Inside Marco Rubio's diplomatic disaster

In late November, Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent instructions to US diplomats directing them to sell Trump’s immigration policies to allies who don’t want them.

In a barely reported move, Rubio instructed American diplomats serving Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada to start “raising concerns” about “immigrant crime” with foreign leaders, while encouraging them to adopt harsher entry restrictions.

Rubio’s directive suggests he is unaware that Canadian, and most European leaders, regard Trump as an undisciplined moron. Unable to read the global room, Rubio instructed American diplomats to “regularly engage host governments” on immigrant crime, and to ‘report back’ on allies who seem “overly supportive of immigrants.”

The goal, Rubio said, is to build foreign support for Trump’s “reform policies related to migrant crime, defending national sovereignty, and ensuring the safety of local communities.”

The result, most likely, will be a collective eye roll.

Rubio is exporting lies

Trump, Fox News, and hard right politicians like Viktor Orban have built their brands around fear mongering, portraying immigrants as dangerous criminals. But educated leaders outside the right wing echo chamber instantly recognize these claims as false.

In 2024, the National Institute of Justice released figures comparing arrest rates between undocumented immigrants and native born US citizens, tracked over a seven year period. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born citizens for violent and drug crimes, and at a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes. For homicide, undocumented immigrants had the lowest arrest rates throughout the entire study, averaging less than half the rate of US-born citizens. Another multi-year studyfrom Stanford shows the same, with immigrants 30% less likely overall to commit crimes than US born natives.

Studies in Europe show similar results. In Germany, where Elon Musk’s darling, the far-right Alternative for Germany party claims that “violent gang rapes” and “knife crimes” by immigrants are “skyrocketing,” media outlets' fact-checking teams showed those claims were false. In early 2025, researchers found no correlation between immigration and crime rates in Italy, Germany, the UK, France and Belgium. The same results were reported in August for Canada and Australia.

Most importantly, disinformation is more tightly controlled in Europe, and the news media is not allowed to fearmonger the way Fox News does, so when Trump tries to export his playground bully diplomacy, members of the public are more skeptical.

Trump is trying to export economic failures

Setting aside perceptions, foreign leaders are aware, even if Trump is not, that his anti-immigrant push has hurt global and local economies.

In the US, no sector has been hurt more by Trump’s anti-immigration push than farmers. American farmers today say their #1 challenge isn’t the weather, equipment costs, or even the mortgage- it’s finding enough labor. With over 40% of American farm workers lacking legal status, people who used to do the heavy lifting are now staying home in fear while crops rot in the fields.

When ICE started raiding farms earlier this year, a large California farmer told Reuters that around 70% of the migrant workforce stopped coming to work, which meant “70% of your crop doesn’t get picked.” She also said out loud what Trump refuses to admit: “Most Americans don’t want to do this (backbreaking) work.”

Although ICE’s effect on food supplies will take more time to assess, immigration policies that ignore regional labor requirements are a long-standing problem. Several years ago, the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association begged Congress to expand their accessible labor pool as the dairy industry faces “an acute national labor crisis” without immigrant labor. In 2025, farm labor, and the dairy labor crisis, have worsened.

Industry leaders in Europe say the same. Migrant workers are as crucial to construction, hospitality, and agriculture in the EU as they are in the US. Immigrants in Europe also comprise over 50% of the skilled workforce in technology. Overall, immigrant labor has become more crucial, not less, as Europe faces declining population trends.

Bad timing

Emphasizing foreign ‘sovereignty’ in their anti-immigrant efforts, Rubio and Trump somehow miss that exporting Trump’s xenophobia, and dictating its ignorant spread, doesn’t respect our allies’ sovereignty, it offends it.

Trump and Rubio seem to project their own Fox News-based myopia onto the world, assuming foreign audiences accept their fact-free propaganda as blindly as MAGA does. But they don’t. Fox couldn’t hack the UK’s accuracy-in-the-news legal requirement and stopped trying to broadcast there several years ago. In result, EU audiences are better equipped to discern fact from fiction than far right audiences in the US.

As the administration calls for a travel ban on entire countries full of “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies,” Rubio’s timing could not be worse. He is pushing Trump’s hatred just when EU allies are credibly accusing him of blackmail, and South America leaders are accusing the administration of murder.

Rubio obviously misapprehends how little regard Europeans and Canadians have for Trump’s uninformed bellicosity. Poor timing on his immigration cable alone suggests our allies will soon start letting his calls go into voicemail.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.