As bad as Donald Trump’s 2016 election was for progressives, his 2024 comeback has been nothing short of a nightmare. And on the question of immigration specifically, Trump has exceeded the wildest expectations of both his supporters and detractors.

Not that long ago, skeptics on both the Right and the Left doubted that Trump would be able to execute MAGA’s immigration plan, particularly without riling the business community into open revolt. As it turns out, immigrant labor was not nearly as important to capital as previously thought — at least not so important that it would aggressively oppose a candidate like Trump. Nor was the racial and ethnic identification of immigrant voters so strong that they could be counted on to vote against an anti-immigrant candidate — not if he was also promising to protect them from competition from even newer migrants.

Faced with this startling new reality, the Democratic Party has offered tepid defenses of migrants’ human rights, all while conceding the framing of immigration as a problem. In this moment, the socialist left needs to advance a serious alternative, not only due to the moral imperative to protect our neighbors under attack but because this attack is specifically designed to neutralize us.