Between Moral and Political Suicide

Immigration is the toughest issue for the Left to solve. And the future depends on it.

Immigrants on an Atlantic Liner, 1906. Library of Congress.

At the end of Milan’s M1 metro line you’ll find Sesto San Giovanni, a sizable blue-collar city. It was once called “Italy’s Stalingrad,” not only for its Brutalist concrete block apartment buildings and hulking steelworks, but also because Sesto San Giovanni was consistently one of the most left-wing towns in Italy. Older residents are still proud of the role the city played in the Resistance. From 1922 until liberation in 1945, Sesto’s denizens organized strikes, barricades, and protests against the Fascist government. Many workers gave their lives for the cause. For these actions the city was later awarded a gold medal for military valor by the Italian Republic. After the war, for decades, this working-class town consistently voted for the powerful Italian Communist Party and its successors, while Milan, its much richer big city neighbor, typically voted for the Right.

That’s all over. In 2017 Sesto elected a right-wing mayor for the first time in 71 years. And in 2022, Sesto voted for Giorgia Meloni’s right-populist alliance by double-digit margins. Over the same period, Milan, rich as ever, has drifted to the left.

Immigration was the issue at the heart of these elections.

Progressives have lamented the fall of Italy’s Stalingrad, blaming their electoral losses on skillful scapegoating by Meloni and the even harder-right Lega Party. And it’s true that the Right has stirred up anxieties and ratcheted up the emotional pitch of the debate, talking about immigrants as if they were all criminals or worse, an invading army. But the Left would be wrong to assume that immigration skepticism is akin to an infectious hate-virus spread by the Right or the product of “misinformation.” Voters didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that immigration was a big problem—big enough that they would give up generations of political loyalty—simply because right-wing demagogues said so.

In Italy, immigration has increased dramatically year-over-year since 2000. And Sesto has seen a significantly larger increase than the country at large. At the same time, the country’s economy remains stagnant, and salaries are now slightly below what they were in 1990. The region’s major industries—once a font of stable, decent, working-class jobs—have closed up. None of the four major metalworks still operate today. As they shuttered, so did the social and cultural organizations of the working class. Workers of the mid-century enjoyed a decent wage and a thick associational life, both made possible by the labor movement. Today’s workers have neither. The children of Sesto’s former factory workers now look for jobs in less stable, lower-wage services, or else they move abroad. In this context, left-wing appeals to openness and multiculturalism rang hollow while the Right’s promise to restrict immigration and restore social and economic security found wide support.

While there are certain peculiarities that make Sesto a particularly dramatic case—few cities are home to both a Karl Marx library and a Gramsci Avenue—in many ways it’s like any other rust belt town in any rich country anywhere in the world. The Left has lost working-class towns like this all over the globe. And in many cases, they’ve lost them because they’ve lost the debate on immigration.

In fact, over the last three decades, immigration has emerged as the signature issue that has allowed right-populist parties to pull blue-collar voters away from the Left. That’s because mass immigration is the most visible social byproduct of globalization. The challenges associated with it represent all that is dysfunctional in the contemporary political and social order: economic scarcity, social anomie, uprootedness, and cultural alienation. Without a compelling answer to these challenges, the Left will continue to flounder.

How the Left Lost on Immigration

Among the well-educated there is a notion that support for immigration restriction is an outgrowth of ugly, racist, or bigoted views. It can be that, sure. But even then, ugly and racist views don’t rise to the level of social or political signifcance—on a global scale no less—unless there is something driving them. What is the motive? Scarcity, for one. The very nature of immigration calls attention to economic scarcity in a way that few other social phenomena do. After all, the reason people travel tens of thousands of miles to find good work is because there is none at home. And the reason native workers resist their coming is because there are fewer and fewer good jobs to go around.

As a recent paper from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank demonstrates, the surge of mass immigration to the United States from 2021 to 2024 “helped cool” a supposedly “overheated” labor market. Translation: immigration suppressed wages. Further, this “cooling” was felt most acutely by those already living hard-scrabble lives—manual workers without university education. As the authors report, workers in construction and manufacturing—that is, those workers progressives most desperately need to win—“saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth.” To make matters worse, this happened just as inflation exploded and prices soared.

