In my daughter’s high school in Virginia there was a talented boy who really liked singing in choir class, but was failing the course because he was often absent. At first she thought he was slacking; then she figured out why he was struggling. “He works at the pizza shop,” she told me. “He works more hours than he should, and he often skips school.” This boy is one of several Honduran kids in her public school who are waiting to get refugee status. This fall, when ICE was all over our town, he stopped coming to school altogether.

Many people believe that large numbers of migrants put an undue burden on schools, or hospitals, or public spaces. Stark differences of language and culture, especially when concentrated in periods of sudden change, can spark resentment and undermine natives’ social trust—as a result, native workers do not want to contribute to the welfare state anymore, squeezing social democracy to the point of collapse. On this view, the clash of cultures is the fundamental source of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Lea Ypi forcefully challenges this contention. The political problems that stem from immigration are not about culture, she claims, but about class. The real problem for my daughter’s school is not that the struggling kid is from Honduras or that he speaks Spanish: it is that he must work to keep his family afloat. Immigrant students who skip school and fall behind put pressure on school structures, but the school must cater to them as well as to native students who struggle economically; the burdens of the globalized economy cut across cultural lines. The key to our political impasse is not excluding poor people from abroad in order to take care of “our own” poor; it is, Ypi says, reclaiming “the Enlightenment values of freedom, equality, and solidarity.” We must fight for “an expansion of political representation beyond inherited citizenship” and build alliances across borders so that “nobody is forced to leave their homes.”

I agree with Ypi that immigration is not a problem. For those who want to be close to people they love, or who try to make a living, it is a solution. For those who flee to safety, it is a solution. And for economies that need cheap labor, or for those who receive remittances, it is also a solution. I also share Ypi’s universal values, and I agree that xenophobia is itself fueled by the crisis of the liberal democratic state. As it gets squeezed on all sides by globalized economic pressure, states must sustain their legitimacy; many conclude that the easiest way to do so is to fuel national sentiment by portraying migrants as a burden or threat. Once migrants are widely seen that way, states can shuffle off the blame for economic woes to newcomers, and at the same time they can more easily help corporations to keep salaries low and grease the wheels of workers’ exploitation. States need capital to survive, and like states, corporations and financial services also like to politicize immigration: as the rich get richer and the poor poorer, they hope that workers will fight each other instead of those who exploit them.

But it’s hard to see how this knot could be untied by “framing” the conversation in different terms—around an appeal to universal values. “Mass Deportation Now!” was a rallying slogan of the Trump campaign last year, and it worked well enough to win. Under this banner, the Republican Party stirred up racism and cruelty toward migrants, and it also made Democrats look aloof and concerned with abstract matters of principle rather than with bread-and-butter issues and specific problems in specific communities. Both these strategies, working together, appear to have led so many workers and naturalized immigrants to vote for the right.

It might be argued that in doing so, workers are voting against their long-term interests. On this view, workers suffer from “false consciousness,” and the cure is political education—by the enlightened—to open their eyes. But who says that cosmopolitan causes are these voters’ “real” interests? To prove that they are, we’d need to cut a clear path from universal values to the political and economic changes that benefit workers. How do you go from supporting migrants’ rights to ensuring that your schools will be funded, that you and other workers will get fair wages, and that you will live in a robust welfare state that takes care of you when you get ill and provides for you in your retirement? How do you go from Lessing’s ideals to small class sizes in schools? Although workers’ solidarity would be beautiful to behold, nobody should expect that native laborers will put the well-being of a worker on the other side of the world ahead of their own.

If Ypi holds that workers’ solidarity across territorial and national borders is not only an ethical but also a rational economic position, she probably also believes in the inevitability of economic crisis and the social revolution, upon which fair political administration will be led by workers. But can voters be sure that these changes will succeed each other—sure enough to abandon traditional structures of power based on national affinity that have so far benefited people like them in exchange for a promised kingdom of universal freedom, equality, and solidarity? For it to seem rational, they would need the hopeful faith in progress—that change is somehow predetermined by economic structures or by reason itself—as well as the conviction that this change will benefit them.

We could, as Ypi suggests, spread the gospel of that faith. But the faith itself would not be enough. To bring about the changes needed to reverse the growth in the gap between rich and poor—the motor driving division among the world’s workers—we need strong political will, organizations able to transform that will into powerful majorities, and political structures able to sustain a different economic system. Yet today there are few, if any, institutions able to foster class solidarity. Around the world, parties and unions are either waning or compromised by the very national establishments that they are supposed to defeat.

In short, workers should be internationalists—sure. But philosophizing about the universality of moral obligation doesn’t itself build structures that create new solidarities. Those structures don’t spring automatically from cosmopolitan appeals. Rather, they must be painstakingly built from and upon people’s everyday practices. True, many people will march or protest for a just cause, but when it comes time to make hard choices or sacrifice, they will likely act because of the esteem of their peers, the love of their family, or immediate threats to their money or their safety. People tend to be in solidarity not with an abstract idea of humanity but with the people who are close to them.

Reminding voters of universal values won’t generate the kind of response Ypi proposes, then—indeed, notional cosmopolitanism may turn some voters away. But setting an example in real relations, local connections, and existing communities just might. This approach might seem counterintuitive, because appeals to (existing) community often fuel xenophobia. But there are many types of memberships; not all are closed, exclusionary, or inherited. Some draw in people around beliefs and preferences, like churches or sports clubs, and in many communities—like a community kitchen, mentoring group, or watershed protection association—you can be a member simply by showing up. Such communities do not just serve charity: rather, they protect the participant’s interests and build power through mutual support.

Take a local library: it’s public, it’s built on shared resources and effort, and it’s supportive of everyone, including migrants. A community garden only exists due to the gardener’s mutual interests. These institutions are not universal: they don’t serve everybody, and not everyone in the world wants them or needs them. But scads of existing organizations can enable the solidarity required to bring about political and economic change.

The upshot is that Ypi’s sharp diagnosis requires a different course of action than the one she prescribes. Merely invoking Enlightenment values of freedom, equality, and solidarity will not prompt xenophobes to defend migrants’ rights any time soon. But I can easily see people coming together to defend local institutions such as libraries, community centers, and sports clubs. And I can see how the same people, who perhaps dislike foreigners in the abstract, might invite actual migrant school children to play soccer with their own children. Or, while some flee to private schools or suburbs, away from poor and the racialized, those left behind might still organize to support the school’s theater troupe or choir. These particular institutions are our best hope for motivating workers to join with others locally and abroad. Indeed they may organize for support for local students so they all have time to do their homework and not drop out, even if they were born in another country. The remedy we need is concrete, local organizations.