Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressivism to flourish?
That the era of low immigration was also the era of progressive triumph is no coincidence. […] The United States felt more like a cohesive nation to many voters, with higher levels of social trust and national pride, and politicians were able to enact higher taxes on the rich and new benefits like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
As a socialist from Denmark, what convinced me to stop supporting immigration was the realization that we’re going to see an overwhelming increase in immigration due to climate change, because enormous parts of northern Africa and the Middle East will become uninhabitable. The increase in climate refugees coupled with our absolutely appaling integration policies, made by right-wing parties over the last 30 years, has convinced me we will absolutely fail misserably if we don’t stop.
My politicians are simply too inept to be able to handle it, and it will destroy my country in the process.
It is hard to read someone acknowledge that some of the reasons people seek refuge is directly result from the wealthiest nations fucking up the planet for profit while the firsts to take the effects are the poor nations that very little contributed to said catastrophe and goes:
“sorry, there is no space for you. It is true that we are ripping the fruit of centuries of imperialism and unchecked destruction of nature and sorry that it affects you guys the most, but we cannot make space and give up the way of life that we killed the planet for”
I don’t disagree with that, and I think it’s a horrible situation it’s putting everyone in, obviously by far the most horrible situation for the people whose home is going to become inhabitable. But realistically, Europe would have to take in too many people. The current population of Northern Africa is roughly 275 million, and the population of the Middle East 500 million. Europe currently has about 742 million people. Doubling that in refugees won’t just change our way of life. Society would collapse. Sure, a bunch could go to Asia, but they’re already seeing a noticable increase in weather related catastrophes. So I’m not seeing that as a real posibility.
Yeah, same thing in America too, conservatives would rather run on “immigration is broken” as an issue than actually take productive steps to make immigration work. Ultimately, they know that positioning themselves as the anti-immigration party during an immigration crisis is a winning play.