Stupidpol Survey On Immigration And Borders

I don't agree with Nagle very much and think that she glides over the ways in which immigration is intentionally used as a wedge issue by the right by presenting a zero sum game between immigrants and natives, in addition she doesn't have much of an ear for internationalism and gives the construct of the nation state far too much credence, which I consider inherently identitarian and deaf to the needs of socialism.

But having said that the whole 'no borders' element of the twitterati left feels like political cosplay. I understand the fury that's come with the deprivations of the Trump regime (although a lot of it seems to have actually been happening under Obama, with little interest from many of the people who are currently up in arms) but in terms of actual political realities at the moment pretty much everyone knows that borders are not going away anytime soon so talking about open borders tends to feel like more of a performative thing directed towards people who already agree with you rather than something actionable. In that regard Nagle has a few pertinent points about how the current system can allow for exploitation of workers even within the purview of a Liberal ideal of immigration, and I think people could be setting themselves up for a fall if they ignore the social anxieties and cynical capitalist forces that help make immigration such a contentious issue, even if the forces behind anti immigration sentiment are racist (and they usually are) you only have to look at Europe in the wake of the refugee crisis to see how things can turn on a dime to become much more reactionary than they were beforehand which can be the cue for Fascists to emerge again.

I don't know what the way around this is because I personally have no regard for nations as a concept and I don't see how it's possible to be a good socialist and not see the inherent problems with being anti-immigration, the main one being that it basically starts from a point of dividing the working class against itself and elevating parts of it against others in the name of mostly facile, identitarian features, in other words it denies the unity of the working class and as such anti-immigration rhetoric and action is itself some of the worst examples of Identity Politics damaging the left in the world today. But even with all that in mind the unpleasant realities seem to be that heavy immigration tends to prompt a nativist reaction among many people, including many working people, in almost every society in the world. I guess my way to try and rectify this might be to promote greater worldwide development and redistribution of wealth, along with robust social welfare programmes for all inhabitants of a country regardless of origin so that people don't feel like they are 'competing' with each other and immigrants can assimilate more comfortably, while also cutting out the factors that cause desperate mass migration that people often have the most negative reactions too. But I don't like to think how the future will look if Climate Change and the chaos that will bring bites as hard as we think it will.

To begin with I don't think Nagle's article was primarily an expression of "anti-immigrant sentiment". She, and I agree with her, was addressing the self-destructive tendencies that the call for NO BORDERS evinces on the part of the contemporary left.

It seems to me obvious that people who make it to Canada or the US or Norway from some other part of the world must be treated with dignity and respect and within legal frameworks such as they are in international law as manifest under the bourgeois capitalist hegemony that administers such things.

I don't live in "the first world" and I am not and never have been an American so I don't tend to think of the US as the center of the political universe except insofar as it has a massive imbalance of economic, military and cultural power on its side and so tends to play an outsize role in how other parts of the world are governed and how their economies flourish or not.

Most of the anti-Nagle posters here and in articles all over the leftish internet view the world from a very typically First World Narcissistic view and appear to have very great difficulty grasping what it means when economies fail to provide even minimal opportunities for work and life for great numbers of people and when states routinely engage in corrupt practices that range from simple failure to enact rule of law/equality before the law conditions all the way to mass extrajudicial executions, support for slavery/human trafficking and full spectrum repression of opinion and expression to the point of mass incarceration.

Any "socialist" who thinks that encouraging a few billion people living under these conditions to emigrate to the welcoming arms of White Saviour Barbie Nations North is just fucking so far out of touch with reality it isn't worth paying attention.

There are NO socialist governments in power in any part of the developed world and so talking about "policies" seems rather silly to me. Outside of Syriza and Podemos there are not even any socialist parties vying for power in the developed world. It remains to be seen whether insurgencies like Corbynite Labour and the slim possibility of a Berniefied Democratic party will result in even halfassed social democratic administrations.

So like Nagle I think the left ought to be working to strengthen unions as part of a general organizing drive to create some sort of sense of unity of interests among a wide and varied swath of working people throughout the developed world. There needs to be work done, and done quickly, to reestablish connections between socialist groups in the north and left-leaning dissident groups in the global south. Pressure needs to be put on employers to get legal powers focused on the abuses and criminality of capital rather than migrants. These are not "policies" per se but focii of organisation drives and protest/pressure groups.

Bottom line for me is my suspicion that focused intense opposition to militarism and the most egregious depredations of capital wherever they manifest will go a lot further in inspiring workers everywhere to understand that their interests are best served by joining left organizations and coalitions than any amount of prancing around calling for things like NO BORDERS and the dissolution of the contemporary state by whatever analytic name you call it.

