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The US-Mexico border has been overwhelmed. John Moore/Getty Images
The battlelines on immigration have hardened predictably. Left-leaning voters proudly display “refugees welcome” yard signs, while Donald Trump supporters cheer his pledge to implement “largest deportation operation in the history of our country”. Amid such partisan attitudes, it has become heretical to suggest that the Democrats need to be tougher on immigration.
But they must. In the long run, progressives have no choice but to acknowledge that huge infusions of migrants stress welfare systems and depress wages for low-skill workers, while damaging social cohesion. Only by accepting this, and making the case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking, can the Left reconnect with its blue-collar roots.
And perhaps it isn’t such a heretical thought. Across the world, Left-leaning political parties have fared best when they have adopted restrictive policies on migration. The reigning Social Democratic Party of Denmark has won successive elections over the last decade with no fear from the populist Right, in large part because of its refusal to take in new asylum seekers and in its efforts to reduce any net migration.
For centre-left Danes, this position isn’t so much an aberration, but an extension of the fight against neoliberalism. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalisation, mass immigration and the free movement of labour is paid for by the lower classes,” Mette Frederiksen, the SDP leader and Danish Prime Minister wrote in her autobiography.
The same can be said of the United States. It is no coincidence that the era of lowest immigration to this country, between the Thirties and Sixties, coincided with the greatest expansion of labour unions, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Reduced migration meant less infighting and greater focus on the broad public interest among the working and middle class. It was these decades that gave us the federal minimum wage as well as Medicare and Social Security, our most durable and most generous entitlement programmes.
Contemporary trends also strongly correlate. Democrats this century have won the White House only in years of decreasing migration. In 2008 and 2012, the years Barack Obama won two successive bids, immigration was down sharply. Four years ago, the Covid pandemic led to the closure of the US-Mexico border and the suspension of most visa programmes, measures that led to the fastest decline in migration on record. Of course, these weren’t the only factors, but the absence of a migration crisis sucked the wind out of the sails of Trump’s reelection that year.
More recently, the Democrat Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden, who represent two of the three districts that the Democrats held onto in Trump country, bucked their party by voting for hardline immigration enforcement and never missed an opportunity to remind voters that they disagreed with their party leaders on this issue. That’s not to say they abandoned the Left. Golden is a torchbearer of labour unions and Perez has been outspoken on breaking up corporate monopolies. But they show how the Democrats can once again become a big tent party, bringing back independent voters.
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SubscribeAlmost perfect article. My only quibble would be the focus on the specifics in the US – exactly the same has happened over here in the UK.
To me it seems that the left-leaning middle-class have developed a belief that any comment against immigration must be racist, presumably because anti-immigration sentiment in the past was often race-based. Consequently, this has become a foundation stone of their beliefs and they are unable to see any other point of view.
Remain voters who have fallen into the trap above are the best example in the UK – unable to see that the freedom of movement that the neoliberal EU insists upon is a fundamental part of the problems we face, and is not just ‘a distraction’ or a ‘dog whistle’.
As with all foolish options this will eventually fade, and they will then collectively forget that it was the ‘idiotic and racist’ leave voters that understood the situation long before they did.
The far-left only want people movement that suits them.
I’ve witnessed Twitter go mad at a single Jewish person moving to the only Jewish majority country in the world because they shouldn’t be there in their far-left minds.
As a middle class person if I move to inner east london they call me a “gentrifier” even though my grandad lived there when he was poor.
If I as an english person move to wales thats bad too as I could cause the welsh language to die out (if I ever moved to wales I would learn it though).
That said the way the UK is set up at moment, you’d have to get millions off illness benefits and into work, stop early retirement and look after our old people to ever really be able to cut immigration.
Error
Nobody can seriously argue with this.
Still in the UK the ruling leftist blob invariably equates opposition to unlimited immigration with prejudice (‘hate’) against immigrants as people. Transparently disingenuous, but it’s still working. For how long?
Interesting article, thank you. I wonder, are we living through a shift in the zeitgeist? Attitudes and beliefs that were hard to question without sounding heretical only a few months ago are becoming open to scrutiny.
Most people blame, or thank, X
In the UK focus was on illegals and processing delays etc…
However large scale migration has absolutely destroyed social cohesion in the UK and Ireland for that matter.
Lefties don’t understand that young unionised Poles came here in 00’s and tweenies not be left wing flag bearers and support their comrades, rather to earn more money for themselves and improve their language skills. Proper neoliberalism.
The left in America never had any blue collar roots. The civil war was because the republicans wanted to end slavery and the democrats wanted to keep it.
The democrats realised that if they could get ex slaves and poor whites to vote for them, they would have a loyal fan base to challenge the republicans on their own ground.
So they just did what they always do; changed history and the public fell for it.
Mind you, that doesn’t make the republicans saints, they morphed into a particularly vicious form of capitalism that is only just being addressed.
Now a lot of the billionaires that once voted republican have now taken over the democrats, the public are finally waking up. Let’s hope they are not fooled again!
The Democratic slave owners were not the Democratic Party of today. The South was Democratic because Lincoln was a Republican. Makes sense. When the Dixiecrats were faced with The Voting Rights Act and Equality Act, they bolted to the Republican Party of today.
