The Racialised Sexual Complex of the Immigration Obsessed White Man: Centuries of Sexual Myths Driving Border Politics

In recent months, anti-immigration sentiments have become prevalent throughout the Western world. From the United Kingdom to the United States to France to Spain, politicians, the media and activists have highlighted the need for controlled borders. The front pages of newspapers are filled with images of people arriving in boats, while deliberations within the political chambers are skewed towards immigration, and graphs of rising immigration are projected onto the television screens.

At face value, it would appear that social, cultural and economic factors drive the Western anti-immigration sentiments; however, in reality, there is more to this emotional response, which is rarely mentioned in the white-washed Western media. The underlying motivation for the anti-immigration sentiment is a racialised sexual panic that the Black and brown man wants to snatch the white woman from the grasp of what I call the Immigration-Obsessed White Man (IOWM). The IOWM is sexually insecure and considers Black and brown men a threat because he has been fed the unfounded belief about their sexual potency. To put it succinctly, he suffers from a racialised sexual complex.

Due to the never-ending discussion on immigration, hysteria has reached unprecedented levels in Western capitals. Those in favour of immigration control cite various reasons for their stance. They argue that uncontrolled immigration leads to criminality, terrorism, strain on housing and healthcare, lack of job opportunities for the locals and overcrowded schools. They also highlight that it contributes to cultural erosion as the newly settled migrants refuse to assimilate. In addition, they believe that immigrants are a drain on the economy and milk the system by refusing to work while collecting welfare benefits.

As a result of these anti-immigration sentiments, protests have erupted in several Western countries. In July 2025, anti-immigration riots took place in Spain in which North Africans were targeted, while the United Kingdom has witnessed people protesting in front of hotels housing black and brown asylum seekers. Since mid-2025, these protests have occurred in several UK cities such as Epping, Bristol, Exeter, Tamworth, Cannock, Nuneaton, Liverpool, Wakefield and Newcastle upon Tyne. There has also been increased racist violence inflicted on Black and brown people in the UK. Hostile rhetoric coming from the political class and the media is fueling these attacks. Paradoxically, while crimes committed by non-whites are racialised by the media, crimes committed by whites are not racialised.

Western politicians are proposing several measures to control immigration. In the UK, Nigel Farage has proposed pulling Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights so that he can deport 600,000 migrants. The US government has entered into third-country agreements with Uganda and Eswatini to receive deported Americans.

There is a selective anti-immigration sentiment taking place in the West, whereby immigration from white populated countries provokes a lesser emotional response relative to immigration from Black and brown populated countries. In the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many Ukrainians fled their country to various European capitals. In response, the United Kingdom introduced the Ukraine Family Visa and Homes for Ukraine Sponsorship schemes. Under the Ukrainian Scheme, those granted permission could live, work and study in the UK and access public funds for up to 3 years. In contrast, the UK populace is not as welcoming to those fleeing wars taking place in Black and brown populated countries. In the UK, immigrants from the so-called old Commonwealth (white Commonwealth) countries, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, are more acceptable than immigrants from Black and brown Commonwealth countries. While the former are often described as expatriates, the latter are dismissed as immigrants. In the USA, the Trump administration's recent immigration clampdown appears to be targeting non-white immigrants, as evidenced by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid targets.

The IOWM, who are the key agitators of this anti-immigration sentiment, come in different political colours and cut across the class divide. Some of the most prominent IOWMs include Nigel Farage, Donald Trump, Keir Starmer, Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Robert Jenkins, Richard Tic, Rupert Lowe and Nick Fuentes. Farage has linked sexual assaults of British women to migrants, claiming, "An Afghan male has a 22 times more likely chance of being convicted of rape than somebody born in this country," and that "40% of sexual assaults in London over the course of the last five years have been committed by those born overseas." According to recent polls, Nigel Farage, whose fiery anti-immigration rhetoric has resonated with a large swath of the British populace, is within touching distance of snatching the keys to No. 10 Downing Street from Sir Keir Starmer. Elon Musk has been vocal about rape and assaults committed by migrants and has expressed his views on the X platform. However, he remains silent when cases of sexual assaults perpetrated by white men are made public. While these IOWM leaders are on top of the Western anti-immigration totem pole, they are backed by thousands of other IOWMs. Black and brown males are the primary targets of attacks by anti-immigration agitators, who are predominantly white men.

