Suzy, can you explain what the different components of the American immigration system are?

Sure. In terms of what the actual policy is, we can separate it out into different categories of migrants. Immigration, the term that we use to talk about all migrants in the public discourse in American law, refers to people who are migrating permanently for settlement. So that term covers people who basically get green cards or legal permanent residence.

Apart from that, we have other categories of migrants. Humanitarian migrants are asylum seekers or refugees who are fleeing their countries of origin primarily for political reasons. And then we’ve got temporary migrants. And those are people who are temporary in the sense that the law doesn’t provide for them to get a green card and permanently settle. So those could be labor-based migrants.

Like those H-1B visas?

Right, the H-1B visa as well as the high-skilled temporary workers. The H visa also covers workers that are not considered skilled, like agricultural workers. Those are H-2A workers, so seasonal workers, things like that. But also people like someone who might come to the United States to be an au pair would be considered temporary migrants. Students would also be considered temporary migrants.

And then there’s this whole other category that doesn’t really get considered in immigration law, which is the people who just travel. Way more than any immigrants who come to settle is a huge flow of people who just cross our borders every day for vacation or short-term business, that kind of stuff. And that’s tens of millions of people who come. And it is related to immigration policy because some of those people overstay their visas and become undocumented workers. And they get processed through the same border system that all the other migrants get processed through. So there is an overlap, but it’s also sort of separate. And we rarely talk about travel visas when we talk about immigration policy.

So when we’re talking about undocumented or illegal immigrants, are we talking about immigrants from all of those categories or from a specific subset of those categories that you just laid out?

Undocumented immigrants are people who legally don’t have any status under those categories. So if you’re a legal immigrant, then you’re someone who has a green card, you have a status. If you’re a humanitarian migrant, you’re someone who usually has a green card and permission to be here for political reasons. If you’re a temporary migrant, you have a temporary visa. Everyone I just mentioned has a legal status.

Undocumented migrants fall outside of that system; they don’t have a legal status. In popular discourse, we call them immigrants. And many undocumented immigrants settle permanently. But historically, in the United States, a lot of undocumented migrants circulated. They came for seasonal work and then went back home. And that changed actually when our border policy became much more violent, so that the risks of circulating increased to the point where people decided to settle.

So it’s hard to categorize undocumented migrants in this sort of framework: they are immigrants now because many of them have had to settle. But they used to be temporary labor-based migrants because they went back and forth.

The definition is kind of messy because if, let’s say, you’re a European student who came on vacation, and you ran out of money and took a job waiting tables or busing for cash under the table, then you’ve technically violated immigration law and are now out of status and are undocumented. Although, obviously, if they don’t catch you, that’s not really going to affect you.

Suzy, do we know of the total number of undocumented workers in the United States? What proportion are these regularly circulating ones who come in for exactly three or four months and go right back out again?

That number is not very high anymore. And that’s a function of our border policy. So it used to be, before we had a heavily militarized border where the risks of crossing are very high, it was basically a lot of that undocumented flow. Most of the migration from Mexico went in this very circular pattern. But that has changed a lot, because the more dangerous you make the border, the more likely you make it that someone who crosses for work has to stay, because they’re going to risk their lives every time they go back and forth.

That wasn’t a thing until the middle of the twentieth century. The borders were not particularly patrolled. And then, particularly between Mexico and the United States, it wasn’t seriously policed, and it wasn’t a big deal. People would cross and go to work and come back. There wasn’t really a strict system for saying that somebody could work or not.

None of that existed until we started imposing restrictions in our system and then militarizing it so that you have to meet with the border officer before you’re able to cross. The Mexican migration actually increased at the turn of the twentieth century when we limited Chinese and Asian migration. The Mexican migrant workers came and replaced the Asian workers, and then there’s this circulation that happens.

There are periods, typically associated with economic crisis in the United States, where we round up all the undocumented workers and deport them. That happened in the 1930s during the Great Depression. “Operation Wetback” in the 1950s was another instance when that happened.

