Migration “must be managed, so that the interests of all sides are considered — the countries of origin, the population of the receiving country and the immigrants themselves.” In a recent conversation with the New Left Review, Sahra Wagenknecht argues that the Left needs to get real and address the fact that her country’s public infrastructure isn’t fit to deal with high levels of immigration. This is true in one limited sense: German public infrastructure is, indeed, in a disastrous state, and unfit to provide for working-class needs in general.

Her new party, known as Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, is not alone in taking this position. The same rhetoric is currently embraced by a growing section of what passes for the European left: a development also visible in the Danish Social Democrats or such forces as Italy’s Five Star Movement. Their pretext is to defend working-class self-interest against the alleged chaos and economic disadvantages that might follow if unrestricted migration to Europe became the rule. Here, migration is depicted as a class conflict, in which the movement of people is detrimental for both the local and migrant working classes.

However, the proclaimed solution of “managing” migration — including Wagenknecht’s party’s full support for a segregated digital payment system designed to police refugees’ spending decisions — simply abandons the left-wing position of fighting for collective improvements and the leveling-up of rights. Instead, this line strengthens a division of the working classes — a division between good, predominantly white, native workers and racialized, bad, immigrant ones. The latter are portrayed as a threat to native workers, by increasing competition over the inescapably limited means available to the working classes.