The annual meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America group has endorsed open borders.
The vote by the DSA — whose members include Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Rashida Tlaib — spotlights the left’s emotional shift from economic solidarity with blue-collar Americans towards a political alliance with migrant foreign graduates and laborers.
The DSA group describes itself as an “internationalist socialist organization,” and it influences staffers and activists in the Democrat Party. The Open Borders resolution says:
Be it resolved that DSA supports the demand for open borders … the uninhibited transnational free movement of people, the demilitarization of the US-Mexico border, the abolition of ICE and CPB without replacement, decriminalization of immigration, full amnesty for all asylum seekers and a pathway to citizenship for all on-citizen residents.
“This Resolution means that our national organization will set up infrastructure and resources for our local chapters to organize around open borders in their communities if they so choose,” DSA press secretary Lawrence Dreyfuss told Breitbart News. “This has been adopted as the overarching strategy of the DSA. It is up to our newly elected political leadership to address specific nuances as they arise.”
National Public Radio reported July 2018:
” … one of [the DSA’s] strengths is that it’s a big tent — at least on the left,” said Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at Hamilton College and a charter member of the DSA. “People come in describing themselves as libertarian socialists or social democrats or anarchists or whatever you know as long as they subscribe to the basic tenets of the organization they can maintain their own political identity within it.”
And because the country is so far from the DSA’s ultimate vision, the group has a pragmatic streak in how it approaches its radical ideas. For example, in explaining its electoral strategy, the group acknowledges that it’s part of a bigger “mobilization to defeat Republican rule at the state and national level,” and that “chapters may also choose to support progressive, anti-corporate candidates who do not openly identify themselves as socialists.”
But there is significant opposition within the Democrat Party to open borders, the DSA resolution admits: “The continual assault on immigrants rights … pervades even leftist spaces.”
The solution ignores the push by billionaire investors to boost cheap labor immigration, and it ignores migration’s impact on Americans’ wages and salaries. Instead, the DSA’s focus is on political power and cultural issues, including “anti-imperialism, migrant justice, labor rights, and ecosocialism.”
Open borders are also needed to change Americans’ politics and culture, the group argues: “Borders and immigration enforcement are tools of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism.”
Open borders are also needed to help citizens and immigrants jointly organize against the capitalist system in the United States, the DSA argues: “borders serve to undermine the international working class, by pitting immigrants and citizens workers in American … against each other in a race to the bottom.”
This goal is exemplified by the emergence of Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez, both of whom were children of immigrants into the United States.
The DSA’s solidarity with foreigners instead of Americans is spotlighted by a quote from one of the resolution’s sponsors. “It is unacceptable that a Fortune 500 corporation can ship a job across a border without consequences while a mother crossing a border to see her child is put into a concentration camp,” said a press statement from Brandon Rey Ramirez, the co-sponsor of the Open Borders resolution, according to a report from Proteanmag.
This alliance with migrants is very popular among Democratic activists. For example, two-in-four Democrats strongly oppose the federal enforcement of judges’ deportation orders, according to a July poll by Morning Consult.
President Donald Trump is citing the progressives’ shift towards foreigners in his 2020 stump speeches. For example, the New York Times spotlighted his comments at an August 1 rally in Cincinnati:
“Democrats have never been farther outside the mainstream,” he told an arena packed with supporters. “No matter what label they use,” he added, “a vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of our great, our beautiful, our wonderful American dream. We’re not going to let our country ever go down the route of socialism.”
…
“Democrats care more about illegal aliens than they care about their own constituents,” he said. “They put foreign citizens before American citizens. We’re not going to do that.”
Democrat legislatiors and 2020 candiddates insist their support for easy migration is not the same as open borders. “Open borders is just a right-wing talking point — it always has been,” 2020 candidate Julian Castro told ABC June 30.
Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes roughly 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or health care, engineering or science, software or statistics.
But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses — plus roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.
The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.
This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.
This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.
The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.
The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.
“If there is a growing flood of foreign labor, the American middle class is no longer going to exist, and Republicans will not have a constituency,” said Hilarie Gamm, a co-cofounder of the American Workers Coalition.