But apart from those sorts of moments, there’s a normal circulation that happens. And we make some rules like the Bracero program, which began in World War II and was a formalization of that. But it wasn’t just a formalization. It was created because we weren’t getting enough workers during World War II, and we needed them. So it was a way to promote increasing migration from Mexico to the farms and to the American labor market. And so there’s this constant changing and circulation that was happening.

And then in 1986, we give amnesty to the undocumented workers who were already here. But then we also heavily militarized the border. So it’s harder to get more of them in here. And then that creates the modern system where we’re constantly talking about undocumented workers and fights over border enforcement.

What are the defining features of modern American immigration policy?

I think if I were to periodize it and think of when modern American immigration policy began, the first key years are the 1920s. That’s when we made the shift away from a relatively open immigration system, wherein when people arrived at a border to cross into the United States there was an assumption of admission.

Unless there was a specific reason to keep you out of the country, such as if you were sick, if you’re a public health risk — then you weren’t allowed to come in. If you were at risk of becoming a “public charge,” meaning you couldn’t work, that was a limitation. And then, of course, there were certain categories of people like Chinese or Asian workers who, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, were denied entry, or whose rights to migrate were limited. But in general, the assumption was that you would be allowed.

In the 1920s, that changed, so that instead the assumption was that you would not be allowed in, and there was a quota system that was imposed. And at the time, the quota acts of the early 1920s created a system where the numbers of people who are allowed in were pegged to the already existing population. So each country got a number that was based on a percentage of the number of nationals who are already in the country. That was the first big break. And there were a lot of critiques that this was openly racist; it was trying to keep the nationality breakdown even.

Right, if I remember my AP US history class, it was heavily biased toward Western Europeans who were no longer migrating in the same numbers that Eastern Europeans were.

So the way in which it was pegged was whomever was the largest proportion of the American population would get a larger percentage of entry. And the smaller members of the existing American population were given less entry.

Exactly right. So obviously, that would give priority to admit more European migrants than from other places. So that was the 1920s. And that instituted this new regime where restriction was the norm, whereby you had to not just have permission to enter, but you had to qualify to enter.

That was reformed in the 1960s — we got rid of these quotas that were seen to be openly racist. There were still caps. So right now, there are actual numbers: every year, there’s a certain number of Mexican people and Indian people and Chinese people who can come in. But it’s not so tightly pegged. I think the rule is that no one country can represent more than 7 percent of immigrants who are admitted, people who get green cards.

But other than that, there was now a whole system of rules whereby people, when they enter, qualify to enter through some connection or some need that we have. So we had some skill-based and labor-based immigration. There were some rules around admitting people for employment or around the skills that we want in our economy.

But then in the 1960s, the vast majority was based on family reunification. Anyone who’s gone through the immigration system knows you can sponsor a family member if you’re a citizen or if you have a green card, and that system of sponsorship was created in the 1960s.

And even though there have been a lot of changes since then — in 1986, there was a major amnesty for undocumented workers who were already here, and the 1980s is when the border really became militarized — the basic framework of how we admit legal migrants hasn’t really changed since the 1960s.

Despite all the years that we’ve been debating immigration — and there have been changes around enforcement — the fundamental structure has been very stable. Maybe the quota numbers go up. But the rules for how you get to come here — you have some skills, you have a family member who sponsors you, you get married — those are the same rules that have been there since the 1960s.

The humanitarian system also began in the middle of the twentieth century. So when you didn’t restrict migration, you didn’t need a humanitarian migration law, because people would just come, you don’t really ask them, “Why are you here?” They were allowed in. Once you start to have restrictions, then you need to have criteria.

And so then you have a separate category. Once restriction came into place, then there were exceptions for humanitarian migrants. And then in the 1980s, we passed a refugee act that created a separate legal category for refugees and asylees, a whole system for processing them and then annual ceilings for accepting refugees.

And it was quite generous. Since the 1980s, and pretty much until the first Trump administration, the United States was the top receiver of refugees for resettlement. So when people left refugee camps, from wherever they were in crisis, the United States was the number one country that received refugees for resettlement, more than any other country until the Trump administration.

A lot of how we talk about immigration politics right now starts from the crisis of immigration that occurred under the Biden administration. Can you explain what that crisis was, and how significant it was?

