It is worth recalling that “we don’t do body counts” became the Bush administration’s unofficial motto in the early years of the global war on terror, and that reporting on Afghan civilian deaths did not even begin until 2007. In 2017 the Department of Defense stopped reporting the number of US military personnel deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and in 2019, President Trump signed an executive order that revoked the requirement for US intelligence to report on civilian casualties outside of areas of “Active Hostilities.” Taken together, these actions indicate a clear preference to render both the nature of military interventions and their costs invisible.

Migration shapes nativist politics, but does not suffice to explain the wider crisis of liberalism. Exclusionary policies on immigration are being pursued in most European countries (with some notable exceptions, such as Portugal). Yet despite general anti-immigrant sentiment, it is only in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Hungary that nationalist governments have actively turned away from the European Union, and only in Budapest and Warsaw that open season has been declared on liberal civil society and the rule of law. Kaczyński and Orbán are special among Europe’s nationalists not for their chauvinism, but for their authoritarian actions against domestic opponents and the EU.

Mexican critics have raised concerns that AMLO and Morena are little more than a recycled PRI, pointing to AMLO’s formative political years and to Morena’s scale of control. What is different about AMLO, however, is his cult of personality and his distaste for the separation of powers.

As the elusive status of citizenship has become one of the many fault lines creating vulnerability in the Covid-19 pandemic, the organizing of deportees and returnees, who have lived most of their lives outside of citizenship and survived the violence that comes from lacking it, has proved invaluable. Mutual aid infrastructure—logistical, financial, and emotional—was already in place in the deportee/returnee community, as many other communities scrambled to figure out how to support one another for the first time.