There’s No “Leftist” Case Against Immigration
Capital freely crosses borders — people should too.
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News about the thousands of Haitian refugees at the Texas border has dominated the national conversation in the past week. On the margins of the standard mainstream discourse about immigration reform, there has been a parallel discussion on the left about abolishing borders altogether. When radical publishing house Haymarket Books posted a tweet calling for border abolition, it sparked some controversy.
While this statement got a fairly positive response from most leftists, there was some pushback from conservatives, liberals — and even some self-identified socialists.
One person wrote that open borders “provide the bosses with an endless supply of strike-breaking labor. Not a smart move.”
This is a minority position on the left, but it still crops up often enough to merit a response.
It’s an appeal to leftist ideas like workers' rights and class struggle. And the people who take up this position consider themselves leftists, but this is hardly a leftist argument.
As much as these folks want to dress it up in socialist principles, it’s still the same tired position reactionary nativists and rightwing trade unionists have been making since the mid-19th century.
The most coherent version of this argument comes from Angela Nagle’s 2018 essay “The Left Case Against Open Borders.” Nagle cites Bernie Sanders and mangles Marx in an attempt to ground her claims in the leftist tradition.
A classic tactic of sophistry is to take a premise that everyone agrees with and then make an unjustified leap to a more controversial conclusion.
That’s exactly what Nagle does.
She starts with the idea that bosses have an interest in pitting different groups of workers against one another. This isn’t disputed on the left. Historically, it’s also true that marginalized groups like immigrants and non-whites are used in this way.
But it doesn’t logically follow that the remedy for this is strict borders enforced through violence, mass detention, family separation, and other policies designed to make the lives of immigrants miserable.
Black workers were also used as cheap labor and strikebreakers in the northern industrial centers after the Great Migration in the early 1900s. But no leftist would argue that in hindsight maybe the United States should’ve implemented internal passports like apartheid South Africa.
Our borders are no different. In practice, a closed immigration policy isn’t leftist at all — it’s white supremacist and Western chauvinist.
Immigrants and refugees are disproportionately from places in the Global South like Guatemala and Haiti.
Stripped down to its essence, Nagel and others are saying that Black, brown, and indigenous people from formerly colonized nations should be subjected to cruelty in order to protect the living standards of the majority-white workers in the imperial core.
The so-called left argument against open borders widely misses the mark in terms of both problem and the solution.
There are two fallacies here. First, there’s the assumption that immigrant labor is driving wages down. There’s not a whole lot of evidence to support that claim.
Second, there’s the assumption that the bosses need to “import workers” to drive labor costs down. This is the 21st century and capital is highly mobile. Why “import” Mexicans when you can just open a maquiladora in Mexico itself?
ICE could be a million-strong army defending a border wall 20 feet high and that’s not going to stop the mass offshoring of US jobs facilitated by free trade agreements.
To the extent that immigrants depress wages, it’s largely because they’re undocumented and are forced to work without labor protections.
There’s a simple fix for that: Give them the same rights as other workers. Make them legal. Extend the benefit of minimum wage laws. Protect their right to unionize.
Rights for immigrant workers, an end to neoliberal trade policies, and reparations for nations destroyed and destabilized by imperialism and colonialism — these are socialist answers to the root causes and effects of immigration
Workplace raids, concentration camps, and deportations are not.
Any politics that privileges the interests of a national working class is by definition not leftist. Socialism is a historical fight for justice and the liberation of all people. No exceptions.