Thought-provoking article. At least Nowrasteh was open how about how “a diverse population reduces solidarity which is good for economic growth” in his tweet. Cheap labor and abolishing welfare states have of course always been central to the neoliberal program. Also note that more people does not just mean more workers, it also means more consumers. In practice the uniparty often sugarcoated the neoliberal consensus with progressive and liberal cultural values. A synergy between right wing economics and left wing cultural values where it fits. That is not to say progressives are necessarily disingenuous but cold economic incentives are just usually present in the background.
Now, another question is whether this neoliberal “growth” strategy even works. The author mentions how the postwar period saw a lot more growth but of course we also had a baby boom. On the other hand, we do see that the productivity per worker has increased tremendously because of innovation. And there might be a lot more to come with AI. Still, the economy has also essentially been on the government lifeline since 2008 because a big part of the financialized economy appeared to be a Ponzi and perhaps still is. None of those problems really point at a lack of productivity but a system that makes little sense.
Alex Nowsratah, at the Cato Institute, is a notorious pro-immigration researcher. The Cato Institute is in favor of unlimited immigration to reduce wages. They are not neo-liberal, but completely libertarian.
That’s what I understood, but there is of course quite some overlap in this case.
I’m curious though, are they also advocating for paying back the estimated 50 trillion wealth transfer big capital received from the neoliberal nanny state using fiscal- and monetary stimulus? I’d say that if one advocates for libertarian policies they first need to make sure the game isn’t rigged.
Very sensible article. Immigration control is an inherently leftwing policy. Why can’t the modern left see this?
Maybe the common concern about immigration isn’t over jobs and wages, isn’t an ideological issue at all, but just a desire not to be ‘replaced’ in the supermarket, on the highways, at the annual block party, etc. A few Spanish speakers at your job is one thing, but if suddenly all the new hires are speaking Spanish that’s not good. Thus a gradual accumulation of new Americans, with time for them to acclimate, is sort of okay, but mass immigration is not.
As so often, the liberal vs. conservative view of the issue is off the mark. It’s much more personal than that.
Sometimes the personal is NOT political.
“If you’re an educated white-collar worker, it’s unlikely you will face direct economic competition with a migrant hailing from Venezuela or Afghanistan. ”
Very true. The competition for white collar professions is from China, India, Russia, and Japan. They are here under the OPT, H-1B, L-1, F-1, B-1, and other work visas. In the 32 years that the H-1B visa has been used extensively, the STEM workforce in the US, of native US workers, has been pretty much destroyed. Thousands of workers have been directly replaced. The OPT visa, never authorized by Congress, now gives 3-year work permits to 250,000 foreign students. US college grads have trouble getting jobs, while foreign students get jobs which not only pay well but are exempt from SS and Medicare taxes. We need to end the work visas.
You are right that American college students who majored in computer science can’t get jobs in Silicon Valley because of H-1B visas. These workers are paid less than a college graduate. It happened to my brother who was laid off by Hewlett-Packard so they could could replace him with cheaper Indian workers. To make matters worse, he had to train the Indian worker who was replacing him.
It is interesting that the Left, given a choice between improving wages for workers and undermining societies through mass displacement, prefer the latter.
All of the mania for open borders on the far left is because of anti-white racism – the woke left is essentially the racist fascism of non-whites. Liberals who are not woke, must purge these racists otherwise there’s nothing you can do to curb the excesses.
In the long run, progressives have no choice but to acknowledge that huge infusions of migrants stress welfare systems and depress wages for low-skill workers, while damaging social cohesion.
For this to happen, two things would have to happen, neither of which will: 1) the American left has to find the self-awareness it either lost or threw away and realize that its supporters are among those harmed by the policies whose consequences never affect the political class, and 2) stop seeing every single issue under the sun as a zero-sum game of “whatever the right thinks, we must think the opposite.”
Among life’s Iron Laws is that you cannot have open borders AND a welfare state, at least not for long. Municipal budgets are already being strained by the idiotic desire to accommodate millions who should not be here. The zeal behind the continued push smacks of Cloward-Piven philosophy and the goal of breaking the system from within.
Also, I wouldn’t use the New Deal and Great Society initiatives as positive things. The former created Social Security which 1) is completely off the financial rails due to DC’s mismanagement and 2) outsourced responsibility for one’s retirement years to the federal govt, creating a new type of dependency. The latter is largely responsible for the destruction of the black family and the concurrent spike in single-parent births, and the effects of both are evident in often dysfunctional urban settings.
We pay for Social Security and Medicare our entire working lives. They are not a form of dependency to the federal government.
Brilliant. New political clarity emerging from the fog of the befuddled Baby Boomer leftism and reactionary responses to it.
the era of lowest immigration to this country, between the Thirties and Sixties, coincided with the greatest expansion of labour unions, the New Deal, and the Great Society.
It was these decades that gave us the federal minimum wage as well as Medicare and Social Security, our most durable and most generous entitlement programmes.
That is an argument FOR open borders. Those policies have been budget-busting disasters and created the nanny state.
I think an appropriate volume of legal immigration is best, with vetting of individuals based on their ability to contribute to our country.