Reflections on Immigration and Borders for the Left

• A world without borders is an ideal, but currently unreachable given global inequalities in income, safety, and rights.
• National social protection systems and public services have finite capacities, necessitating limits on immigration.
• The left must address immigration without taboos to prevent ceding the political space to the far right.
• The ultimate goal remains a world where borders are unnecessary, achieved through global development and reduced inequality.

Reality of Capacity Constraints

• Countries function as political communities requiring social cohesion and specific resource organization for healthcare, education, and labor protections.
• Immigration pressures disproportionately affect the working class, who often compete for the same strained public services and low-wage jobs.
• Dismissing valid public concerns as mere racism is a political error that fuels support for the far right.

Defining a Progressive Immigration Policy

• Progressives should distinguish between the moral desire for open movement and the practical reality that societies cannot sustain infinite intake.
• Policy must focus on making immigration manageable, humane, and rational rather than pretending it has no limit.
• The agenda should include clear communication: welcoming migrants while acknowledging limits on volume and pace, and ensuring asylum is not the sole, overstretched mechanism for movement.

The Strategic Horizon

• Establishing borders today is a political necessity, even if they are morally arbitrary in a utopian sense.
• The left must avoid the vacuum created by ignoring migration tensions, as this allows the far right to impose more brutal, exclusionary solutions.
• Long-term effort should be directed at mitigating the drivers of migration—poverty, war, and persecution—to eventually render borders obsolete.