Latest news with #antiimmigrant
South China Morning Post
4 days ago
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Will Japan's anti-immigrant far-right parties win more votes in key election?
As Japan heads into a pivotal upper house election, populist parties on the far-right are seizing on anti-immigrant rhetoric to win over voters, echoing the strategies of US President Donald Trump's Republicans and hard-right movements across Europe. While candidates from across the political spectrum in Japan campaign on familiar issues such as inflation, jobs and defence, a surge in anti-immigrant messaging has also reframed the national conversation ahead of the House of Councillors election on Sunday. The shift is being driven by the rise of ultraconservative groups like Sanseito, a party founded in 2020, which is polling fourth in opinion surveys among the 10 parties contesting the election. While Sanseito's support remains modest – just 5.9 per cent according to a July 11 NHK poll – more than 33 per cent of voters say they are still undecided. With the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) struggling to rebound from a string of scandals and polling at just 24 per cent, political analysts say the election could produce a hung result, forcing the LDP to negotiate with smaller parties to retain power. That may give hardline groups such as Sanseito or other right-leaning contenders – the Conservative Party of Japan (CPJ), the Japan Innovation Party (Ishin), or the Democratic Party for the People (DPFP) – the leverage to demand a role in government or even a cabinet seat, according to analysts. Hiromichi Moteki, a conservative historian who lives in Tokyo, used to be a supporter of the LDP but has grown disillusioned by its present leadership, dismissing Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba as 'hopeless'.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Police Arrest Far-Right Leader After Anti-Immigrant Riots in Spanish Town
The police in Spain have arrested the leader of an anti-immigrant group on charges that he helped to incite days of violent clashes between far-right demonstrators and police officers in the southeastern town of Torre Pacheco, the interior ministry said on Tuesday. The man, who was identified only by his initials C.L.F., is a local leader of Deport Them Now, a group that has spread hateful messages about immigrants on the Telegram app, driving days of riots in the town, in the Murcia region. He was arrested on Monday and accused of inciting violence. Police also seized the man's computers and tried to limit access to the group's Telegram channels. The town was bracing for more violence on Tuesday evening, as the authorities deployed dozens of riot police and members of the civil guard. The recent clashes are among the worst public violence in Spain, where for years a liberal government has relaxed immigration laws, making it easier for undocumented immigrants to become legal citizens. For four consecutive nights, rioters attacked businesses linked to the town's Moroccan residents, trashing shawarma restaurants and halal grocers. They also vandalized stores catering to the town's other immigrant communities, including Pakistani, Turkish and Latin American businesses. Some residents tried to protect their homes and business. The rioters clashed with the police, and by Tuesday morning 11 people had been arrested, 10 of whom were linked to the far-right groups that came from elsewhere. Prosecutors in Murcia said they were also investigating the leader of another anti-immigrant political party, Vox, for using hate speech that may also have whipped up the violence. The party's regional leader, José Ángel Antelo, is a professional basketball player turned politician, who was elected to the Murcia regional assembly in 2023 on a ticket attacking Spain's immigration policies. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
4 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
In Northern Ireland, Fire Has Long Been Used as a Weapon of Fear
An effigy of a boat filled with migrants, placed on top of a bonfire and set alight. Homes set on fire during a spasm of riots. Displaced families fleeing as angry mobs hurled Molotov cocktails. This drumbeat of anti-immigrant episodes has taken place over the last five weeks in Northern Ireland. But the images have also brought to mind darker moments in the history of the territory, where fire was long used to intimidate and force out people seen by some as outsiders. The target of this most recent wave of violence is different from those of the sectarian attacks that defined this land during the Troubles. That decades-long conflict was between the region's hard-line Protestant Loyalists, who believed Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom, and Irish Catholic nationalists, who wanted the territory to become part of the Republic of Ireland. But the violence shares a common message: You are not welcome here. If you won't leave, we may make you. 'Territorialism in Northern Ireland is still embedded — and not only embedded, it's being patrolled by armed groups,' said Duncan Morrow, a politics professor at Ulster University in Belfast. 'Northern Ireland as a society escalates extremely rapidly, because so much of this is already in the whole way society's organized.' The town of Ballymena, about 30 miles from Belfast, is sometimes called the 'buckle' of Northern Ireland's Protestant Bible Belt. The most recent violence erupted there after two 14-year-old boys were charged with the attempted oral rape of a local girl on June 7. The two boys, who the BBC reported spoke in court through a Romanian translator, denied the charges. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Times
5 days ago
- Times
Anti-migrant rioters attack homes of ‘foreigners' in Spanish town
