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The Immigration Debate Shows Progressives Have Abandoned the Working
Class | Opinion
BATYA UNGAR-SARGON , NEWSWEEK DEPUTY OPINION EDITOR
ON 6/8/21 AT 4:31 PM EDT
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Kamala Harris Warns Guatemalan Migrants 'Do Not Come' To The U.S.

Vice President Kamala Harris had strong words for migrants making their
way to America's border on her first trip as vice president, to
Guatemala. "Do not come," Harris said—twice—while speaking to reporters.
"The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our
border. There are legal methods by which migration can and should occur,
but we, as one of our priorities, will discourage illegal migration."

Her words were a rebuke to the masses of people flocking to the southern
border since Joe Biden won the presidency, some of whom have explicitly
referenced Biden's language on immigration as the impetus for their
journey north. But the idea that America should have a national
border—one which it polices and secures—and that America is entitled to
a formal legal process whereby it grants citizenship to would-be
immigrants, was not an obvious point to everyone.

"This is disappointing to see," tweeted Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the standard-bearer for the progressive Left.
"First, seeking asylum at any US border is a 100% legal method of
arrival. Second, the US spent decades contributing to regime change and
destabilization in Latin America. We can't help set someone's house on
fire and then blame them for fleeing."

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Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez's disappointment that Vice President Harris
was discouraging illegal immigration seemed to suggest that the only
position she would welcome would be one in which every immigrant is
indiscriminately welcomed. In publicly expressing her dissent,
Ocasio-Cortez telegraphed to the Biden administration in no uncertain
terms that any legal restrictions at all on immigration will face fierce
opposition from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. She was
not the only one.

"We should not abandon our values and rights to far right white
nationalists," tweeted fellow Squad-member Congresswoman Ilhan Omar
(D-MN) atop video of Harris's speech.

This view, that discouraging illegal immigration is a white nationalist
value, is actually a new one for progressives. "Open borders?"
democratic socialist Bernie Sanders (D-VT) scoffed in an interview with
Ezra Klein for Vox as recently as 2015. "That's a Koch Brothers proposal."

"It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn't it?" Klein pressed.

"It would make everybody in America poorer," Sanders responded. "You're
doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don't think there's
any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a
nation-state or in a country called the United States or U.K. or Denmark
or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything
we can to help poor people."

It was a right-wing proposition to have unbridled immigration, Sanders
insisted as recently as six years ago. "What right-wing people in this
country would love is an open-border policy," Sanders explained. "Bring
in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great
for them. I don't believe in that."

Sanders was voicing what many Americans—both white and people of color—
had already figured out. A large majority of African Americans and
Hispanics said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood
for strengthening our border security to reduce illegal immigration, a
2019 Harvard-Harris poll found. That shouldn't be surprising; illegal
immigration has been tied to a 20-60 percent decrease in Black
working-class wages. Another recent study suggested that immigration
accounts for a third of the decline in the Black employment rate over
the last 40 years. "Black Americans are more supportive of limiting
immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition. And
Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration
than are whites or Blacks," the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported.

You wouldn't know this to listen to the politicians and influencers of
the Democratic Party—and not just from the progressive wing; when
Democratic candidates running for the 2020 presidential nomination were
asked if they would decriminalize illegal border crossing, almost all of
them said yes.

Why? How did progressive leaders go from understanding that mass
immigration is a de facto tax on the poor—as recently as six years
ago—to casting it as the only morally defensible position, the only
non-racist one?

It has to do with who the Democrats' new base is. In a new paper, the
French economist Thomas Piketty along with a others detailed a colossal
shift that has been underway in Western democracies in terms of who
populates the ranks of the Left. If in the 1960s, the Democratic Party
and other liberal-leaning political parties were filled with members of
the working class, over the course of the past 60 years, they have
become the bastion of the highly educated—a Brahmin Left whose concerns
and demands increasingly constitute Democrats' agenda.

It's counterintuitive, write Picketty et al., given the skyrocketing
inequality across the developed world. "Given this recent evolution, one
might have expected to observe rising political demand for
redistribution and the return of class-based (income-based or
wealth-based) politics," write the economists. "Instead, Western
democracies seem to have shifted to new forms of identity-based
conflicts in recent decades, embodied by the increasing salience of
environmental issues and the growing prosperity of anti-establishment
authoritarian movements."

A class-based political spectrum has been replaced by what Picketty et
al. call a "multi-elite party system." If we once had one party
representing the rich and one party representing labor, today, we have
one party representing the rich and one party representing the highly
educated and no party representing the working class. In 2020, Biden won
84 of the 100 counties with the highest percentage of college
degree-holders. But the ranks of the rich are increasingly split, too:
In 2020, Wall Street donors gave more money to Biden than to Trump.

Needless to say, they didn't do so because they are keen on economic
redistribution.

AOC and Kamala Harris
US Vice President Kamala Harris takes part in an event on June 3, 2021.
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty
Images). Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) during a press conference
on June 03, 2021. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images).
MANDEL NGAN, MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO, GETTY IMAGES
The truth is, the Brahmin Left doesn't want redistribution; it wants
culture wars over identity. It wants environmentalism, open borders, and
student loan forgiveness.

Open borders was once the calling card of the libertarian-infused Right.
Now, it's a humanitarian cri de coeur that flatters the vanity of highly
educated liberals while working class Americans of all races bear the
burden—and are then smeared as racists for being afraid they might lose
their jobs due to an influx of labor.

"The history of Citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history
of racism," tweeted Ocasio-Cortez back in 2019. "It has been used as the
legal enforcer of racism for most of US history."

She got it exactly backwards: Protections from racism, like all civil
rights, depend on a national border and on the compact a sovereign
citizenry makes with its own government. A Left that was invested in the
working class wouldn't have forgotten this, wouldn't have had the luxury
of smearing people afraid of losing their jobs—people of all races—as
racists. But instead of listening to the concerns of our multiracial
working class, the Democrats are listening to the Squad—the patron
saints of the Brahmin Left.

Batya Ungar-Sargon is the deputy opinion editor of Newsweek.

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When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand. -- Raymond Chandler

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