To help remedy the deficit of left-wing and, in particular, socialist perspectives in this forum, I thought it'd be a refreshing change to examine the topical issue of immigration through the eyes of the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, a regular contributor to the *New Left Review* and a thinker equally if not moreso deserving of the idiosyncratic reputation accorded to the [increasingly marginal](https://jacobitemag.com/2018/05/02/slipping-slavoj/) Zizek.

* Wolfgang Streeck: [Between Charity and Justice: Remarks on the Social Construction of Immigration Policy in Rich Democracies](https://wolfgangstreeck.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/streeck2017_daws_between-charity-and-justice.pdf)

Don't miss the footnotes, which are quite entertaining.

>In liberal public discourse, immigration policies are placed on a left-right spectrum. While restrictive regimes, associated with “xenophobia” and “racism”, are located on the right, open borders, linked to “openness”, generosity, and cosmopolitan brother- or sisterhood, are considered left. Note that traditionally in political economy, the Left favored regulation as a defense against the uncertainties of free markets, whereas deregulation was sought by the Right, especially since “globalization”. By fighting for deregulation of national borders to allow for open and open-ended immigration, the Left abandons a central element of its historical pro-regulation agenda, which importantly involved restricting the supply of labor in order to limit competition in labor markets.^(9)

>^(9) Rhetorically, open borders are sometimes claimed to be demanded by international (working class) solidarity. Historically, however, solidarity among workers meant jointly fighting employers to prevent them from pitting workers against one another as competitors for employment. For the open borders-Left, by comparison, solidarity requires workers in rich countries allowing workers from poor countries to compete with them for their jobs. What makes this so divisive is that those who push the new solidarity typically have jobs that are out of reach for mass migrants.

>This does not mean that the pro-immigration Left had no Right to fight any more. Taking the place of the *neoliberal-deregulatory Right*, associated with business, the new enemy of the *deregulation Left* is what it identifies as a *xenophobic Right*. Its social base tends to be among workers and the lower middle class, i.e., what used to be part of the social base of the Left when it was still a pro-regulation Left. Given the deep moral loading of the new left-right divide, it entails a duty for the reconfigured Left, overrepresented as it is in educational institutions and the media, to continue the old class struggle as a new culture war – as a general education effort undertaken as a replay of the Left’s lost struggle against fascism in the first half of the twentieth century.^(11) The goal now is to open domestic labor markets for everybody from everywhere, with the Left, now as a *liberal-libertarian Left*, fighting side-by-side with the *neoliberal Right*. Not that the new battle between the classes was confined to the class room or the TV studios. If the xenophobic Right turns out to be unwilling to listen, repression is also available, in the form of exclusion from political discourse and civil intercourse, to prevent public displays of “populist” discontent with liberal anti-borderism and “cosmopolitan” pro-immigrationism.

>^(11) In terms of a materialist critique of ideology, the latest wave of immigration may be described as a long-awaited opportunity for the middle-class Left to take leave from their historical ally, the old working class, and close ranks, in a lasting political realignment, with the libertarian liberals. This spares them from having to pretend sympathies with a declining class and a cultural milieu found increasingly embarrassing among “educated” “knowledge workers”. In terms of class interests, borderless liberalized labor markets suit them twice, as both sellers and buyers of labor power: while they can move wherever they please, they can employ unskilled service labor from wherever it comes cheapest.

>***

>Note the surprisingly frequent recent references to Christian charity among the proponents of open borders in the highly secular societies of advanced capitalism, which seem intended to legitimate the conversion of the progressive-humanitarian Left to deregulation. One may also suspect that calls from the Left for unconditional admission of fellow-human beings on the move serve the latent function to cover up and make more bearable the technocratic transformation, under “globalization” and the neoliberal revolution and endorsed not least by the center-left, of the national welfare state into a free-market competition and consolidation state. Seen this way, the social figure of the would-be immigrant, as construed by a liberal public, resurrects the beggar of medieval Catholicism in his function of appeasing the bad conscience, justifying the existence, and soothing the fears of the well-to-do. With the modern, rights-based welfare state, largely a product of the Reformation, dissolving into the world market, Christian mercy returns to replace social rights, substituting for social progress. Very importantly, as the global supply of misery is endless, acts of altruism, however generous, can only be symbolic, exempting them from having to account for their efficiency and effectiveness. A stark indication of the expressive nature of liberal-libertarian immigration policies is that almost nobody (“only right-wingers”) cares about the fact that sustaining refugees as immigrants in European countries is far more expensive, and therefore benefits a much smaller number of individuals, than providing for them near their countries of origin, as envisaged by international law.

As if to demonstrate his point, *Jacobin* just published [an article on immigration](https://jacobinmag.com/2018/06/immigration-economic-effects-welfare-state) that's almost rhetorically indistinguishable from an editorial in *The Economist*.

Streeck's cynical honesty in identifying the Left's complicity with the forces it ostensibly opposes when it comes to migration may be surprising, but his is really the more historically consistent position. This obsession with undoing state controls to maximize migration flows is not a feature of any actually existing socialist society, nearly all of which rehabilitated the politics of the nation-state for their own ends. (One remarkable example is that one of the few exceptions East Germany made to its otherwise consistent attempts to distinguish itself from its Nazi predecessor was that [it literally derived its immigration policy from Nazi legislation](http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1445676/1/U593000.pdf). Perhaps not coincidentally, *Die Linke*, the successor to its ruling party, is one of few left-wing parties [not entirely hostile to nativism](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/die-linke-germany-sahra-wagenknecht-immigration-xenophobia-afd/).) He also identifies the irony that those who long sought to promote the socially contractual benefits of a proactive state now deny the ability of the state to regulate the expansion of its community of subjects in deference to its obligations to its existing subjects.