The crisis in migration during the Joe Biden presidency really began between 2022 and 2023 as things went back to normal, as travel returned to normal, after the COVID disruption. Before COVID, there was a net migration into the United States of roughly 1.5–1.7 million. This meant more people were coming in, but other people were leaving. And during COVID, that number dropped to around three hundred thousand. So for this period of over a year, the migration that would normally have happened did not happen.

We could expect there would have been a rebound of immigration. Not just to return to normal, but also all those people who were waiting to migrate, but couldn’t, and who were now going to come in — we would expect that number to increase.

On top of which, COVID was a huge political-economic disruption around the world, which means that if migration is something that’s caused by difficult conditions at home, things get worse and people try to leave. So you would imagine that there would be an increase. And all of those things did contribute to an increase in migration. There are numbers but it’s difficult to measure, because these are undocumented people.

Then by 2023, the number had bounced up to three million. That’s quite high. There was a real crisis. But it’s really difficult to know the trend because then Trump comes into power and all of his policies have a huge impact.

Some of the numbers that you can see showed that it was already abating by the end of the Biden administration. I think that it was a temporary spike. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem. It was a problem. But it depends on how you handle it.

What happened when there was this huge surge in 2023 of net immigration?

The Biden administration handled it in possibly the worst way that you could.

[Laughing] I’m shocked.

Well, I think the first thing is that the Biden administration intensified the crisis through the way that it highlighted migration. I think they made political hay out of undoing the Trump era migration policies, which were very unpopular. But in so doing and making immigration this big-ticket item, it means that it told the rest of the world, “We’re opening our borders. You’re welcome to come.”

So the thing with migration is that there are lots of different things that cause it. Sometimes it’s conditions in the sending country. It’s demand for labor in the receiving country. It’s the connections between the receiving country and the sending country. All of those things matter.

But also policy matters. Because migrants are thinking, ‘What are my chances of getting in if I come?” And that’s something that, if you’re being rational, you’re going to think about those things. Also, there is a whole migration industry of people who are coordinating and facilitating, and they’re looking at politics and law in the places that people are going to and saying “You should go there because this is how you’re going to get in.” These are all things that matter.

And so, by Biden making himself the opposite of Trump, even if not literally having open borders but saying, “We’re a new regime and we’re welcoming migrants,” that was an invitation for that flow to grow. And maybe that’s not a popular thing to say, but it did have that effect.

Again, I think that three million is a lot. It didn’t have to be catastrophic. That’s less than 1 percent increase in the American population.

But the other part of it was that the Biden administration didn’t handle it. So one of the things it did not do was that it did not create additional infrastructure for processing all these people who are coming in and applying for asylum. We already had a huge asylum backlog because all of our immigration systems are underfunded, and we don’t have enough adjudicators. And so there was a yearslong backlog that was made worse.

When you come to the border and say, “I am claiming asylum,” then the law requires that we have to consider all the legitimate cases and put them through the system. And once you claim it, the policy was that you were paroled into the United States — and parole is a term that just means you’re allowed to come in.

I remember this becoming a talking point for the Right, where they were saying, “Oh, people are abusing the asylum system and are just using it so that they have a way to migrate here as basically undocumented.”

I think that criticism is tricky because there are many reasons why people come. And it’s not like when you’re someone coming to the border, you know the immigration law well enough to say, “I’m actually a labor migrant, but I’m going to claim to be an asylee.” You’re leaving terrible conditions at home. You are asking, “Can I come here and live because I can’t make a life there?” So I don’t know that anybody was lying. I think people were saying “This is what I’m told to say,” and I will say it’s not untrue.

If you think realistically, coming back from COVID, there was social breakdown in so many places, and people were leaving. And by any layperson’s understanding of asking for refuge or asylum, many of these people would have qualified.

So all these people came at the same time, and not only was there no way to process them quickly, but also they were allowed to stay at the border. And so if you’re a refugee, we have systems for getting you to places. There’s a resettlement program in the country where we send you to different cities and there are people to receive you and help you. None of these people got any of that sort of support because we weren’t processing them quickly enough. Instead, they just stayed in the border towns.

