Image by Nitish Meena.
Journalist Lee Fang has an admirable track record for exposing authoritarian tendencies within the Democratic Party and in progressive spaces. His work is often a service to these institutions, who are seldom grateful for his critical exposés, and Fang has often faced harsh blowback online after much uncharitable misreading of his work. Yet his recent piece on immigration, “The progressive case against immigration: Open borders threaten American Labour”, prominently featured in UnHerd’s online platform, marches to a very different drum: it accompanies a conventional and lazy thinking that only pretends to challenge establishment orthodoxies, when it in practice props up the short-sightedness and narcissistic solipsism that is characteristic of American exceptionalism.
Fang writes “it has become heretical to suggest that the Democrats” (here one can swap that American party’s name for any other progressive center-left party in the West) “need to be tougher on immigration. But they must.(…) 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”. Fang invokes Sanders’ famous, oft-parroted statement about open borders being a concoction of the Koch Brothers and falls back on familiar arguments about how migration stresses national social security systems, while tempting employers to depress wages. He points out that a spokesperson of the Cato institute celebrates how the increased diversity brought about by immigration generates alienation between workers which damages social cohesion and solidarity. Absent is a deeper traditionally leftist analysis of how capitalism and its propagandists actively foster the alienation between groups.
Fang then goes on to cite Danish social democrats as exemplary of a sea-change in left attitudes towards migration: Denmark’s social democrats were recently able to win back some of their lost popularity after having agreed to right-wing populist’s demands on immigration, working these into their centrist program. Fang concludes that curtailing immigration simply forms an elementary part of the global fight against neoliberalism: so, today’s desperate migrants and asylum-seekers are but the swarming harbingers of globalization; or they are canaries in the coal mine, warning of a crumbling social welfare system. Stressing the need for this consensus on immigration, Fang curiously uses figures from the New Deal United States, alleging a correlation between lessened migration and the growth that occurred between the 1930s and 60s. In this example he completely obliterates and strips away the historical context that allowed a postwar North American economic and procreative boom. He inverts cause and psychological effect, by esteeming the unfortunate result of new middle class prosperity—people who emerge from poverty tend to become protective of what they have gained, and suspicious towards have-nots—as the very motor of prosperity.
“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.” No mention of the second world war having then destroyed Europe, China and the USSR, leaving America as the lone standing industrial giant that inherited the reins of the world economy. Fang also leaves out that, after a maimed Europe lost the stranglehold over its vast colonies in the aftermath of the WW2, the ebbing away of a weakened European imperium led to the rise of post-colonial nationalisms in Africa, Asia and the Americas. Just then an era of nation-building and industrialization had begun, as states like Nehru’s India and Suharto’s Indonesia could provide unprecedented opportunities for growth and employment—locally.
Meanwhile, Argentina under the Perons, roughly coinciding with the New Deal’s timeline, returned to an open-borders policy and welcomed immigrant laborers as the economy industrialized, abandoning the neo-feudal agrarian way of life. Not even the liberal economists and historians who malign Peronism and who cheered on Milei, would deny that was the best moment for unions in 20th century South America.
Fang is elsewhere an outstanding critic of the neocon agenda. But his immigration piece leaves out any interrelation between US exceptionalist foreign policy, and the historic boom in migration rates.
Let’s look more closely at some roots of the crisis impacting the US Southern border.
According to the BBC, “recent figures show that over the past financial year the most common nationality encountered at the southern border were Mexicans.” Well, no surprises there: after all, the US shares its border with Mexico. But then we find another, much more far-flung nationality, whose overrepresentation at the border was historically unprecedented: “This was followed by nearly a quarter of a million Venezuelans”. These figures refer to “encounters”, meaning foreigners discovered by authorities, rather than those who were able to transgress unnoticed. The real number tallies higher.
The vastness of Venezuelan migration-flows is incomprehensible unless we take into account how US foreign and economic policy imposed Spartan sanctions on an underdeveloped Caribbean state. The embargo, which has orchestrated an unprecedented scarcity of food and medicine for Venezuela, is among the leading factors that have driven 7.7 million Venezuelans out of their country’s borders since 2015, to seek survival elsewhere.
Cuba’s maritime frontier with the US constitutes “the other Southern border crisis”. Trump and Biden’s near-identical foreign policies of economic strangulation of Cuba, along with the inefficacy of Díaz-Canel, helped produce the circumstances in which, since 2021, 5% of island’s population, including much of its talented young professionals, have joined the mass exodus to Guess Where.
A quite different, more insidious economic regimen dominates Puerto Rico, where roughly 11.2% of the population have left the island for the mainland in the past decade ever since the Obama administration passed the PROMESA act, which thwarted the island’s self-governing status and imposed a financial oversight board, popularly called the “junta”, to enforce austerity measures impacting infrastructure, health, education, and employment—spurring the largest exodus of islanders since the second world war.
Nowadays the sole demographic abandonment as large as Venezuela’s is that of Ukraine, with over six million having fled since 2022. The Russian invasion was unjust, and cruel. But it was not unprovoked: Biden’s and NATO’s active derailment of diplomatic aid have ramped up war, which has human consequences in the form of refugee flows.
Of course, American foreign policy cannot be uniquely blamed for the largest refugee flows in living memory. But it is puerile and irresponsible to ignore that is it a contributing factor. Particularly after the Syrian wars of the Obama tenure, the war machine, alongside Western financial firms like the IMF play outsized roles in destabilizing regions and propelling vaster and ever-increasing numbers of people towards doing what is rational, which is to leave when faced with sanctions, scarcity and war.
