Trump’s claim that globalisation did not benefit the West reads strangely from Aotearoa New Zealand. Our story is not one of civilisational decline or of nations sinking into a late Western mood. It is the story of a small country that undertook one of the most radical neoliberal transformations in the democratic world and then lived with its long consequences. When Trump turns globalisation into a migrant problem, he overlooks the simpler truth that these disruptions were created at home by Western policymakers. Aotearoa’s experience makes this clear.

Neoliberalism arrived here with unusual speed. Rogernomics and Ruthanasia swept aside the economic model that had shaped Aotearoa New Zealand for decades. State assets were sold, tariffs removed, finance liberalised, and unions weakened until their bargaining strength was greatly reduced. These reforms were not designed to defend the West. They were designed to discipline labour, free capital from local constraints, and pull New Zealand into global markets. By the time migration became a topic of public concern, manufacturing towns had already emptied out, wages had flattened, and working-class security had thinned. None of this was caused by migrants. It was the product of decisions made in Wellington.

One outcome of this shift was the quiet end of New Zealand’s informal preference for migrants from the Anglosphere. As the economy opened, labour shortages could not be filled from Britain. The latter was still sending managers rather than the workers New Zealand required, which meant the labour had to come from Asia and beyond. Asian and other non-European migrants arrived in significant numbers and brought with them an opportunity for Aotearoa New Zealand to build a genuine soft-power relationship with Asia through the skills and cultural fluency of new New Zealanders.

That opportunity never fully developed. The economy welcomed Asian migrants, but society kept them at arm’s length. Highly educated newcomers were confined to under-employment. Their qualifications were discounted, and their accents became quiet disadvantages. Mobility was limited, although rarely in explicit terms. Aotearoa New Zealand opened its borders yet left its social hierarchy largely unchanged. Instead of becoming an Asia-literate society, Aotearoa New Zealand became an importer of Asian labour while keeping Asian communities structurally peripheral.

This is where Trump’s rhetoric, when applied to Aotearoa New Zealand, begins to unravel. The globalisation we lived through was shaped by domestic elites who pursued a neoliberal blueprint. Migration filled the labour shortages created by that blueprint. It did not create them. Yet the political right now frames the entire era as a civilisational dispute, as if cultural outsiders produced economic effects that were in fact caused by internal policy.

John Gray offers a useful way to understand this moment. In The New Leviathans and What Comes After Progressivism, he argues that the liberal promise of harmony through open markets has faded. States are moving into a post-liberal phase with greater emphasis on identity, security, and managed diversity. Trump stands at one end of this development. His politics turns economic dislocation into cultural grievance. Such a politics requires recognisable figures of blame, and migrants provide an easy symbol. When economic choices are framed as cultural wounds, the architects of those choices disappear from view. Civilisation becomes a rhetorical device that is emotionally effective although analytically weak.

At the same time, Fukuyama has attempted to revive his idea of thymos, the desire for dignity and recognition. He interprets American working-class anger as a plea for equal standing, which he calls isothymia. This misses the central dynamic of Trumpism. The demand is often for restored status, not equality. Fukuyama refers to this as megalothymia, the desire to stand above. A politics built on megalothymia cannot coexist with racial equality. This explains why the continued neglect of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian communities in the United States falls outside his framework.

A quieter version of the same pattern operates in Aotearoa. If even the Indigenous people who signed Te Tiriti o Waitangi have faced generations of structural racism, then the position of migrants is even more vulnerable. Migrant under-employment does not reflect individual shortcoming. It reflects a social hierarchy that existed long before they arrived. A society that struggles to honour its founding agreement cannot easily create full belonging for those who arrive later.

Inside migrant communities, these pressures produce distortions of their own. A small lumpen element forms among those who move early into property ownership or into the real-estate economy and its related occupations. Instead of challenging the hierarchies that once held them back, they often display loyalty to power and become validators of the structures that marginalised them. Community life becomes heavy with dance, food, and staged celebration, yet light on genuine empowerment. Energy that could support collective advancement is spent on spectacle. The deeper issues of racism, under-employment, and structural inequality remain largely untouched.

From an Aotearoa vantage point, the contradiction in Trump’s claim is easy to see. Globalisation did not arrive because birth rates were falling or because New Zealand sought global openness. Migration increased because neoliberal reforms weakened unions and produced labour shortages that domestic workers could not fill. Migrants were essential to the economic model because they helped control wage growth and reduce bargaining power. They were brought in to make the system function. To now frame this as a civilisational threat ignores the policymakers and economic actors who built that system.

Once migrants arrived, another barrier emerged. Racism and under-employment functioned as a second tier of labour control. Highly qualified migrants from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were welcomed for their labour but denied full access to the professions they trained for. Their skills were underestimated and their accents treated as disadvantages. Their upward paths were limited by silence rather than explicit exclusion. None of this was accidental. It reflected an economic landscape that valued flexibility over fairness and that maintained a racially tiered workforce because it made the model workable.

Trump’s framing fails in Aotearoa and fails in the United States as well. The pressures attributed to migrants were created by the same elites who relied on their presence while keeping them constrained. The failure was never migration. The failure was the system that relied on managed inequality.

In Aotearoa the picture is especially clear. Globalisation did not strengthen a productive economy. It expanded a property market. The gains of the neoliberal era flowed to landlords and speculative investment rather than to workers or communities. Migrants entered a labour market that had been intentionally weakened and a society increasingly shaped by rising house prices rather than rising capability. To blame them for pressures that arose from policies favouring assets over wages is to misunderstand the country’s history. The responsibility lies not with those who sought opportunity, but with the economic model that still defines Aotearoa New Zealand.