If you have three million people come and hang out in a border town, the town is not going to be able to handle those kinds of numbers. You remember the busing of migrants to New York City and stuff like this? It was political theater, but it was very effective political theater because it was a real problem. And the Biden administration was not dealing with it. If you wanted to create a migration crisis, make it worse, and make migrants into scapegoats, that was the way to do it.

This was the context in which you see Trump running for his second presidency. There was a palpable sense of a national immigration crisis. And it was obviously not concocted out of thin air. Biden and Kamala Harris refused to deal with it or acknowledge it. And Trump made tremendous political capital out of this.

If you compare his two presidential campaigns, in the first one, he’s running as much more of a populist and outsider, wanting to shake the halls of power. And in the second one, the populism is basically gone. And it’s full-frontal anti-immigration and incredibly racist. And then, of course, the issue of the wars, of wanting to end the forever wars. But he comes into office essentially on an anti-immigrant platform. And that is largely because of the way in which, as Suzy is saying, Biden handled immigration during his presidency.

But when we stand back and look at the situation in June 2026, and if we compare the previous two months of Trump’s immigration regime with the first four or five months, the difference is stark. Because in the first four or five months, what you see is an incredibly militarized regime against immigrants but, by extension, also against American cities.

The second thing you see is that, even back then, some guardrails were emerging about which kinds of immigrants Trump felt he could go after, and which ones — he discovers out of watching the reaction of important sectors of capital and of the economy — he has to draw back from. And both poles of the winding down of the initially aggressive immigration policy are now much more apparent in summer of 2026.

I think one good thing to examine right now would be: What are the guardrails that he discovered for himself in the first few months? You deal with this in your article, Suzy. And secondly: Why has he had to scale back the aggressiveness overall of the anti-immigration, of the deportation?

I think the guardrails are capital. There are sectors in the American economy that rely on immigrant labor: the hospitality sector, agriculture, construction. And when the immigration enforcement tactics started to impact their ability to access labor, they let Trump know. And even though the pullback was not trumpeted anywhere nearly as loudly, very quickly after the workplace raids started, there was pushback. And very quietly, the Trump administration dismantled most of it.

Yeah, and you see that in Congress itself, all the senators coming from these Midwestern states, which are agricultural and rural states, they’re the ones beating the drums, because what’s happening is that the farmers who employ those rural workers are calling their congressmen. And the congressmen are saying to Trump, “What are you doing? You’re going to destroy our chances in the next elections if you keep this up.”

Yes, I think that’s the major guardrail. When it affects capital, it’s rolled back. I think that’s why you also see some of these attacks on the cities, the visible attacks on the cities, because it’s political theater, but it doesn’t hit these sectors in the same way. And so I think that’s why that went on longer than the workplace raids.

As to the second guardrail on the severity of the anti-immigrant crackdowns, I think that has to do with the American population not being as virulently nativist or racist as Trump anticipated, but also as the political pundits would have you believe, right?

Yes, there was a backlash against the crisis that happened under Biden. People were frustrated, and so they were willing to contemplate certain intensifications of attacks on immigrants. That’s clear.

But when they actually saw what it was, they were repulsed. They were disgusted by it, and I think that the backlash against it was pretty immediate in the polling, and I think that that had an impact on the Trump administration. Maybe not in the beginning when they felt like they were invincible, but increasingly as other things have made them unpopular. And as they’ve not delivered on any of the economic promises that they’ve made, the support for the immigration enforcement has precipitously declined. I think that that has been a guardrail on the ugliness of the enforcement policy.

A couple of points worth noting: One is that, as one steps back, you see the guardrails are coming from two different directions. One is from the halls of power, which is employers of various kinds saying that Trump is now interfering with our normal operations and profit-making, and Trump had to step back from that. The other is coming from below, from popular resistance to this.

