Lea Ypi is plainly correct that “migration is not a problem as such.” Instead, the demonization of migrants is fundamentally a politics of mystification. The idea that migrants steal jobs obscures the reality of class domination by the richest human beings who have ever existed, dividing the working class against itself within nations and then again between them. And the notion that migrants are invading North America or Europe erases the reality that it is Western imperialist powers that have invaded the Global South and plundered it for resources. The “culture war” over immigration is first and foremost a tool to distract, divide, and conquer waged from above by an oligarchy increasingly explicit about its fascism.

Ypi is also absolutely right that the center-left has very much “bought into” this politics. In fact, it has played an essential role in making anti-migrant sensibilities seem like common sense. The far-right nativist movement has always dominated the debate and pushed the most explicitly racist anti-migrant policies and rhetoric in the United States, and the Democratic center, from Clinton through Obama and then Biden has pushed back on some of the overt racism and defended various forms of legal migration and the nation-of-immigrants mythos, it is true. But the Democrats did so all while deploying the criminal justice system to facilitate mass deportations, backing the construction of hundreds of miles of border wall, and helping to increase the size of the Border Patrol fivefold since the early 1990s.

To be sure, nativism is a constant feature of U.S. history. But it’s no surprise that the mystification of politics has intensified over more than four decades of neoliberal globalization: the period where ever-freer movement of capital has been accompanied by ever-hardening borders for people. The mid-1990s militarization of the border with Mexico promised to protect the American people from Mexican migrants; in reality, it served to protect NAFTA, supported by the Democratic president and Republicans alike, from democratic challenge on both sides of the border. At the time, free trade was criticized from the left by labor and environmentalists and from the right by nationalists led by Pat Buchanan. Today, the far right has made Buchanan’s model the dominant one, combining militarized xenophobia with a form of protectionism that has perversely accelerated capitalist exploitation. But Trump has been able to parlay anti-migrant politics into an authoritarian nightmare because Democrats have worked with Republicans to make it a problem as such. In short, anti-migrant politics has been actively supported at the highest levels of the two major parties. The same, it should be noted, is true of anti-Palestinian politics—which Trump has wielded with particular effect against noncitizens.

In the 1990s, far-right activists in California successfully organized a racist campaign to deny migrants access to public services and education (much of it later blocked in court). The Republican Party moved right and became split between business moderates who supported legal immigration while championing border and interior enforcement escalation against an insurgent nativist right who demanded deeper militarization, mass deportation, and no legalization. Centrist Democrats led by Bill Clinton responded by moving rightward as well because they attempted to triangulate—embracing increasingly draconian border militarization and anti-immigrant measures while, like Republican moderates, supporting, over the years, legalization, legal migration, and guest worker visas demanded by business.

That bipartisan politics, forged in the crucible of 1990s globalization dysphoria, took an even more dramatically dangerous form with the onset of the War on Terror. It can’t be overemphasized how the bipartisan wars on Iraq and Afghanistan (and beyond) reformulated immigration and border enforcement into a repressive core—the Department of Homeland Security—that today functions as an instrument of mass repression. The War on Terror didn’t just boomerang back into the metropole; from its inception it entailed building a system of mass repression at home staffed by Border Patrol and ICE. From the streets of Chicago to the waters off Venezuela, the results are clear: unconstrained dominance at home and abroad, celebrated in unapologetically supremacist tones. Anti-immigrant politics have thus provided a crucial alibi to a bipartisan politics of neoliberalism and imperialism. We are now reaping the consequences: unadulterated fascist authoritarianism.


Today’s crisis is novel in its freakish peculiarities but is also the product of more ordinary U.S. history. Until the reforms of 1965, U.S. immigration policy was still quite legibly a policy of European settler colonialism that prioritized a narrow band of white migration, capped disfavored whites, and largely excluded Asians and Africans. During the brief interlude of Cold War–era liberalism, the United States could plausibly be portrayed as having always been a nation of immigrants, even though the concept was in fact brand new. It was a country whose domestic civil rights politics seemed to have ended in triumph and justice, a perception that could only bolster the legitimacy of the U.S.-dominated liberal international order. But post-1965 immigration policy could not survive the crisis in American liberalism and the international order as a whole. After decades of retrenchment, Trump’s resettlement of purportedly persecuted Afrikaner “refugees” marks the reversion to an explicitly white supremacist immigration policy.

Yet the new regime is an unsteady one. Public opinion about migration is not set in stone. Since Trumpism emerged it has moved back and forth rapidly, often vertiginously. Polls have run the gamut from majoritarian support for immigration restriction to popular revulsion against Trump’s regime of brutal repression once Americans see Trump’s policies in action. But the hardcore Republican campaign to whip up the country into nativist fervor has never been clearly and consistently opposed by Democrats. Indeed, on this core ideological matter, there has been no opposition party at all. In a misguided bid to strategically outsmart their opponents, Democrats have provided crucial assistance to a hegemonic project of the far right. We urgently need a counter-hegemonic project: a clearly articulated, full-throated, pro-migrant politics.

In Gramscian terms, a hegemonic project is successful when it makes its politics appear normal because they seem to reflect basic common sense. Hegemonic projects are fundamentally concerned with remaking common sense. The right has for decades dedicated itself to normalizing the idea that immigrants pose a criminal, economic, terroristic, cultural, and racial threat. Their efforts have been greatly assisted by not just the absence of an opposition from the Democratic Party establishment, but often its explicit support.

And yet the far right’s project is clearly unable to secure real hegemony. Instead, it has to resort to raw domination. We confront an astoundingly dangerous and bleak situation, yet the far right’s ideas have not succeeded in becoming the governing ideas of our time. This isn’t surprising because, as Ypi argues, immigration is not the actual problem people confront; it is a symptom and a scapegoat. Growing swaths of Americans are angry about the fascist threat, as well as the Democratic Party’s refusal to embrace a forceful politics to counter it. They are looking leftward for leadership and taking to the streets in Los Angeles, Washington, Portland, and Chicago to resist federal occupation. There is an important opening to grow a new majority.

Ultimately, the only way through this crisis—I agree with Ypi—is to recompose a global working class oriented toward horizontal solidarities within and across borders against a capitalist class that everywhere immiserates. The expropriation and exploitation perpetrated by capitalist firms and the violence wrought by imperialist states drive Global South workers across borders while simultaneously grinding Global North workers into poverty, medical debt, addiction, mental illness, deaths of despair, incarceration, or homelessness.

One way to interpret Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in New York is as a hegemonic project from the left that recognizes these connections, uniting a diverse, multiracial, and multinational working class against capital and the anti-migrant police state. It builds coalitions between downwardly mobile college graduates and the multiracial, immigrant working class, between the socialist left and the liberal resistance, and beyond. That is the way forward.