Democrats Need to be Tougher on Immigration

The future of class-based progressive reform requires an end to permissive immigration policies. Here's the left-wing case against open borders.

This commentary was published in partnership with Unherd.

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 center-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 globalization, mass immigration and the free movement of labor 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 labor 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 programs.