Sanders: still wrong about borders
But don't look for open-borders capitalism for solutions to immigration, either.
JONATHAN KARL: Is there anything that you think Trump has done right?
BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. I think…making sure our borders are stronger. Look, nobody thinks illegal immigration is appropriate.
Anyone who still thinks that American socialists march in lockstep behind Bernie Sanders should take a look at the reaction to this clip online. Still, while you’ll find plenty of people calling Sanders a social fascist and a racist, what you won’t find much of in this criticism is the articulation of an alternative. And that’s a serious problem too, because if socialists can’t give people a viable alternative to border controls, what we’ll get instead is equally dystopian: open borders capitalism.
Even in the utopian scenario of a global legal regime protecting all workers, that would mean an accellerated race-to-the-bottom for wages and working standards as capital takes advantage of unrestricted labor mobility to play workers off against each other. More realistically, however, open borders capitalism is likely to mean the growth of a parallel black labor market in which migrant workers have no real labor protections at all. And as Sanders has correctly pointed out in the past, that is what the oligarchs want: cheap labor lacking the legal rights of citizenship.
Instead of merely fighting for open borders, then, socialists need to fight for a much more ambitious alternative: international socialism. Specifically this means, at a minimum, two things:
An international freedom of movement. The right to a national freedom of movement is widely recognized throughout the world, but this right is still consistently impeded by borders. Socialists should fight for a return to the norm of legally unrestricted movement throughout the world. This is not, it should be stressed, some fantastic or utopian ambition; on the contrary, it was the historical norm until quite recently.
The international redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Reducing global inequality would have two major beneficial impacts on migration. First, it would sharply curb involuntary migration, as majorities of immigrants consistently report that they would have remained in their native countries given better economic conditions. Second, it would reduce the degree of socioeconomically destabilizing poverty that is imported through immigration.
As always, redistribution would require two distinct mechanisms: a tax / expropriation mechanism and a transfer mechanism. Both would require extraordinary international cooperation. In order to deal with the problems of tax avoidance, for example, countries would need to share information about wealth assets and would need to coordinate their enforcement efforts. Transfers through national governments would similarly have to be subject to all kinds of financial and administrative regulations.
There are proposals on the table to pursue international redistribution on this scale by coordinating existing nation-states with transnational agreements and institutions; see Piketty’s Capital and Ideology for example. However, the more efficient approach — and the one that was advocated historically by socialists in the twentieth century — would be the establishment of a global socialist state.
Particularly in the United States, socialists have become used to thinking about economic policy as a national question to be decided by national movements through the US government. The issue of immigration directly challenges that framework, however, because it is a decidedly international issue that requires international solutions. At a minimum, socialists in the US should coordinate with socialists abroad to push for the sort of transnational initiatives discussed above; for example, in order to deal with the problem of international tax avoidance, US socialists may want to support financial transparency rules currently being litigated by the European Union. In the long run, however, socialists ought to give serious thought about how to move beyond the nation-state framework that has dominated the modern era towards a truly global socialist state. It is this kind of thinking — and not merely a reflexive call for open borders within capitalist economies — that can ultimately develop a humane approach to immigration.
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