But it’s not only that native-born workers in rich countries are forced into wage competition with foreign-born workers. It’s that for the last 30 years or so, these workers have been losing the same wage competition to foreign workers abroad. Factories drained out of places like the American Midwest, the English Midlands and Italian towns like Sesto because labor was cheaper elsewhere. Now the plants are gone, and whoever is left in these former industrial hubs is thrown into an intensified wage competition with over-exploited immigrants for the few decent jobs that remain. It’s an employer’s dream.

Economists never tire of pointing out the macroeconomic upsides to having a large, docile pool of cheap migrant labor—think of all the new restaurants, affordable services, and low grocery prices. No doubt, the free trade in goods and labor has juiced economic growth. But it’s not as if one click upwards in GDP translates to a wage hike for the average laborer. Most of the gains from this growth have accrued at the top. What’s more, free-trade-fueled growth has come at significant social costs that are rarely mentioned—probably because they aren’t felt by economists. Instead, it’s working-class communities that bear the burden. Not only are the border towns that house and manage the integration of recent arrivals—from Southern Italy to Southwest Texas—overwhelmingly working-class, but they are often small towns where the social character, municipal services, and general way of life are easily overwhelmed by a surge of immigration. Add to the mix that many of the new arrivals are single young men struggling to find steady, dignified work, isolated in their host nation, and, as a result, suffering from acute anomie. Though perhaps through little fault of their own, they aren’t exactly the easiest new neighbors.

While it’s true that steady and orderly immigration doesn’t increase crime rates, there is evidence that large surges in immigration are followed by spikes in crime and social disorder. Yet concerns about order and safety are routinely dismissed by liberals and progressives rather than addressed as genuine challenges. Ironically, many who favor liberal asylum and immigration laws appeal to a spirit of solidarity, arguing that asylum seekers are victims of crime, violence, and low wages in their home countries. And they are; their conditions rightly outrage our sense of justice. At the same time, complaints of crime, violence and low-wages from native-born workers are not received with the same sense of moral outrage. Instead, they are combed over with powerful statistical tools designed to prove that such anxieties are little more than a mask for hate. Can’t it be that the victims of hyper-globalization are both the immigrants and the native-born?

Today, progressives are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the question of immigration because it was mainstream center-left parties in the core economies, like the United States, UK, and Northern Europe, that helped develop the broad tenets of globalism that now face backlash at the polls. In these countries, the center-Left designed, promoted, and defended the free-trade treaties, the complimentary migration policies, and the promise of a globalized economy while justifying such policies with shallow appeals to multiculturalism and tolerance. As a result, to many workers, the Left are the globalists responsible for this mess.

As the center-left embraced globalism, they also traded their blue-collar social bases for the Brahmin voters who dominate these parties today. The class composition of the current parties of the Left has blinded them to the nature of the problem and the ways in which slogans of global openness are received by blue-collar workers. By virtue of their white-collar work life, most progressives are not adversely affected by immigration—in fact, in many ways, thanks to cheaper services and more diverse consumer choices, they actually benefit. As a result, they have internalized the notion that globalized labor markets benefit all. They are perennially shocked to find that the masses reject that claim.

A Left that cannot mount a serious critique of what historian Perry Anderson has called “factor mobility”—the fluid exchange of people and money that keeps global capitalism limping along—will continue to fail. To put it more plainly, those who discuss immigration as a matter of tolerance, pluralism, and global openness while neglecting to mention the social, cultural, and economic challenges—in a time of extreme inequality and stagnant growth rates—are advocating political suicide. They are rolling out the red carpet for the Right.

The recent elections in Portugal prove the point. In the lead-up to the May 2025 snap election, open-borders leftists insisted that Portuguese progressives need not change tact on immigration. They could win big by promising better public services and more social insurance programs, while leaving the border issue to the Right. But as journalist Juan David Rojas noted, this was a doomed strategy. Portugal is a small, and relatively poor, country on the periphery of Europe. From 2020 to 2024 the foreign-born population there more than doubled. By the time of the election, 70 percent of Portuguese voters said they favored less immigration. Predictably, the Left got walloped.

The center-right Democratic Action won the day. But a hard-right populist party stole the headlines. As recently as 2019, the right-wing party Chega (translation, “enough”) polled at a measly 1%. They now control the same share of the vote as the center-left Socialists (22.8%). According to the New York Times they “made inroads in regions that were historically strongholds of the left.” The voteshare of far-left Bloco, meanwhile, was cut in half—to 2%. “It’s not the Left anymore” that represents the working class, said Professor Antonio Costa Pinto, a left-wing political scientist. “Chega is the protagonist of the anti-establishment feelings.”