All that said, I think it’s important to acknowledge the basic support for deportation remains in place. What people are objecting to is the brutality of it and the militarization of it, and they don’t like these federal troops coming into their cities and overturning the local cops, and overturning the local machine of law and order. But it would be a mistake to think that there is now a movement against the deportation regime per se. It’s important for the Left to recognize this: Across all the different sectors of the population, the basic idea that if people are here illegally, if they’re here clandestinely, then they shouldn’t be allowed to stay, or that there has to be some kind of tightening of the sluices through which they’re coming in. I think that still remains in place.

Or people believe something needs to be done about that population, I would say. And yes, I do agree that there still remains some support for deportation, although there is also support for amnesty or paths to citizenship for undocumented workers, too.

I think that that’s the work of the Left, of convincing people, of providing a different solution to the problem. And so if we don’t want to see deportations, then we have to offer something else.

I think the interesting thing about this is that there’s definitely been an increase in the attention to and discussion of how our immigration system needs to be reformed. And one of the interesting things that you talk about in your article is that, despite all the money that the Trump administration has thrown into immigration enforcement, there actually hasn’t been much net return on investment in terms of actually being able to deport people.

But the other side of this is the question of how the Left orients toward the immigration system and this question of deportation, because I think a lot of leftists are looking at the situation and saying, “Well, because there’s a political crisis, it’s an opportunity to push and argue that there shouldn’t be such a thing as an undocumented immigrant, or that there should be no such thing as illegal immigration.”

So I’m curious what you think about that, Suzy, because it seems to be in contrast to what Vivek just said regarding the reality that most people still support some kind of deportation.

I am on the side of the people who think that there shouldn’t be a thing as undocumented or illegal immigration. But my position on that has to do with what it does to the labor movement, and what it does to worker power, when you have a category of person that is considered undocumented or illegal. The vulnerability that that creates is not just a problem for that person but for anybody who is of a class with them and needs to be able to organize.

If you’re undocumented, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to work. You’re going to work, but employers are going to be able to exploit you more brutally than they can exploit a citizen, or even a documented worker. And so then that means that, when it’s time to organize a union, that person is not going to be someone who can take the risk of organizing. Sometimes some really brave people are willing, but in general, the risk of participation in labor organization is much higher for somebody who’s undocumented, and also for someone who is an immigrant.

In other places, I’ve made an argument for open borders, and the argument isn’t about the economy or anything. It’s about labor power and the need for people to have secure rights in order to be able to organize them. “Illegal immigration” will always undermine the labor movement as long as that’s the regime we live under.

And so the question is, how do we get there from here? Because I do think that if we just say, “Oh, we’re going to make everybody legal,” because there is social support for deportation, and there is a particular way that we talk about immigration, that it would be really hard to go from where we are now to an open borders kind of policy.

But as leftists, as labor organizers, we have to see that as the problem and figure out how we work around that.

I think it’s very hard. I’ve not decided whether I think the end point should be open borders, and I’m certainly willing to consider it. I think there’s a difference between saying that, as a matter of principle, we should be in favor of open borders, but, as a matter of practicality, we can’t be and saying that, even as a matter of principle, we should have regulated borders of some kind.

My inclination is to say we should have regulated borders, not open borders. And the reason for that is, I think, twofold. One is that open borders does mean that for neighboring countries, which are much better off than you or much worse off than you, there’s going to be a huge incentive for masses of people to try to cross over, and the odds are that they’re going to overwhelm the system when they do.

Well for most of the history that I’ve talked about, the United States was wealthier than Mexico. And for a good chunk of that history, the border was not regulated, and people circulated back and forth. And you did not actually have all the Mexicans move into America, right? What you actually had was circulation, because people don’t want to live in America. They wanted to live at home. Maybe they wanted to have a job. But going all the way across to work that job, it’s a big thing, it involves risk, even if the border is not dangerous, it’s lonely, all of these things, right? There’s only going to be some percentage that does that.

I think open borders is not a realistic thing that we can talk about, and so I can only speculate as to the impact. But I do think that if such a regime were to exist, we wouldn’t just see constant flows from one direction to another. We would see some sort of stability, and it would be something more like what we saw before we had more border enforcement.