Nine people have been arrested after three days of anti-immigrant clashes in a town in southeastern Spain following an attack on a pensioner. Police reinforcements have been deployed to Torre-Pacheco, in the Murcia region, where five people have been injured and nine detained in the disturbances, officials said on Monday. Far-right groups and residents have fought against youths of north African origin several times since a 68-year-old Spaniard was attacked on Wednesday. Public anger mounted after a photograph of his badly bruised face and a video purporting to show the attack were posted online. The man, Domingo Tomás, told Spanish media that the incident occurred as he took his usual early morning walk at 5.30am. He came across two young people of Maghrebi origin, he said, when a third ran at him and hit him with a stick, knocking him down before beating him again. 'I didn't understand what they were saying as it was in another language. I didn't say anything to provoke them,' he told El Español news website. 'I had my watch and house keys with me, and that young man didn't even take the watch — he just hit me to hurt me. He hit me for fun. 'In town, they say the young kids are doing a dare, hitting someone to see who hits harder, and I think that's why they did it — to film everything.' Two of the three suspects have been arrested, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the interior minister, said on Monday. Police were still looking for the main perpetrator. Six others — five Spaniards and one north African resident — were arrested for assault, public disorder, hate crimes or damage to property, the interior ministry said on Monday morning. Later in the day, a ninth person was detained in connection with an attack on a kebab shop. The local mayor, Pedro Ángel Roca, called on the 'migrant community not to leave their homes and not to confront rioters', telling the national broadcaster, TVE: 'Confrontation achieves nothing and ultimately makes us all afraid.' Tomás said that the video purporting to show the attack was not of him, prompting media to report that it had been circulated by far-right groups hoping to whip up anger. One group, named 'Deport Them Now', posted a message on social media calling for attacks against people of north African origin. • Police should disclose ethnicity of suspects, says Met chief On Friday, the city council had called a peaceful demonstration to condemn the attack, but tensions were already running high. A handful of youths of Maghrebi origin arrived, as did members of far-right groups who attacked them despite the presence of police officers. Videos posted on social media showed men dressed in clothes bearing far-right symbols and migrants carrying Moroccan flags hurling objects at each other in Saturday night's violence, which came after lower intensity unrest. Several dozen youths from far-right groups, some hooded, hurled glass bottles and objects at riot police in Torre-Pacheco on Sunday night. Police fired rubber bullets to quell the unrest. Groups of violent individuals, many of them from outside the municipality, roamed the town's streets armed with sticks and went to homes where they knew foreigners lived, according to the local newspaper La Opinión de Murcia. Police intercepted more than 20 vehicles attempting to enter the town, with some occupants carrying sticks and batons, Grande-Marlaska said. The Murcian town has 40,000 inhabitants, 30 per cent of whom are of Maghrebi origin. The area surrounding the town also hosts large numbers of migrants who work as day labourers in agriculture, one of the pillars of the regional economy. Politicians have appealed for calm. Grande-Marlaska blamed far-right groups and the populist right-wing Vox party. 'It's a consequence of the far-right's rhetoric, endorsed by the right, which doesn't question it. It's Vox's fault and its rhetoric,' he said. He criticised the political party's association of illegal immigration with crime when interior ministry data 'doesn't support it'. The Vox leader, Santiago Abascal, denied any responsibility for the incidents and said the government's migration policies were to blame. Abdelali, a north African resident who declined to give his surname, said he was now afraid of being attacked on the streets. He said: 'We want peace. That's what we want, we don't want anything else. I ride my scooter and I'm afraid of being hit by a bottle.' In 2000, violent anti-immigration protests broke out in the town of El Ejido in southern Spain after three Spanish citizens were killed by Moroccan migrants.
New York Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
Nothing Good Happens When People Become ‘the Other'
Fifteen years ago, when Arizona enacted a notorious anti-immigrant 'show me your papers' law, I wrote an essay in The Times that began, 'I'm glad I've already seen the Grand Canyon. Because I'm not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.' The essay provoked a variety of reactions, most supportive but some vituperatively negative. One angry reader, noting that the newspaper identified me as teaching at Yale Law School, wrote to the school's dean to demand that he fire me. The dean and I had a good laugh over that letter. But rather than dismiss it as the product of an eccentric crank, I realize now that I should have understood the letter as a window on the toxic brew of anti-immigrant sentiment that led a state to pass such a law. The Obama administration challenged Arizona's law, and after the Supreme Court invalidated most of it in 2012, the harsh anti-immigrant wave subsided. But now my letter writer and like-minded people have a friend in the White House. Or friends, actually — among them, Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, appears to be giving President Trump his marching orders for the arrests and deportations now shredding the civic fabric of communities across the country. I have a home in the Los Angeles area, and my recent weeks there encompassed the deployment of the Marines and the federalization of California's National Guard. I steeled myself every morning to read the granular reporting in The Los Angeles Times of scenes that I could never have imagined just months ago: people snatched up while waiting at a bus stop in peaceful Pasadena; the undocumented father of three Marines taken at his landscaping job, pinned down and punched by masked federal agents before being thrown into detention. People whose quiet presence among us was tolerated for decades as they paid their taxes and raised their American children are now hunted down like animals, so fearful of even going grocery shopping that Los Angeles nonprofits have mobilized to deliver food to their doors. I was taking an early-morning walk in my neighborhood when a black SUV with tinted windows slowed to a stop a half block ahead. I considered: If this is ICE coming to take someone, should I intervene? Start filming? Make sure the victims know their rights? Or just keep walking, secure in the knowledge that no one was coming for me? The car turned out to be an airport limo picking up a passenger, and I was left to ponder how bizarre it was to feel obliged to run through such a mental triage on a summer morning on an American city street. Something beyond the raw politics of immigration lies behind the venomous cruelty on display, and I think it is this: To everyone involved, from the policymakers in Washington to the masked agents on the street, undocumented individuals are 'the other,' people who not only lack legal rights as a formal matter but who stand outside the web of connection that defines human society. Tom Homan, the Trump administration's border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as 'the gotaways,' the ones we didn't catch. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