Counterexamples: Denmark and Mexico

So what, then, is the path forward for the Left? As Anderson has noted, while Right and Left can both rail against the elites, oligarchs, and negative social effects of neoliberal capitalism, only the Right can effectively rail against immigration “with still greater vehemence, xenophobia towards immigrants operating as its trump card.” But there, Anderson writes, “populisms of the left cannot follow without moral suicide.” He’s correct. ICE, at the direction of President Trump and the hard-right architects of the administration’s mass deportation policy, has spent the past year tearing apart peaceful, hard-working families and flinging neighborhoods into terror. Endorsing that program would indeed be moral suicide, and with few political benefits, as most workers disagree with the viciousness of Trump’s deportation machine.

The barbarism of the Right’s immigration program only underscores the urgency for the Left to find a solution to the immigration question that is economically sound, morally defensible, and, crucially, provides a viable way back to power. In recent years, a handful of left-wing parties across the globe have managed to articulate a straightforward progressive opposition to mass migration that has proven capable of outflanking right-wing populists. In Mexico, the left-populist MORENA initially adopted the standard liberal-humanitarian line on immigration but soon cooperated with Trump’s Migrant Protections Protocols and implemented stronger protections on both the Northern US and Southern Guatemalan borders. Importantly, MORENA has framed the mass migration issue in starkly left-wing terms, both as a fight against American corporations with globalist ambitions and as a fight for human dignity and workers’ right to stay at home. This formula went well beyond anything the Right was offering.

While mass immigration may benefit rich receiver-nations (or rather, may benefit the ruling classes of rich receiver nations), mass emigration is often a disaster for poorer supplier-nations. “Brain-drain,” lost productivity, and shrinking tax revenue are persistent and bedeviling problems for any developing nation that suffers from excessive outmigration, as are the social hardships of broken families and depopulated small towns. Any way you slice it, the economic case for liberalized borders rests on a kind of rich country chauvinism wherein the role of all poor nations is to provide the rich ones with an endless supply of cheap labor and consumer goods. The whole world’s people, poor as most of them are, are expected to take it as their duty and destiny to contribute to the GDP of the United States and Europe. In Mexico, AMLO and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum pitched their populism in these terms. Their criticism of immigration was understood not as cruelty or hostility toward newcomers but as a defense of a beleaguered nation. Combined with the party’s successful new social and economic reforms, this full-throated populism has attracted and retained a working-class base. In Mexico “populism” is a creature exclusively of the Left. And today MORENA might be the only left-wing party in the world to actually grow its share of working-class voters in recent elections.

Similarly, though under very different conditions, the Social Democrats of Denmark under prime minister Mette Frederiksen called for reductions in immigration long before the Right had a chance to capitalize on the issue. Like MORENA, they have avoided hysterical, inflammatory, or xenophobic rhetoric and instead framed the issue as one of workers’ rights and against “social dumping.” Frederiksen’s populism combines a criticism of globalism with a traditional social democratic egalitarianism: “An American capital fund buying our homes. A bonus of several hundred million kroners to a CEO. Does greed know of no boundaries?” Though, unlike many of her contemporaries on the Left, she sees democratic control of the border as a pillar of progressive principle.

As a result, her party—unlike virtually all other left-leaning parties in Europe—has maintained their long-standing base of workers and stanched a right-wing populist wave. In fact, while far-right parties have been surging on the rest of the continent, in Denmark’s most recent elections, the nationalist Danish People’s Party was barely able to hold onto a single seat. Moreover, the Danish Social Democrats’ continued electoral success has translated to policy victories, expanding benefits and deepening the social state—which, in turn, has strengthened their political position.

Populists of the Left in Denmark and Mexico explicitly tied globalization and mass migration to the “Washington Consensus” and the interests of multinationals and high-finance. That is, they pitched migration restrictions against the capitalist plot to rob their nations of wealth, sovereignty, power, social protections, trust, and high-skill workers. They connected the ills of globalized finance with the travails of globalized labor, rightly noting that to address either we must address both. As they won back the working class, parties like MORENA and the Danish Social Democrats became more, not less, migration skeptical. At the same time, they have not embraced the cruelty or thoughtless xenophobia of parties of the Right. “Our government wishes to help people who are fleeing war and violence,” argued Frederiksen in a recent speech, “Help in the regions of origin. This is where we can help the most.”

The success of both MORENA and that of the Danish Social Democrats offers a lesson: there is no reason to embrace the hateful rhetoric of the Right, but there is good reason to demand democratic control over the labor market.

