Social Democracy, Immigration and the Working Class

Oct. 31, 2024

Migrant workers pick strawberries south of San Francisco, California, on April 3, 2024. © Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Getty

Writing for The Ideas Letter, Bhaskar Sunkara recently offered a magisterial account of the decline of social democracy. The upshot is that the movement waned because its leaders put “the interests of capital over those of workers” amid the crises of the 1970s—a trend that persists to this day. In response, many workers abandoned these parties in search of better representation, not least on the populist right; educated professionals replaced them as social democracy’s base. 

So how might proponents of social democracy turn things around? What would it take to revivify the model’s core elements—above all, high union density leading to better wages and a less lopsided distribution of the social income—in an inauspicious 21^st century? In sketching a way forward, Sunkara rules out what he considers three dead-ends. I’m with him on the first two, which involve either celebrating these developments or pretending they aren’t taking place. 

Yet I have to part ways with him on the third approach: namely, accommodating popular discontent with the, well, liberal aspects of neoliberalism, most notably mass, low-wage migration. That’s no dead-end at all, but common electoral and political-economic sense. 

The first dead-end is to “glorify the changes underway”: that is, to welcome the takeover of erstwhile workers’ parties, including the US Democratic Party, by professionals more interested in liberalizing cultural mores than mounting countervailing power against capital. Recall, for example, then-Rep. Carolyn Mahoney (D-NY) responding to a 2020 news story about the obscene compensation packages of corporate CEOs by asking, “Where are the women?” 

The professional classes’ ideological interests here aren’t merely “ideological”: The production and maintenance of progressive normativity entails material gains for the members of this class, in the form of sinecures as corporate HR managers, university administrators, and the like. But as Sunkara rightly notes, even if the professionals were pure of heart, the fact is that they are “less strategically positioned than workers at the points of production and exchange.” 

This helps explain why professional-class environmental politics too often amount to little more than policing ordinary people at the level of consumption—the straws they drink out of, the forms of mobility they use to get to work, and so on—rather than advancing grand-scale reforms in the mode and relations of production. 

Fortifying Sunkara’s argument, we might turn to his collaborator Vivek Chibber’s 2022 book, The Class Matrix. The author doubles down on the core Marxian insight that people’s place in the class structure constrains their range of choices to a degree unmatched by any belief, cultural identity, or ideological commitment. Hence the chief diversity officer who opens her anti-union rant with a pronoun announcement. Or the mining company that proclaims the centrality of land acknowledgments to the industry. Or the Catholic private-equity boss for whom the Church’s social teaching is no bar to asset-stripping. Sunkara (and Chibber) are right, then, to identify social class and the “dull compulsion” meted out by market economies as central to social reform in a way that is simply not the case with race, gender, culture, belief, and other such dimensions of identity. 

The second of Sunkara’s dead-ends is simple denial: the insistence among some left activists and union organizers that there is no dealignment taking place between social-democratic parties and the working class. Sunkara marshals plenty of polling data to the contrary. I’d add anecdotal evidence from my own conversations with labor leaders—some on the record, others off—astonished by their rank and file’s attraction to Donald Trump. 

Which brings us to the point of disagreement. Sunkara rejects a third approach that would “excise liberal values from center-left politics to appeal to what they see as the traditionally conservative values of the working class.” To put it more bluntly: He thinks it’s a mistake for proponents of social democracy to offer any sop to the working class on immigration. He singles out Sahra Wagenknecht, a former leader of Germany’s Left party who has since launched her own political movement, for doing just that. 

But Sunkara’s critique of Wagenknecht’s approach—which presumably extends to that of Denmark’s Social Democrats, among other left formations shifting right on migration—rests on flimsy analysis. 

At the heart of social democracy is the primacy of politics over the economy. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries, nascent market societies promised political equality, but the pledge was withdrawn as soon as workers walked through the factory gates. At a larger scale, what the economic historian Karl Polanyi described as the “autonomous market” barreled past local preferences and upended familiar social and moral coordinates. Mass movements for political and economic democracy arose in response to this imperious market, culminating in the achievements of the New Deal order in America and social and Christian democracy in Europe. 

Fast-forward to our time, and asserting the primacy of the political means representing working-class people when they oppose massive, low-wage, unskilled migration, the perennial fetish of the likes of the Koch Brothers, the Cato Institute, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. As the writer Michael Lind has documented, such migration is one of two chief forms of labor arbitrage by which the employer class plays populations and jurisdictions against each other to lower costs (the other being offshoring). 

In other words, opposition to mass, low-wage migration isn’t an expression of working-class people’s irrational or atavistic cultural illiberalism, as Sunkara implies. It’s part of a rational calculation that in a primarily services-based economy, high migrant flows diminish what little bargaining power native-born workers enjoy. Newcomers who lack language proficiency and fret about their legal status aren’t going to organize to push back against management; they aren’t going to turn to federal regulators to complain about wage theft and abysmal working conditions. 

Sunkara hints that reviving manufacturing in the Western heartland would address these concerns. Social democrats should indeed support tariffs and industrial policies aimed at protecting and nurturing domestic industry. But even if the manufacturing share of the economy could be boosted to say 20 percent of GDP (from less than 10 percent currently), the manufacturing share of total employment is unlikely to change much, owing to automation, which will only accelerate with the advance of AI, robotics, and the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. A significant share of tomorrow’s workers will thus remain in the service sector—even if both parties commit to renewing the Hamiltonian system of import substitution in our century. 

Sunkara might counter this point by arguing that the way forward is by organizing the newcomers. Put another way: Let them in, but then work hard to build up social democracy at the workplace. But history throws cold water at such enthusiasm. 

In the United States, for example, the New Deal order correlated with the fairly restrictive immigration regime inherited from the 1924 Immigration Act. As The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson wrote long ago: “It was only during the one period in American history when immigration was almost shut off—1923 through 1965—that industrial workers were able to organize themselves.” Vernon Briggs, the eminent historian of the labor movement’s intersection with immigration, concluded that “membership in American unions has over time moved inversely with trends in the size of immigration inflows.” And the neoliberals and libertarians themselves proudly boast that higher migration has been a major factor in the overall decline of union density. 

The free movement of labor is a central component of the neoliberal order that supplanted social democracy on both sides of the Atlantic. Working-class people will continue to dealign from social democracy—and turn to ever-more-terrifying far-right parties—so long as would-be economic reformers remain wedded to this defining aspect of the neoliberal agenda.