Any politics that pits one segment of the working class against others is morally repugnant and in the long run self destructive to socialism.

I mean I've been pretty vocal about this, but my position is essentially that both public attitudes regarding immigration and government policy concerning it are necessarily superstructural, and that therefore the left — or at least Marxist — take is that most of the issues people associate with immigration are in fact consequences of the relations of production that ought to be addressed directly instead.

The labour concerns people ascribe to the presence of migrant labour are in reality simply a reflection of the weakness of labour in the US. Neither increasing nor decreasing immigration is actually going to impact that in any meaningful sense. Limiting immigration might improve the situation of certain labourers who qualify as "Americans" — really an arbitrary distinction, as the working class is not defined by national borders — but it will do so at the cost of those who don't, so really all you're achieving is the division of the working class into separate castes, a situation that capital will exploit just as readily as they would an increase in immigration. Depending on the form of capital in question — and specifically it's mobility — its owners my prefer one immigration regime vs the other, but ultimately these are just the bourgeois political disputes you would expect of the hegemonic superstructure. Neither position meaningfully challenges the relations of production, whereas an actual challenge to those relations would necessarily render the question moot; If labour were to achieve a measure of actual power over capital — or better yet, actual control over production — as is the goal of socialist movements, it wouldn't matter how many people there would be vying for those jobs, the conditions would be the same.

Nagle’s article is imprecise in a number of ways, but her contempt for the American academic-professional left is a welcome rejoinder to the abstract solidarity of tenured radicals who are politically useless—not to mention direct beneficiaries of neoliberal globalization—IRL.

Anyone who doesn’t see the alignment between de facto “open borders” and neoliberal policies that ensure the virtually borderless circulation of capital, goods, and services around the globe (labor, let us recall, is a “good” or commodity in capitalism: one that assures low wages the more in supply it is) is an idiot or a liar.

Something that Rousseau said comes to mind: “Distrust those cosmopolitans who search out remote duties in their books and neglect those that lie nearest. Such philosophers love the Tartars so as to avoid loving their neighbor.”

Radical centrist incoming: I'm still undecided.

It's not an issue I've given serious thought before, so the discussion on this sub has been really interesting for me. Compelling arguments on both sides. I need to sit down one of these days to hash it out for myself.

I agree with Current Affairs' criticism of Nagle to the pragmatic extent that E-Verify would wreck the lives of people who have been living here for 30 years or more. However, in the medium term, Nagle is right. Half of America's legal citizens are in economic peril and socialist solutions need to appeal to those workers and those out of work. In the longest term, hopefully, stringent border control will be unnecessary.

I have officially become tired with the Matt Christman thesis that closed borders automatically equal genocide. Other countries are victims of First World plunder but they also can take care of their own business. Colonialism causes long-term systemic damage which manifests as civil war and so on, but evacuating the entire country is not the solution.

I don't have specific answers to policies and how to enact it but I honestly feel that in the long run, open borders and a unified world are necessary because of the effects we've caused to our climate. Realistically right now pushing for open borders feels really performative and unfeasible, especially considering the degree of global tensions and how much countries (seem) to hate each other. But as the world gets worse and worse environmentally, it's going to become increasingly necessary for countries to work together and allow free movement as entire regions become uninhabitable.

Feel like this is somewhat of a nihilist view but I just don't see us as a planet making significant progress to slow or stop man made climate change and things will just keep getting worse.

I'll go first, to give an example of what I think might be helpful, and also because I'm extremely opinionated and arrogant.

Policies (United States and other first world countries) :

1. End of all foreign interventions, humanitarian or otherwise.
2. Minimum wage for all workers in the US, regardless of legality, and extension of worker's comp and other labor laws. Even if deported, all migrant workers are entitled to workers comp, if they have been injured on the job, and they deserve all other entitlements, backpay (based on at least minimum wage), overtime pay, etc.
3. Instant, unconditional, and free-of-charge citizenship for undocumented persons within the United States, at some specific time, say, on the tuesday of second week of january 2019. I.e. A general amnesty. Many long-term undocumented workers in the US, are economically, culturally and socially integrated into America, and are functionally already US citizens (sending their kids to school, etc). Extending legal citizenship is only fair.
4. Fair and logical border policies, with all the expected privileges and trappings, and a maximum migrant quota of, say, 0.5->1% of the US population, per year.
5. Solidarity with third world nations by providing climate mitigation strategies & infrastructure.