That’s possible. But we shouldn’t assume that that’s going to be the case. We should also allow for the possibility — because it’s happening in Europe now, and it’s happening here — that whatever the flow is, it’s going to be large enough to overwhelm the infrastructure that you have in place.

The second issue is that when we look back to the 1870s and ’80s, when there was a huge wave of immigrants, and it wasn’t very well regulated — and that was true all over the world — it was a very different era in an important sense. That was a moment in which national identities were not very well formed, states were not very well formed, and the notion of a political community in which the larger community owes something to the citizens through things like welfare rights and employment, wasn’t really formed yet.

In today’s world, when people look to the state, they see a settled, well-formed state, and they feel that the state owes them certain things as a matter of their being citizens, which is stability in their lives, safety in their neighborhoods, jobs, welfare rights. That was not true in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. That means that the threshold for a political crisis back then was much higher, because for the working class, they were living through a political crisis day to day, totally disenfranchised, no question of rights.

Today the notion of foreignness and foreign people coming in is so much more implanted in people’s consciousness as a reality. We don’t have to endorse it, but it’s a reality. It’s so much more deeply implanted that they are instinctively more wary of people speaking from other cultures, speaking other languages, and having other mores coming into their world.

Now, as socialists on the left, when you look out into the crisis in Europe on immigration, or when you look here, just like with everything else, when we tell the Left, “Don’t berate and scold ordinary people for their reactions,” I think for us, it’s an important learning moment to say, well, when we see that it’s mostly workers who are responding negatively, we can either do like the American left and say, “You’re all racists, you’re all nativists, fill out this form, and when you’re ready, when you’re worthy of us, we’ll come to you,” or you can say, well, we’re discovering something here about human psychology.

My own thinking on this has evolved, it’s changed a bit. I was much more of the open-borders ilk a few years ago until I saw what’s unfolding, and I said, “You know, there’s a reality we’re discovering about people’s psychology now, and that has a sociological basis.” And I think it is that identities around citizenship and nationhood are so much more congealed now than they used to be.

And I don’t think it’s that much of a sacrifice of our guiding principles to say, well, maybe not open borders but liberally regulated borders might be the end point to which we are striving. And when I think about it, that end point seems to me to be entirely consistent with all of our other principles as socialists. I wonder what you think about that.

I think it depends on what “liberally regulated” means. “Open borders” is such a messy term. I would not be somebody who contemplates a situation where you don’t check in with somebody as you cross, right? We need to know who’s here, even if you’re going to qualify for welfare benefits or whatever. We need to know that. So there is an administered border, regardless of whatever it is.

So then, what do the two of you think the Left’s approach on immigration policy should be, at least from a general-principles standpoint?

It seems to me a pretty clear-cut principle, which is you should allow only as many immigrants in as your infrastructure and your political culture can absorb. Now, that’s not giving any numbers. That’s not giving any clear laws, but it’s a principle. So in certain countries, that’ll mean a fairly restrictive immigration policy.

Look at South Africa right now: South Africa has an immigration debate, because Zimbabwean migrants are coming into the country. And for the American left, this is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, you can’t say it’s racism. The American left loves to go to race as the explanation for all this stuff. And there is not a racism problem in South and Southern Africa. It is national. It is cultural. And that’s why I said people are now attached to their national identities in a way that wasn’t true 120 or 150 years ago.

So in a situation like South Africa, you might have to have a fairly tight immigration regime because you have upward of 40 percent unemployment in the country, and people are exceedingly nervous about the ability of the labor market to absorb new entrants.

Now, that’s a recognition of reality. But maybe in the United States, it’s more liberal. Why would it be more liberal? Because A, the infrastructure — in terms of state services, in terms of welfare, in terms of education — is more able to absorb it, and B, there’s a larger labor market that can absorb it. But while the numbers will be as proportions of the population will be very different in these two countries, the principle will be the same.

So I think that there are two ways of answering the question. One is: What does the Left do when it’s in power? And that is Vivek’s answer. And then there’s what we should do right now, out of power: How should we approach the problem? I think that those are the two ways to answer the question. And I do think that Vivek is right in that once we’re in power, it has to be managed in some way.

