last November, that “Western elites … do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration." Pogue reported that the book “raised alarms about declining Western birth rates and globalization and argued that immigration was sapping America’s character and social cohesion.” Pogue added that Vance told him “The Death of the West” was the first political book he read.

But the immigration issue is a red herring. Those whom the United Nations High Commission on Refugees describe as “forcibly displaced people” worldwide total 123 million, comprising 44 million refugees, 6.9 million asylumseekers and 63 million internally displaced. Three out of every four of them have sought refuge in low- or middleincome countries — not Europe or the United States.

“Despite the panic in rich countries over the arrival of people fleeing poor, war-tossed nations, most people from the global south who migrate don’t head north,” Times columnist Lydia Polgreen reported. “The majority who flee in haste end up quite near where they came from, hoping to go home as soon as possible. And even those who migrate farther afield — searching for work, fleeing political persecution or simply wanting a new life — tend to remain in their own region or continent. In our hyperconnected, jet-powered age, the median distance traveled by modern migrants is less than 400 miles. This pattern has been repeated across the globe in the biggest crises of our time.”

Polgreen noted that Turkey alone took in three million Syrian refugees, “roughly three times the number taken in by the entire European Union.” Of the seven million Venezuelans refugees, Colombia, “with 50 million people, with a per capita GDP of less than a tenth that of the United States,” has taken in “four times as many Venezuelans as America” and 80 percent have fled to Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 14 million people who fled Sudan’s civil war have gone to neighboring countries which have their own major problems, such as Chad, the Central African Republic, South Africa, Egypt, Libya and Ethiopia. Unrest in countries such as Somalia, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe has led to “floods of refugees” and “Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world in the number of forcibly displaced people,” totaling 45 million or more than double since 2017. “But an estimated 96 percent of those people remain within the continent.”

In the United States, a majority of undocumented migrants are from neighboring Mexico and many have been living here for at least a decade. They have been raising families, picking crops, mowing lawns, working in construction and starting businesses. They have been paying taxes and contributing billions of dollars to the economy – while being ineligible for social benefits — and committing fewer crimes than the general population but forced to live in the shadows of society. So while tough measures intended to enforce border protection policies may be justified, that cannot be said of the ongoing expulsion of undocumented migrants whose only wrong-doing is entering the country without the necessary documents.

That offense is so minor in the great scheme of criminal justice that the penalty for a first instance of “improper entry” – a civil offense — ranges from a fine of $50 to $250, imprisonment for up to six months or both.

There is more to the immigration crackdown. It allows also for culling the population by deporting mostly nonEuropean Americans, even as the president invites white South Africans to come and other people from “nice countries, you know, like Denmark, Switzerland? How about Norway?” as he told a meeting of millionaire donors last April. Culling and restocking.

Then there is the president’s directive ending citizenship for children born to undocumented migrants. He is also mulling over sending American citizens convicted of some crimes to another country to serve their sentences, “if we had the legal right to do it.” Those would obviously include African Americans, who comprise 38 percent of prisoners but only 14 percent of the population. It is worthy of noting that Britain deported about 164,000 members of its “criminal class” to what became Australia and the United States and to other places.

In all this, truth is the casualty. “Dune – Prophecy,” a sci-fi serial released last November 17, features a Bene Gesserit sisterhood, some of whom were trained as Truthsayers whose duty is to discern when the truth is being told. Do not expect to see an American Bene Gesserit any time soon.