Sometimes an author spends a lot of time, finely crafting his OpEd for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and winds up telling us exactly what he didn’t really mean to convey.
On immigration, Trump doesn’t have a copyright on cruelty
On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants are regarded as a problem at best, a danger to national security at worst, writes German journalist Adrian Schulz.
by Adrian Schulz | Tuesday, September 2, 2025 | 6:00 AM EDT
Detention camps, violent rhetoric, physical harm, deportations to third-party countries under brutal regimes — Donald Trump did not invent the playbook on callousness toward immigrants.
The European Union, winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, got there ahead of him.
As I read the news about the U.S. government’s continuing assault on people whose sole fault is not having the right documents to legally live in a country that is otherwise happy to exploit their labor, I also follow the German debate around the 10th anniversary of the so-called refugee crisis. In 2015, more than a million people came to Germany seeking refuge, many of them fleeing from war-torn Syria.
“(N)ot having the right documents,” huh? Yet another euphemism for being in the country illegally!
I cannot speak to European law, but “not having the right documents” is not their “sole fault” in the United States, because to work in the United States you must be a citizen or be here legally, with the appropriate documents. This means that the illegals who work have either presented forged documents, or be working for a company which has knowingly hired them without documentation, or they are, like those apprehended at Home Depots while looking for day labor, working for cash, almost always unreported, and are thus evading our income and Social Security taxes.
Those things are all felonies!
What I see is not so different. On both sides of the Atlantic, migrants are regarded as a problem at best, a danger to national security at worst. Trump has no copyright on cruelty. Europeans just put on a friendlier face.
Is there ever a ‘friendly face’ on an arresting officer? Regardless of the crime, no one likes being arrested, but that’s what doing something really radical like enforcing the law requires. Our good friends on the left were saying all along that ‘no one is above the law,’ as they prosecuted and persecuted then former President Donald Trump, trying everything they could to throw him in jail and prohibit him from running for President again. They had no problem with the prosecution and persecution of the January 6 Capitol kerfufflers and screamed blood murder when the re-inaugurated President Trump pardoned them, even though most had already served their sentences. Philadelphia District Attorney, who routinely hands out lenient plea bargains to gang bangers, even said he’d try to prosecute the pardoned kerfufflers on state charges.
But somehow, some way, no one being above the law doesn’t seem to matter to them when it comes to people living in our country illegally. Given that they are committing felonies every day they go to work, I’d say that they are far worse criminals than the kerfufflers ever were.
The decision of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel not to close the borders in 2015 is seen today by many as a cardinal sin that fundamentally changed the German political landscape, leading to the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party, known as the AfD. It came in second place in the recent federal elections.
AfD was founded in 2013, just before the immigration crisis in Germany, but started growing as Germans became more and more disillusioned by the unrestrained, mostly Muslim, immigration. Germany is a democratic republic, and when author Adrian Schulz tells us that the party came in second in recent elections, he is telling us that the German people are disillusioned with the huge number of immigrants in the country.
(Frau Merkel) chose the former. Her phrase, “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can make it,” endeared her to liberals and outraged conservatives, but for a short moment, most Germans celebrated a Willkommenskultur, a culture of welcoming. People brought truckloads of stuffed animals to train stations where the refugee families arrived.
The optimism soon vanished, though. As in other European countries, the debate started to focus on radically limiting the number of asylum-seekers. The rhetoric became hostile.
“As in other European countries . . . .” Herr Schulz has admitted to us that the movement to reject unregulated Muslim immigration is growing throughout the European democracies. The editors of the Inquirer certainly loved an article decrying President Trump’s immigration policies as “callousness” and “cruelty,” but in doing so, the newspaper concomitantly told readers that we were not alone among democracies in rejecting what is, in the end, an attack on our culture, on Western civilization.
This is what the editors of the Inky, and Herr Schulz just don’t quite get. In the democracies that they claim to cherish, sometimes the people may take democratic choices they just don’t like.