I think the other part, this thing that you said about nationalism, is something I’m thinking about a lot and trying to understand. I think that you may be right, but also that it’s the responsibility of the Left to change it. And not in terms of yelling at people and saying “You’re racist” and that kind of thing, but it makes me think about the Mamdani campaign.

I think it was effective in the sense that it didn’t say migration is a problem, even though all those people were bused into the city and exacerbated housing problems, right? He didn’t say it was a problem. He was like, “Immigration is great. I support immigrants. Immigrants have rights,” all that stuff. But the core of the campaign was about material issues, something else, right? And I think that the Left out of power should focus on immigrants’ rights.

The flow is something that we can’t control until we’re in power. And we can make this or that promise or whatever, but it’s not realistic. Maybe we have a policy where we say we’re going to manage it better, right? We’re not going to do what Biden did. And the flows that are going to come, we’re going to manage them better. But I don’t think that we should get into the business of, “What are the exact numbers”? I don’t think that’s very effective or useful.

And then I think that we need to actually depoliticize immigration, because it’s not really the thing that causes all of these other problems that make people want to vote for Trump, right? People voted for Trump because he promised them all sorts of economic goods, right? That the world was going to be better. And people are turning on him now because he hasn’t delivered on those things. And in the context of that, he used immigration as a scapegoat to say, “This is the reason why you can’t have all these nice things, and I’m going to deport all these people and then things will be great.”

And so what immigration has been useful for politically is as this sort of political cudgel. And when we engage in that game, the Left will always lose because of nationalism, and because things really do suck. And if you’re talking about immigration, it’s easy to point at immigrants and scapegoat them, right?

I think that the task of the Left is to depoliticize immigration, to make it like the weather, right? Flows of people will come because the world is messy, bad things happen. People have to leave where they’re living to survive. That’s what it means to be an animal. We move to survive. And flows will happen regardless of however we handle it.

Whatever we do, there’s no world in which we can make zero migration happen. And so then we need to figure out how to make migration into a thing that we know will happen. There will be spikes. And then sometimes there’ll be real declines. And we just sort of have to manage it as a thing that is a material reality.

And then once it’s not politicized, we can come up with all the reasonable politics and all this stuff. And to not politicize it also means that we have to deliver on the things that make politicians want to use migration as a scapegoat. So we fix the housing problem. We fix the jobs problem. And then Trump can talk about nationalism as much as he wants, but it will not have the same valence if people are not facing the kinds of stark problems that they are now in their everyday lives.

So we depoliticize the flow, but we absolutely politicize the rights question because it’s absolutely necessary for migrants to be able to participate in politics, which is what you need.

You know, one thing I’ve been wondering about is, we’re talking about how immigration has largely become, as you said, a cudgel for politicians like Trump to wield. Why, if that’s the case, have the Democrats moved so far to the right on immigration?

If I’m right, that immigration becomes useful as a cudgel, as a scapegoat for other problems, then how bad those problems are is going to be an indication of how well immigration is going to work. And so then you have to have an answer for what the real causes of those problems are, right?

I think centrist Democrats don’t have an answer. Or their answer is not that it’s capitalism and it’s capitalists, because that’s the real answer, saying that we have to reform our economy and our politics so drastically that the billionaires don’t get to dictate what happens in our world, and so that we use our resources to provide for everybody. Doing that would require a dramatic transformation of the kind that centrist Democrats are not going to do.

So if you can’t do that, then you don’t have a real answer for immigration. You just swing back and forth from being like, “Don’t be inhumane” to “You’re right, immigration is a problem, let’s be just as inhumane.” Those become your only two options in that scenario.

From “Nobody’s illegal” to “Everybody’s illegal.”

Right, right.

Why do you think this draconian nativist approach to immigration policy landed so well in 2024?

I think some of it was around the crisis that we discussed, in which the Biden administration exacerbated it. But, the crisis of the Biden administration was not just about immigration. It was also about inflation and all these other problems, the world becoming worse. And so in that context, why does it work to point to an immigrant instead of pointing to capital?

If you could point down or point up, why does it work to point down?