The history books can help us understand the rationale behind the IOWM's hysteria. To justify slavery and colonialism, Western scientists, anthropologists, doctors, and philosophers came up with pseudo-scientific racial theories. These racial theories, which were prevalent between the 17th century and early 20th century, argued that there was a hierarchy of races in which white people were at the top and Black people at the bottom. A Swedish physician, Carl Linnaeus, described blacks as sly, lazy, negligent and governed by caprice. Samuel Morton, an American anthropologist, classified races based on skull size. He argued that Europeans had large brains, signifying high intellectual capabilities, while blacks had the smallest and lowest intellectual capabilities. Carl Vogt, a polygenist evolutionist, claimed that the white race was a different species relative to the Black race and that Black people were related to apes.

The white power structure has developed several myths about Black and brown men's sexual powers, which have persisted since the time of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Mandingo myth was created when the white slave owners claimed that Black men were hypersexual and primitive. Because of this, they regarded black men as breeding animals or studs whose function was to move from plantation to plantation impregnating Black women to produce the next generation of slaves. The white slaver believed that Black men were a threat to white women and would get apprehensive whenever he left his wife behind during his travels. After the abolition of slavery, the Mandingo Myth morphed into the Black brute and Black rapist myth. According to these myths, the Black men had overdeveloped genitals, an excessive sex drive and were on the prowl to rape white women. During Colonial rule in India, Muslim men were portrayed as sexual predators and licentious. Besides describing black and Indian men with racialised sexual tropes, Western colonialists also used racialised sexual tropes against Arabs, who were dismissed as hyper sexual men who lusted after white women.

With the advent of television and the movie screen, the Black brute and Black rapist myth spread in Jim Crow America. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation, directed by D. W. Griffith became a box office success as it was screened to millions of Americans. The film depicted a scene where Gus, a Black man (actually a white actor in blackface), tried to rape Flora, a white woman. The movie created such an emotional response that in one of the cinemas where it was screened, a white man brought out his gun and began shooting at the screen to save Flora. It was the first movie to be screened in the White House, where it was watched by President Woodrow Wilson, his family and members of his cabinet. The film also contributed to the popularity of the Ku Klux Klan and justified lynching, which was prevalent during the Jim Crow era. Another film which caricatured Black men as animalistic, oversexualised brutes was the King Kong movie released in 1933. In the film King Kong, the giant gorilla is a metaphor for the Black man who wants a blonde white woman. Ultimately, King Kong was killed, and the blonde white woman reunited with her white lover. The Tarzan movie is another example in which Black men are portrayed as threats to white womanhood.

Due to the white man's fear of the so-called hyper sexual black man, he has often resorted to racial violence to tame the black man. In Jim Crow America, lynching was the go-to method for "Putting the black man in his place." White men justified lynching Black men on the grounds that they were brutes who wanted to assault white women. The mere accusation of assaulting a white woman or making a pass at her was an automatic death sentence for Black men. Many of these accusations were fabricated. One of the most high-profile lynching cases was that of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was accused in 1955 of whistling and flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. The woman's husband and his brother abducted Emmet Till at night, beat him, mutilated his body and after shooting him in the head, they threw his corpse into the river. Till's killers, who were initially arrested, were eventually released, and in 2017, sixty-two years after Till's murder, Bryant recanted her testimony. The public lynching of Black people was a public spectacle in white America, where white men, along with their wives and children, brought food and picnic baskets for the lynching party. People would take pictures with a lynched person, and lynching postcards were marketed. Sometimes, white men took the genitals of lynched Black men home as souvenirs.

Because white men felt that Black men had excessive sexual potency, they often resorted to castrating Black men to strip them of their masculinity. White slavers sometimes castrated slaves who tried to flee the plantation. This was done publicly to serve as a warning to other slaves who wanted to consider escaping. During the Jim Crow era, Black men who were accused of sexual offences against white women were castrated and then hanged from a tree or lamppost. By castrating Black men, the white men were able to assert their control over Black men and allay their anxieties regarding the Black men's so-called sexual power.

The curious case of Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion, also helps us understand the racialised sexual complex confronting the modern-day Immigration Obsessed White Man. In 1910, Jack Johnson defeated James Jeffries in the fight of the century. In response to his victory, riots broke out in several cities throughout America. Due to his exploits in the boxing ring, Johnson became one of the most popular Black people in America. Despite living during Jim Crow America, Johnson was romantically linked to many white women. He wrote in his biography, "My lot henceforth would be cast only with white women." During his lifetime, he married three white women. Due to Johnson's interest in white women, white America was enraged by his attitude. In 1913, he was convicted for violating the White-Slave Traffic Act because he transported a white woman for "immoral purposes" across state lines. He was sentenced to one year's imprisonment. However, he fled the USA and was in exile for seven years. Eventually, he returned and was imprisoned. President Trump granted Johnson a presidential pardon in 2018.

