People hold placards during a protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, in September.Themba Hadebe/The Associated Press

Richard Poplak is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker based in Johannesburg and Toronto.

Once, not so long ago, Africa was a place to take stuff from. Now, it’s a place to dump stuff in. “The West,” whatever that means these days, doesn’t seem to see the continent as a place, or even as a market, so much as an idea.

The idea is that Africa is flat (in the Thomas Friedman-ian sense of the term), a tabula rasa that alternately maintains and threatens Western stability and supremacy. That there is no Western stability any longer means ominous things for Africa: It is, in the minds of European and North American policy makers, a garburator for the stuff the West doesn’t want.

Which is to say, foreign migrants.

By way of example, on Nov. 5, 19 West Africans deportees from the United States arrived in Ghana. They were placed in a hotel, and poof! – they disappeared. Their lawyers have lost track of them; most, if not all, were not Ghanaian nationals.

Opinion: The moment the postcolonial domination of Africa finally ended

This, by the way, was not an anomaly. It’s policy. The second Trump administration has scaled up a practice that has been enthusiastically embraced by far-right governments across the developed world. Many of these governments won office by running on an anti-immigration platform – from their perspective, they’re simply fulfilling their mandates. In doing so, they’re both submitting to and driving the fact that geopolitics has been entirely reshaped on the back of migrancy.

Brexit in the United Kingdom, which ushered in nearly 10 years of unmitigated political chaos, was entirely premised on England for the English. Following its adoption under the shambolic idiocy of Boris Johnson (remember him?), it found its apotheosis in a scheme to deport migrants to Rwanda, at a cost to the government of almost half-a-billion dollars before a single person was placed on a plane. (It’s worth noting here........

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