Sovereignty, Democracy, and Internationalism

Still, in a last-ditch attempt to avoid taking political responsibility, some will argue that we can simply organize our way out of this conundrum. If foreign-born workers all join a union, they might say, then immigrant labor would cease to act as a wage-depressing reserve. By organizing, they will have succeeded in democratically regulating the labor market at the firm level. Plus, in the process of organizing, many native-born workers will come to see immigrant workers as equals in the fight against their employer. No doubt, this is an elegant and attractive solution. The problem is that it is almost impossible to do at scale.

In their classic study, Racial Competition and Class Solidarity, sociologists Terry Boswell, Cliff Brown, John Brueggemann, and T. Ralph Peters Jr. found two major factors that explained the failure of cross-race organizing on the shopfloor. The first was obvious: overtly racist paternalism on the part of employers. In such cases solidarity was smothered. But the second factor was merely the presence of recent immigrants. They concluded that, in the cases they studied, as “employers attempted to replace dominant labor with cheaper minority labor, racial competition resulted in renewed racial antagonism and segregation of the labor market by unions.” A constant stream of new entrants into the labor market, it seems, makes workplace organizing much, much harder. Under such conditions, racial balkanization and competition typically prevails. And with the labor movement in the sorry state that it’s in, where we can’t even organize enough native-born workers to halt our decline (let alone grow), how should we expect the unions to organize the millions of undocumented workers needed to reverse the effects of wage suppression, while also changing the hearts and minds of millions more? The “organize everyone” argument serves more as psychological comfort to people on the Left than it does to provide a compelling solution.

To find a real solution we must begin by understanding that a critique of global migration need not be synonymous with anti-immigrant scapegoating. To be sure, in the US, the working class has not actually embraced the reactionary caricature that some liberals imagine. As the Center for Working-Class Politics has shown, even as a majority of working-class voters support tighter restrictions on migration and greater investments in border security, they also favor a pathway to citizenship and are broadly opposed to deportations of peaceful, lawful residents without due process. That’s hardly a program of xenophobia. Instead, it seems a straightforward attempt to wrest some control back from the wild consequences of unfettered globalization. As a Trump-voting asphalt worker recently told me, it’s not the immigrants he has a problem with, it’s a system that encourages a “permanent under-class of workers.”

There’s our political opening. Taking advantage of it requires breaking with the way the contemporary Left has dealt with the migration question. It’s not that the open-borders Left is too utopian, or too idealistic—quite the opposite. They are too committed to the status quo. Until now, fluid borders and global movement have been seen as synonymous with the old socialist ideal of internationalism. But nothing could be further from the truth. Internationalism supposes that nation-states could, and should, democratically cooperate to pursue shared interests or mitigate mutual conflicts. Internationalism depends on democracy and sovereignty. Yet on the question of migration—in both rich, labor-importing countries and poor, labor-exporting countries—democracy and sovereignty are nowhere to be found. The decision to become a hyper-mobile world wasn’t much of a decision at all. The imperatives of the market, and the interest of financial elites at home and abroad, demanded that labor become more liquid on a global scale. Voters were only consulted after the fact. In such a situation democratic internationalism has given way to globalist, technocratic governance. And in whose interest? Sovereignty has been ceded to the demands of the market, the demands of capital.

Mistaking globalism for internationalism and prizing autonomy (the freedom of movement) over sovereignty (the capacity for self-rule), we’ve rendered questions about immigration in moralistic, rather than democratic, terms. The fluidity of labor and capital are naturalized, while their effects on social cohesion and solidarity are made invisible. This position, if it can even be considered political, only risks further empowering the Right. Worse, it is socially and morally indefensible in the long term. If we wish to have a stable and solidaristic social world, we cannot endorse ceaseless, constant churn. And if we wish to have a democratic society we cannot have a global market in labor, any more than we can have a global market in finance.

To put it simply, if we want to win back working-class voters, we should take seriously what they are voting for. They are demanding democratic control over the labor market and a restoration of social order. They are demanding a reduction of the all-consuming market’s scale from the global to the national level. To pursue those aims is not a cynical election maneuver. Nor does it run against our moral duty. Instead, it is in line with our broader goals of restoring the power of ordinary citizens over their nation-states, of strengthening the position of labor at home and abroad, and of reasserting the promise of internationalism over the failure of globalism. There lies the path between moral and political suicide.

---

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.