Mass Immigration is the Fourth Horseman of the Globalisation Apocalypse but the New identitarian Left is in denial about it, through a ‘politically Correct’ fear of being seen as ‘anti-immigrant’ or ‘xenophobic’. To contemplate a US border wall with Mexico, for example, is anathematised as a crime against ethnic Diversity. Consequently, the contemporary Left has no policy on border control concerning the quantity and quality of immigrants other than to let all-comers in.
An identitarian Left does not, and can not, specify a cap on immigration, or exercise any selectivity on which immigrants to admit, because it would mean saying ‘go away, we’re full’ to the unlucky arrival who is the first one over the limit and this would be ‘racist’ (especially where that threshold-breaking immigrant is a ‘person of colour’). To specify an immigration cap would be to admit that some level of discrimination is necessary (whether by criteria of country, education, English-language ability, etc.) and this is political kryptonite to an identity-worshipping Left.
The Western Left’s immigration policy is impractical, simplistic and purely moral:
A Gallup survey, conducted between 2015 and 2017, found that 758 million people (15% of the world’s adults) said they would like to move to another country permanently if they could.
640 million of these aspirant emigrants wanted to move to a First World developed country with the US being the desired destination for 158 million of these would-be emigrants (3% of the world’s adults).
The percentage of Central American adults wanting to emigrate (for work and welfare), was double this (33%) at around 10 million adults. One-third of sub-Saharan African adults would also like to leave.
Longing looks were cast at the US by 16% of adults from Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Costa Rica, or 5 million people).
Gallup subsequently surveyed all 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean whether they would ‘like to move to another country permanently if you could?”. A staggering 27% of the 450 million adults in the region said they would. Of this estimated 120 million would-be emigrants, 35%, or 42 million adults (plus their children), wanted to go to the United States. Fully 5 million said they were planning to move in the next twelve months. As the US admits (only!) one million legal immigrants each year from across the world, the illegal options for entry (including people ‘caravan’) by Latin Americans loom large. ‘Open borders’ has no way to contain this human tide.
Each and every one of these millions (or on billion people if adding in their children) would qualify under the New Left’s calculus for unimpeded entry to the West. The old left once opposed globalisation, and, by implication at least, supported border controls on people/cheap labour movement but the New Left’s abdication of this policy position in favour of the politically correct, identity politics of ‘anti-racism’ has seen the anti-globalisation baton picked up by Trump. As the globalist left is duty-bound to recoil in horror at everything the nationalist Trump does, they have become fierce opponents of putting national working class citizens’ interest first.
“Open borders” used to be the preserve of radical free market think-tanks and libertarian business circles such as, for example, the Koch-funded Cato Institute (which also advocates lifting legal restrictions on child labour) and the neo-classical economic ideologues of the Adam Smith Institute. The new identitarian Left, however, has joined the world’s capitalist class in their opposition to border control and the effects of open or highly porous borders on the national working class of their own country. For the New left, a simplistic moral and political dichotomy now prevails where it is asserted that it is right-wing to be against immigration and left-wing or progressive to be for it.
This gets it all wrong. There is nothing left wing about capitalists seeking the cheapest labour, neither is it progressive to advocate mass immigration. Mass unskilled immigration is entirely from poor Third World countries, whilst immigration of more skilled labour is largely from more developed, but still cheaper labour, countries such as India and China, for the precise reason that the source countries offer cheaper workers willing to accept low wages in gratitude for somewhat higher wages than they could have received in heir own countries.
Their influx exposes the working class in the host countries to job theft and lower wages, deteriorating social conditions, overstrained services and environmentally unsustainable population growth. Apparently, this is the position that the Left in the developed world now advocates for its own working class. And it wonders why its influence amongst its class base continues to wane as it steadily loses political market share.
The Old Left was once aligned with Western trade unions which have historically been largely opposed to mass immigration. The leftist leader of the United Farm Workers union in the US, Cesar Chavez, was a hero to the Old Left in the late 1960s for vigorously opposing employers’ encouragement of mass, low-wage immigration (especially illegal immigration) because it weakened labour’s wage-bargaining power by curtailing the ability of union labour to limit and withdraw the supply of labour.
Supporting mass immigration is a New Left policy because it is based on identity politics (and, for the reformist moderate social democratic mainstream left, because it promotes profits for the capitalist system they are committed to serving), so the New Left’s obsession with ‘anti-racism’ delivers outcomes harmful to the interests of the working class which in increasingly distant eras were the left’s natural class base. The rote response of the trade unions viz that it is better to organise with all the cheap labour immigrants rather than against them, hereby making the unions stronger, was always a lie. Thirty years ago, California construction workers were making $45 an hour are now making $11 an hour. A similar trend applies across all industries infiltrated by foreign labour, and, more generally, is one of the factors behind class wide wage stagnation.
As is the case now, the New Left welcomes mass immigration and the easy and cheap replacement of organised labour makes its harder for the labour movement to bargain for its interests. Thus have contemporary leftists, with their adoption of “open borders” advocacy, become the ‘useful idiots’ of the capitalist class by further disempowering organised labour in the First World.
The Old left also used to celebrate the Third World working class and revolutionary nationalist political upheavals but their new found fanaticism for open borders facilitates the robbery of the Third World ‘hellholes’ of their skilled professional and other human capital, and diminishes the revolutionary potential of the Third World’s working classes and the advanced skills of its professionals which would be needed to provide quality services. The brain drain from poor countries to rich ones has long been a reality and it has been a talking-point among development economists for decades. According to Foreign Policy magazine, “there are more Ethiopian physicians practising in Chicago [in 2006] than in all of Ethiopia, a country of 80 million” (these figures are from an Ethiopian-émigré website and thus their reliability may be compromised by the source’s desire to rebuke the white West for its wickedness to the Third World) but the broad point is made. No anti-Western animus can explain away the fact that, for bottom-tier First World countries, the brain drain is alive and well - between 2009 and 2015, half of Romania's doctors left that for North American or West European countries and their better-paying salaries and standards of living [Romania's brain drain: Half of Romania's doctors left the country between 2009 and 2015.]
Instead of cheering on political revolution in the Third World (and thus making immigration unnecessary), however, the New Left now advocates the atrophy of the Third World’s potential political and union muscle through the shortcut of immigration to the West. The ‘anti-racist’ Left now makes the racist assumption that black and brown people are incapable of civilisation-building, of ridding their countries of endemic levels of crime, drugs, poverty, corruption and undemocratic politics, just like the West. This irony is lost of the new Left, however.
The ‘anti-racist’ identitarian Left is further self-indoctrinated in the virtue of open borders by its refusal to accept that ‘Western Civilisation’ has many superior aspects to non-Western civilisation. The potential immigrants themselves, however, give the lie to Western civilisational superiority by wanting to come in their millions to the ‘wicked’ White West.