US President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” border strategy of tearing apart immigrant families and throwing toddlers in cages (later revised) has deflected attention away from the growing opposition to immigrants in Europe and how his administration is actively promoting this viciously poisonous campaign in the continent. For example, to ward off criticism about his policy, Trump said immigrants are indulging in crimes not only in the US but in Germany as well. On Twitter, he claimed that crime in Germany had risen because of immigration. He also claimed that immigrants illegally come to US to kill and rape and steal.

Of course, Trump is not the first US leader to blame immigrants for the crimes they did not commit. Refugees were blamed for a bomb explosion outside the JP Morgan Bank at 23 Wall St. in New York City on Sept. 16, 1920. But despite several investigations (the last concluding in 1944), no one has been held responsible for what was the largest terrorist attack in US history at that time.

The only difference is that in America, Mexican and Muslim immigrants have taken the place of largely Jewish and Catholic people from southern and Eastern Europe while the continent is turning increasingly hostile toward Muslims and Africans. From Hungary to Austria to Italy, right-wing parties are making electoral gains by drawing on anger about migration.

In less than two years, the continent’s social-democratic parties have suffered historic losses in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.

European voters, alarmed at a sustained influx of refugees and migrants, have transformed a series of recent elections into popular referenda on immigration.

The results are there for all to see. Italy introduced its immigration policy last week by turning away a boat carrying more than 600 migrants from Africa. The staunchly anti-immigrant League party, led by Matteo Salvini, is the power behind the new Italian coalition. In April, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán won a landslide victory on an anti-immigration platform. The focus of his campaign was the “threat” to “Christian values” posed by Muslim immigrants. In Slovenia, former Prime Minister Janez Janša’s right-wing opposition is set to form the next government. Taking a cue from Trump, Janša ran an anti-immigrant “Slovenia first” campaign.

Germany’s leading politicians have scraped together a truce according to which Chancellor Angela Merkel should reach an agreement with the country’s European partners to limit immigration. Meanwhile, her Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, a strong opponent of the chancellor’s compassionate approach to asylum seekers, has said he will start turning back any migrant whose asylum process is pending in another European Union country, or who has been registered as arriving there. Austria too is turning its face against migrants. The government in Vienna remains one of the loudest voices in Europe for securing the bloc's external border.

All this is forcing center-left parties, especially leftists, in several key countries to change or rethink long-held positions on migration.

We can’t blame Europe’s center-left parties if they call for effective limits on immigration. Otherwise, they will become more and more irrelevant and the field will be dominated by those who oppose immigration on grounds of nationality, ethnicity or religion. They can ignore the statement of Trump’s new ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell that he is trying to “empower” right-wing figures across Europe only at their peril.

Immigrants on their part need to listen to the criticism coming from well-meaning people. They should be sensitive to local customs and feelings.

NGOs and social organizations working among Muslim immigrants should realize that one complaint against them is they create “parallel societies” in the European countries that receive them. The US and those European parties who are against immigrants, especially Muslims, should realize that some of the Western countries are responsible for the unstable conditions which force the Middle Eastern people to flee their homes.