Why

The experience of Germany and other European countries, has demonstrated that increasing immigration has not lead to a general fall in racial prejudice, but a sharp increase. The poor of both the native and migrant populations, have become pitted against each other, through competition over limited (and contracting, thanks to austerity) social services and employment opportunities.

This has lead to a major increase in reactionary political animus, and a spike in fascist political movements. In the event of a major population migration (which an open borders policy may incentivize), there is a very real danger of a nationalist-populist backlash.

The only winners of this, will be the rich, as they will be able to insulate themselves from any real conflict, and fascist-leaning governments pose no real threat to the capitalist system, or to capitalists themselves.

The people most at threat, is the left (as the political target of this backlash), and already existing minorities within these nations. For especially diverse countries like the United States, this may result in civil war, and possibly balkanization, neither of which is acceptable.

i'm on team nagle. i see no reason to nitpick the practical the claims in her article - except perhaps to show how much better i, leftist man, grasp the intricacies of immigration than this _stupid woman_, which i suspect is the source of much of the "narcissism of minor differences" i see expressed on the topic, although perhaps not in this thread, i haven't read it fully - until the positions gains enough traction that minute variations on the position might affect the lives of thousands of people. again, open-borders-now nonsense strikes me as empty moral grandstanding, and minor disagreement appears to me as leftier-than-thou peacocking.

Regarding the Nagel article . . . it was very bad from a policy standpoint. E-verify is ABSOLUTELY a pro-corporate tool, even beyond what the Current Affairs article explains in terms of it punishing undocumented workers. It's a tool for eliminating competition / smaller employers, because larger companies can better absorb the cost of compliance.

Otherwise, in simple terms, I'd like to see:

1 - Extremely low bar for asylum admission, and massive investment in streamlining asylum process.

2 - Birthright citizenship is kinda silly, but I don't think "anchor babies" are the cause of migration. Rather, it's the shitty conditions faced by the migrants. So, I'd keep that.

3 - lower the bar to entry, with some attention to affected labor markets. I'd love to say "open borders," because I think that's the long-term position. But, one way or another, open borders would breed a ton of resentment and would backfire quickly. I agree with others who recognize the political significance of xenophobia (i.e., the people who live here now, like it or not, will play a large role in who gets to live here later). Relatedly, I agree that migration can sometimes depress local wages in the destination country. There are lots of complicated proposals that address the impact of migration on labor markets, and I sort of vaguely support one of those.

4 - Substantially raise the minimum wage, allow farm workers to form unions, eliminate NAFTA. Both policies are immigrant-neutral, in that they apply to everyone without special benefits for migrant workers. A higher minimum wage addresses the problem of migrants (and others) being stuck in jobs that barely enable them to live. (Under current law, minimum wage and overtime rules (generally) apply to them.) Enabling farm workers to form unions would benefit migrant and native farm workers alike. I don't feel like explaining why NAFTA is bad for migrant workers, or workers in Central America generally.

No borders

Gotta run soon, so I might end up coming back here to edit in a much more detailed response later...

I actually am in favor of immigration, especially in the United States, which I view as a land of immigrants, ideally. I haven't done enough research recently to specify some sort of ideal number of immigrants per year, but I would say, a million per year, at the very least, to keep things interesting :).

My main objection to open borders is the inherently anti-democratic nature of the proposal. If the United States body politic wants to accept 50,000 immigrants a year, or 50 million immigrants a year, that's all fine with me, but ultimately it should be up to the voters. I view 'open borders' in the most literal sense of the term as inherently anti-democratic because it essentially says that "democratic sovereignty is cancelled", and who knows a day might come when that will be the right thing for everyone involved, but I don't believe it's here or anytime soon and I don't think that makes me a bad person or not a leftist or whatever.

Here's a question: Why are owners of capital able to move freely across the planet taking jobs with them while doing so and yet when ordinary people try to move you have to jump around numerous hoops only to get your application rejected and that's if you're not pushed by desperation to leave?

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Anyone who advocates for more state surveillance of workers is not someone who I would trust to have my best interests at heart. This is coming from someone who has seen people laid off and replaced by outsourced workers.

I'm against "policy." So, none of that.

Immigration as a thing people do is usually a good idea for the people who do it. Barriers to it should be minimal/ritual.

Immigration as a thing done to people, e.g. Labour's avowedly vengeful infliction of it on already-Britons, is war. Class war, usually. And whatever has to be done, however unprincipled, to make the aggressors lose that war is fine.