What's alarming is that a rising alignment of certain left-right values outside of intersectionality is potentially permanent and real, not just a trick of the light caused by social-media noise and distortion weaponized by big players.
You are right, Flick. This is going to be the pivotal question over the upcoming years. The immigration issue was already decisive for Trump's campaign, and that campaign was game-changing, so the urgent question is how to respond to it.
Florian is right, Nagle is a European Social Democrat, and Frank is right too, her viewpoint is going to be a real problem. However all her arguments are totally serious, and if no one can do better, then the center-left will be stuck with a losing version of a nationalist argument.
What's wrong with nationalism? ask the social democrats. Citizenship is based on rights and responsibilities. If citizens do not have the right to be protected against the wage competition fostered by neoliberal open-border policies, they will not accept the responsibility of paying taxes for social programs. If elections cannot be won and taxes cannot be collected, then there is no strong social democratic government to support weaker governments via development aid and coherent international policies. The result, say the social democrats, is that the developing countries will never be able to achieve higher living standards and lift their people out of poverty. So they conclude that open borders are politically impossible in developed democracies, and even worse for the peripheral countries--and that last is actually Nagle's main point, which she illustrates with her own country, Ireland, which according to her has been devastated by the emigration of the best and the brightest during periods of economic downturn.
It is true that the growing exploitation of illegal immigrant labor has been a factor of downward pressure on wages throughout the neoliberal period, along with outsourcing and automation, and that has continued whatever side has been in power. The resulting inequalities have been used to great political advantage by the right, for sure. However, the flood of refugees overwhelming developed-country borders is going to be permanent going forward, because of climate change on one hand, and also because the structural inequality of neoliberal free trade has already broken down any chance of egalitarian social relations in many countries. Where the US is concerned, the continuing illegality of drugs and the consequently inflated market for them, plus the quasi-legal exportation of arms, has contributed to the growth of extremely destabilizing gang warfare across Mexico and Central America, which is not a myth or something that can just be glossed over. All of this to say that insecurity caused by massive immigration is no mere fantasy.
But here's the thing. If fences and militarization of the border is all we can do in the face of increasingly disastrous conditions to the south, then we will turn into permanently fascist and racist countries, for whom non-citizens are not human beings. The large amounts of people living illegally throughout the developed countries, plus the large amounts of people who are legal, but look and talk just the same as those without papers, will lead to violence far beyond the border fence. It will lead to a permanent police state and an acceptance of constant military, police and civilian brutality, whose targets can be varied at will, to include whomsoever may be judged deviant. The business-as-usual approach of the Clintonian Democrats, and to only a slightly lesser extent of the Deporter-in-Chief Obama, heads straight in this direction, as do current policies in Europe. We need to change the neoliberal policies, but it is far too late in the game to do that by some kind of social-democracy-in-one-country and for white people only.
In the US, the people have spoken at the midterm elections and the Nagle option has not been taken. The energy of the moment is solidarity with minorities against oppression, plus social services for everyone. However, letting this decline into tolerant multiculturalism with anti-police rhtetoric plus an equally tacit acceptance of neoliberal free trade is imho a losing policy. In fact, were it not for the tremendous fear of Trump, I think even the current level of left-wing support for illegal immigrants would be a losing policy. We must not make the Merkel mistake, ie, a momentarily popular generosity that proves politically unviable over the middle term. We have a chance in the US to do better than that right now, and it is probably the only chance.
There is a way forward. I totally agree with everything that is said in the Socialist register article about how new immigrants strengthen the union movement: look at the Fight for Fifteen in the US and all that it has accomplished. Only real progress in the abysmal conditions facing workers today can pull citizens away from the otherwise rational argument that you would be a lot better off economically with a big bad fence at the border. But that grassroots, bottom-up dimension of labor struggle has to be matched with collective investment both domestic and international, based on a strategic political vision. In the US, practically everything needs to be fixed, and all across the world there is a new energy grid to build, plus tremendous potential employment in all sorts of vital ecological restoration. Internationally, the money spent on war can be redirected to protect against a real danger, which is that the continental divides between developed and developing world turn into superfenced highways to barbarism. Drug laws have to be changed entirely (this has finally begun), pathways for the useful investment of remittance money have to be set up (now a lot of it goes to empty suburban-style houses that benefit no one) and above all, the North has to cease acting like a vampire on the South, hollowing out economies, governments and civil societies to the point where they collapse as they have done in Honduras and continually threaten to do in Mexico. The only way to achieve this is to act substantially on four simple words: climate. change. is. real. The twenty-first century has a challenge that is a lot more meaningful than putting a man on the moon, and that could hopefully be a lot less destructive than WWII. The great challenge justifying massive collective investment is that of finding a peaceful pathway to the mitigation of what is now inevitable global warming.
In 2008, calls for a Green New Deal were denounced as greenwashing to cover up business as usual. The game had not yet been changed. Now we're staring into the abyss, not only in Brazil but everywhere. People on the right and in the center are legitimately concerned for their security, in every sense of that last word. They are just unclear, and deliberately misled, about where the insecurity comes from and about what forms it may take in the near future. On the left we have had very little to say about the subject up till now. We have spoken endlessly about liberation without saying what it looks like, really, in a world of economics, laws, institutions and political accords both within and between countries. I reckon we have one chance left to speak up and to act on what we say. We had better make this Green New Deal happen. And we had better extend it from the national framework to the international dimensions that Nagle, despite all the shortcomings in her article, justly points to.
-BH