Before promoting the Danish social democrats’ restrictive immigration policy as a recipe for success, Fang would do well to more closely scrutinize the Dutch Labor party’s less promising example in the Netherlands—another North European welfare state comparable to Denmark and Sweden, therefore also automatically admired by Sandernistas. In recent decades, no other party in the Netherlands had striven more to distance itself from its association in the public eye with multiculturalism and the lax migration policies that existed prior to 9/11.
The Dutch Labor Party reinvented itself as a leading architect of new detention and deportation centers, a veritable prison warden, in the hope of winning back working class voters—even as it refused to break its bear-hug embrace of neoliberalism. Dutch spin doctors also picked up on tabloid media’s indicators that a working class vox populi was calling for its traditional representatives to get tough on Southern European countries like Greece in the EU parliament, by subjecting these to humiliating austerity. As a result of pursuing these reactionary methods and amping up xenophobia, the Dutch Labor Party was surprised by the most cataclysmic defeat in its history in 2017 and has since then failed to reenter the electoral map. That was the price of a traditionally pro-worker party having alienated workers—a population which includes immigrants—as it lost its final, fading echo of internal coherence.
Northern European welfare states like Denmark and Sweden, misunderstood as “socialist” and romanticized from afar by Jacobin-contributors, have always featured an ethnocentric, communitarian and insular character. The postwar proliferation of the social welfare-state model was pursued and tolerated by Europe’s ruling classes as a necessary, though uncomfortable concession for the duration of the Cold War: the robust nannying state provided a mechanism with which to satisfy and assuage the rebellious energies of workers who would otherwise feel tempted to go Soviet.
Since the dissolution of the USSR, paraphrasing neoliberalism’s sorceress Thatcher, no “alternative” survives—therefore, ruling elites fear no danger in further dismantling the social state’s last vestiges. That geopolitical endgame we call “neoliberalism”, which is otherwise neither new nor liberal.
Do immigrants bear the responsibility for the perpetuation of neoliberal ideology, which shrinks public spending and public space everywhere? To the contrary, mass-migration is symptomatic. The guarantor of the neoliberal impasse is American unipolar dominion over world affairs, enforced by its neoconservative foreign policy, and through institutions like the IMF that punish whichever dissenting countries attempt to grow in ways that would enable more opportunity at home. Any critique of neoliberalism which characterizes immigrants as the locust-like agents of the neoliberal plague, rather than as the disaster’s human consequences, has grossly misread the heart of the public. Refugees fleeing scarcity and war are also the shipwrecks of neoliberalism, even if the countries they deserted had attempted (and failed) to subvert the neoliberal model. A “left” that attempts to indulge the most primitive xenophobic impulses of domestic workers, who are suspicious of those worse off than them, is a left that sacrifices its integral internationalist heritage and identity—and that’s what got us leftists here, into these doldrums of failure and irrelevance in the first place.
North American and European parties can temporarily indulge what they believe is the vox populi and build all the walls they want. Medieval walls once held back invading armies and their battering rams, centuries before aviation. Such fortifications as Trump’s wall and Biden’s grotesquely renamed “fence” are largely psychological and anachronistic. These gestures play upon atavistic, ancient memories and instincts in humankind, rather than offering real solutions to contemporary planetary crises.
There is nothing new in this resort to demagoguery among the European centrist parties which have for the previous decade given a much more generous treatment to pro-Orban anti-immigrant parties than to the left. In France, Macron’s recent spectacle—blocking the left-leaning election winner, while attempting to court Lepen—case in point.
Ultimately, any war on immigration is like the war on drugs: it’s a behavior that cannot be utterly stopped, but anti-immigrant politicians are attractive to neoliberals because any implementation of their politics makes for more defenseless undocumented workers inhabiting a legal limbo in which they are rendered more exploitable and expendable.
Europe’s demagogues of the ancien center-left forgot that the immigration-related chaos is but a spillover effect of geopolitical collapse throughout the world. Europe’s vacuous, docile foreign policy—that of yes-man to America with nil diplomatic resolve—only waters the roots of these problems. Building more walls is a way of narrowing one’s vista of a deteriorating planet, by blocking out the sight of whatever’s awry in the outside world.
Let’s pick a better scapegoat than the immigrant: Western agribusiness. American, and especially European agricultural policies privilege industrial farming while devastating family farms in Europe and in the Asian and African countries who want to access Western markets. The EU’s subsidized food industry blocks access for small farmers around the world to the major markets, leading to immiserated peasants choosing to migrate to the banlieues where they cannot integrate. The EU’s multi-billion payrolls to numerous Mediterranean dictatorships in exchange for violently suppressing migrant flows constitutes yet another self-harming strategy.
The welfare state—first implemented by Mussolini, Peron and Hitler in the 20th century—always contained some inherently reactionary structures built into its design; these aspects of the benefactor-government may have been more of a feature of that blueprint, rather than a bug. Foucault was posthumously criticized for having observed that reality before the triumph of neoliberalism. But that observation alone is not itself a condemnation of government, nor is it a justification for the brutal erosion of the public sectors the world over since the Berlin wall fell. If a global assault on the welfare state began with American unipolarity after the Cold War, then it’s clear what it will take to end it. The only antidote to neoliberalism is more genuine internationalism, which is incompatible with anti-immigrant faux common sense.
A vanguard of contemporary pundits who call themselves “left” have forgotten that the true meaning of socialism was once, and still is, inseparable from internationalism and geopolitical consciousness. It is especially disappointing when a writer as accomplished as Lee Fang joins the vanguard of intellectually mediocre figures like the quasi-Evangelical Sohrab Amhari of Compact Magazine or Newsweek’s Batya-Ungar Sargon who describe all sympathies towards immigrants such as themselves as aristocratic highfalutin “wokeness”.