I think that it’s because there is a real thing that happens in the labor market that people, whether they directly experience it or not, it’s something that logically makes sense, which is that, in a situation where there are two people applying for a job, only one person will get it and the other person won’t. So if the number of people applying for a job increases because of immigration, then you don’t have to be racist to be like, “Oh, that person is going to decrease my chances of getting a job. So what am I going to do to improve my situation? Revolution doesn’t seem likely. I don’t think I can claw back the money from Elon Musk. I can maybe prevent somebody else from entering the labor market and competing with me,” right? That’s a thought.

The other thing is that, rationally, if you think about it, you say, “If I’m talking with my boss and trying to get a raise, and there’s somebody else who’s available who could do my job for less, then I’m less likely to get my raise from my boss.” So those are reasonable, logical things workers conclude. It’s sensible to think along those terms at a micro level.

There’s a second component to what Suzy is saying, but it’s about the government and the state. These migrants who come in also have to be given certain state services and welfare services. They have to be put in decent accommodations. They have to be given education. They have to be put into food shelters and things like that. And in a context where social services are being cut back dramatically, the image of immigrants in peoples’ heads may be people who are really not working yet. And in fact, in some countries, you’re legally not allowed to work for a stipulated period of time. But you get social services.

Now in an era of austerity, this is a perfect image of the immigrant: not just taking away jobs, but taking away services. And they’re not paying taxes, right? So this is a kind of a micro-psychology feeding on people’s insecurities and anxieties and anger about their material situation and redirecting it toward immigrants.

There’s a lot of data on this now on voting patterns in Europe. And what they’ve seen is that the vote for the far right, which is running on an anti-immigrant platform, is highest not in the districts with unemployment rates being very high but in the districts where social services have been cut the most dramatically.

So both of these things interact. And again, that means there’s a material basis for this stuff, which is that the Left has to be in favor of an employment-generating regime that increases people’s sense of security. They have to be able to cut their defense budgets and redirect money toward welfare programs and redistribution so people at the bottom don’t feel that they’re in a zero-sum game against everyone else for dwindling resources. You do that, and you will absolutely see the culture around immigration changing.

In fact, we know this because in the early 2000s when the immigration flood into Europe started, there was no backlash. The backlash came a few years later when the numbers became so high that they overwhelmed the system and when the austerity really started biting.

That’s why I come back to my point, which is that our proposed principle has to be to allow the number of people in that you can successfully absorb. And that absorption means political absorption, so that there isn’t a backlash, as well as material absorption, so that they aren’t out on the street all the time looking for scraps, and they can be gainfully employed and given the social services that they deserve. And over time, I think you’ll have a much more stable, and probably much more generous immigration regime this way.

I think the Left is in an interesting position right now because there has been a lot of pushback on Trump’s nativist and racist approaches to immigration policy. On the other hand, workers’ anxieties about immigration are real and predate Trump. So how does the Left come up with a strategy that addresses these concerns over immigration without delving into strategies that are ultimately harmful to their own efforts at things like worker organizing.

I think that the left strategy is the same strategy as it is for almost everything else, which is that we have to deliver on the things that improve people’s lives. And it’s kind of circular because in order to deliver we need power. So then, what is the thing that we say that will get us power?

I think that we have to acknowledge that people have real concerns, that the core behind whatever nativist reaction there seems to be — someone’s willingness to vote for Trump or countenance some of the stuff that’s happening — that we have to respect the crappiness of life that makes people look for solutions, and that looking at a fellow worker as competition is one way of answering “How can I better my situation?” We have to acknowledge that reality, and then we have to say, What is the thing that we do?

The answer to that question is always that we build solidarity. We say we build power so that we can win against capital, which is the actual cause of these problems. That has to be where the focus of the Left is. And when we think about the immigration policy and immigration politics that has to orient how we do that. And sometimes that means that we have to have a policy, restrictive or not, that works well so that it doesn’t create crises where there don’t need to be any.

But it also then means, more importantly, delivering on bettering the material lives of workers and giving them more power in their lives. And then I think that the impetus to look for a scapegoat or a solution to the problem will dissipate. That’s how we get a more humane immigration policy.