Immigrants increasingly back the parties that would have kept them out. The latest arrivals, it seems, are keenest to pull up the ladder.
Backed by the hard-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), George Simion (pictured above) topped the first round of Romania’s re-run presidential election in May 2025, taking 40.96 per cent of the vote. For three decades a country that has exported people in huge numbers (around 20 per cent of all Romanians live abroad), Bucharest is now having to import workers in order to fill the breach and both Simion and his supporters do not approve. Ironically (or, perhaps, hypocritically) Simion’s strongest support came from the very same people who have left those gaps, Romania’s diaspora. Romanians abroad handed him about 61 per cent of their votes, and in Spain and Italy, home to the two of the largest emigrant communities, the share climbed to roughly 73 per cent. The men and women pouring cement in Madrid and waiting tables in Milan had voted, in effect, for the candidate least keen on people like them.
Simion did not win the presidency, being defeated by Nicușor Dan, erstwhile mayor of Bucharest, in a run-off. The diaspora, however, continued to back him. Romanians in the West leant hard in Simion’s favour, at around 55 per cent. The further from home they had migrated for work, the harder they voted for the man promising to make that home country impenetrable to migrants.
So far, Romania has been anything but. More than 200,000 non-EU workers were admitted from 2024-25, with the annual quota reduced to 90,000 for 2026, primarily at the behest of labour unions who view foreign workers as a threat to wages. Simion, whose party leads in opinion polls, has used the same argument, stating that Romania’s dysfunctional labour market cannot be fixed by bringing in immigrants at the expense of “creating the conditions for the return of the diaspora”.
Sergiu Gherghina and Aurelian Giugal, in a 2025 study titled Cast (the vote) away, tracked diaspora voting patterns across a decade of Romanian elections. Emigrant support for the far-right, they found, works largely as a protest against the mainstream parties blamed for pushing them out in the first place. Vladimir Bortun, a Romanian political scientist interviewed by the European Centre for Populism Studies, adds economic insecurity to the list of reasons.
Good migrant, bad migrant
In Britain, Michael Gove made much the same pitch to a very different audience in 2016. During the Brexit campaign he argued that leaving the European Union would end a system that waved in unqualified Romanians and Poles while making Indian doctors and Nigerian engineers go through cumbersome and expensive bureaucratic processes. It was insidious, given that Romanian and Polish medical staff have been a feature of the UK’s National Health Service for years. Regardless, the campaign broadly worked. A 2024 report found that left-behind voters (those who are older, marginalised, and anti-immigrant) hold well for ethnic minority voters too. Some one-third of Britain’s ethnic-minority voters backed Leave, in numbers large enough to make a difference in a close result (Leave won the Brexit referendum by a margin of 52-48). A 2025 Cambridge study, Immigrants Against Immigration, found these voters drawing a line between what they viewed as the good migrant, meaning themselves, and the bad, meaning whoever had arrived later.
Britain’s own cabinet has at times offered an almost perfect example of the trend. Priti Patel, the daughter of Ugandan-Indian shopkeepers, created the Rwanda deportation scheme as home secretary in the spring of 2022. Suella Braverman, whose parents arrived from Kenya and Mauritius, later took the same job and in October of that year described migrants coming to Britain via the English Channel as a part of an “invasion” of the south coast. Braverman has since jumped ship from the Conservatives to the nakedly anti-immigration Reform. Kemi Badenoch, born to Nigerian parents, became Conservative leader in November 2024 on a platform of hard borders.
Over in the United States, Donald Trump won 46 per cent of the Latino vote in November 2024, up from 32 per cent four years earlier, with support from that particularly constituency as high as 55 per cent in Texas. Reporters at ProPublica found much of his support came from Latinos who had long settled in the US and resented the arrivals that followed them. By July 2025, once the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) campaign had been rolled out, Trump’s approval among Latino voters had fallen to 38 per cent.
In a 2025 paper on diversity and Brexit, Magda Borkowska and James Laurence suggested that migrants will often follow the lead of their new neighbours. Where a host public is particularly anti-immigrant, immigrants take on board that mood and turn against the next generation of migrants, a trend confirmed in a European Social Survey analysis for RFBerlin which found much the same to be true across the continent. It appears that the ladder is pulled up most eagerly by those standing on the rung immediately above.
Much like the Latinos in the US wrongly identified by ICE as illegal immigrants, they should be careful what they wish for. Adrian Bott, a British writer, put the phenomenon most succinctly in October 2015. “I never thought leopards would eat MY face,” he had a voter cry, having wilfully, naively perhaps, backed the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. The line has been repeated and paraphrased plenty since.
Photo: Dreamstime.