Franz Fanon, the Martinique psychiatrist and Pan Africanist, detailed the psychological framework behind the racialised sexual complex of the Immigration Obsessed White Man in his groundbreaking book, Black Skin, White Mask. According to Fanon, "The white man is convinced that the Negro is a beast; if it is not the length of the penis, then it is the sexual potency that impresses him." He argued that the white man sees the black man as the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions. He also noted that there is a general belief among white men that "A white woman who has had a Negro lover finds it difficult to return to white men." According to Fanon, the racial jealousy emanating from white men is what produces the crimes of racism.

To appreciate the Immigration Obsessed White Man's racialised sexual panic towards the Black and brown man, one also needs to examine how historically white men perceived white women relative to Black women. During slavery, Jim Crow and colonial times, the white woman was idealised as a symbol of purity and seen to be fragile. They were also viewed as the property of white men who had to be protected to save the white race from contamination by the hyper sexual Black man. In contrast, the white man showed no mercy to the Black woman. Unlike white women, who were protected, the black woman was objectified and subjected to racial violence. Black women were described by their enslavers as Jezebels with an insatiable appetite for sex. The slave owners would routinely rape them. If the enslaver felt they were insubordinate, he would get the foreman to strip the women naked and have them publicly flogged. Pregnant black women were not spared. According to Malcolm X during his talk about Afro American history, the enslaver "Used to take a Black woman who would be pregnant and tie her up by her toes, let her be hanging head down, and they would take a knife and cut her stomach open, let that Black unborn child fall out, and then stomp its head in the ground." Black women were also forced to breed so their slave masters could have more slaves.

The declining fertility in the West has also amplified the racialised sexual panic exhibited by the IOWM. According to a Lancet research, Western Europe's total fertility rate (TFR) is projected to reduce from 1.53 in 2021, to 1.44 in 2050 and 1.37 in 2100. This is way below the 2.1 TFR needed to maintain a stable population. The report also states that 1 in 2 babies born in 2100 would come from Africa. A study published by Human Reproduction revealed that between 1973 and 2011, men from the Western countries of Australia and New Zealand, as well as countries in North America and Europe, experienced a 52.4% reduction in sperm count. This has triggered an alarm in the IOWM community. Elon Musk has been concerned about declining fertility in the so-called developed world. In 2022, he wrote on X, "A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilisation faces by far." In response to Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson tweeted, "Population collapse is the problem, not overpopulation." The IOWM is concerned that, with the population of white countries declining, the black race could end up replacing the white race. This is also the thinking behind the Great Replacement Theory being debated in Western societies. Ironically, while one white man is introducing an 8-Year Hormonal IUD for African women, another white man is encouraging American women to procreate.

The fear of Black and brown men commingling with white women has now reached elevated levels in the West. As people flee persecution and war from far-flung places to the West, the Immigration Obsessed White Man believes his worst nightmare is coming to reality. While not all white men are fixated on immigration, a few are; likewise, not all Black and brown men are fixated on white women, but there are some Black celebrities and politicians in the West who, like Jack Johnson, are fixated on white women. In the UK, some Black Premiership footballers are frequently seen in the company of blonde white women. The image of a 6-foot-tall black player strolling hand in hand with a blonde white woman strikes fear and rage in the IOWM, who predicts that if immigration is not controlled, this trend will prevail throughout the country.

As the IOWM becomes more enraged, there is a risk to Black and brown people living in the West, irrespective of their passport colour, social standing, political affiliation or interracial marital status. However, instead of venting his anger on immigrants, the IOWM needs to look inward and ask some hard questions as to why there is an uptick in Black and brown immigration. If the French, British, German, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish colonialists had not left the shores of their countries to invade the Global South and impose their will on the colonies, would there have been a high level of black and brown migration in the West today? Are the migratory flows from Iraq (following the 2003 invasion), Afghanistan (after the 2001 invasion), Libya (since the 2011 invasion), Syria and Yemen, amid civil wars that saw Western involvement from 2011 and 2015, respectively, and Zimbabwe not linked to wars, interventions, and sanctions created by the West? If the unholy trinity of IMF, World Bank and the WTO established by the West had not prescribed neo-colonial economic policies on the Global South throughout the 21st century, would there have been increased immigration from Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Pakistan and Ghana?

Finally, if the Immigration-Obsessed White Man wants to have peace of mind, he should unlearn and deprogramme his brain from the unfounded racial tropes about Black men, which have been passed down from generation to generation and rid himself of his racialised sexual insecurity.

Selah.

Ahmed Olayinka Sule is a Nigerian writer, financial analyst and documentary filmmaker based in London. He can be reached at [email protected] and @Alatenumo