From Donald Trump's US Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to Operation New Broom and South Africa's Revised Draft White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, when states won't confront their own decay, they externalise the blame.

There is a familiar pattern playing out globally: take a real crisis, strip it of its causes, and attach it to a target that cannot vote you out. The target is rarely chosen because it is the real driver of unemployment, housing failure, collapsing public services or violent crime. It is chosen because it's visible, precarious and politically dispensable.

What has changed globally is not that societies suddenly discovered nationalism, nor that scarcity is a novel issue. What has changed is that institutional capacity has been thinning into institutional exhaustion: the point where a government still exercises authority but can no longer produce predictable results.

In this context, immigration becomes a reliable accelerant. Blaming foreigners and performing high-visibility enforcement can be easier than doing the hard work of institutional repair. Plato's cave captures the method: showcase what is visible over what is causal. Raids and removals are the shadows on the wall; the institutional machinery that produced the crisis remains in the dark.

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Global parallels: raids, discretion, and democratic fatigue

The United States offers one of the clearest and perhaps most troubling examples of what speed enforcement untethered from institutional restraint can look like. Heightened raids, expanding detention capacity and...