The respondents all agree that growing hostility to migration is an unwelcome development: people should be free to move, as well as free to stay. But we disagree on the root of the crisis and how to move forward. My own position is that migration is not a problem as such but a symptom of wider injustices, stemming from the way global capitalism and state sovereignty combine to increase opportunities for some while denying them to others. To reduce the questions raised by migration to issues of membership or culture is to neglect its class dimension. The relevant question is not why people move in general, but why some of them—those usually treated with hostility in political discourse—are forced to do so.

Alexander Aleinikoff captures this point well when he writes that in a just world, migration would be “a choice, not a necessity.” He begins with an illuminating comparison between domestic and international migration: within states, restrictions on freedom of movement are treated as serious violations; across borders, they are accepted as a matter of sovereignty. Yet, even this distinction does not apply to everyone equally. For those who can afford to move, the whole world is a country. Mobility is a privilege of the wealthy and a crime of the poor.

Aleinikoff, Dara Lind, and Chandran Kukathas are right that not all migration is driven by injustice: millions cross borders each year for study, tourism, or to reunite with their families. Yet those movements are seldom the ones that provoke fear and resentment, at least not for now (which is not to say that things won’t change in the future). What drives anti-immigration rhetoric in most liberal states are the forms of migration that expose the coercive structure of the global order: the people forced to move not because they can, but because they have no other choice. And while I also agree with Aleinikoff that class solidarity is only one possible avenue to counter anti-migration narratives, I think it is particularly relevant to revive the sort of transnational politics needed so that the legal routes he suggests are not captured by strong elite interests.

Lind warns that portraying migrants as merely “expelled natives” risks justifying indifference: if they are seen as belonging elsewhere, societies may feel less obliged to welcome them or help them settle. I agree. The challenge is to recognize coercion without denying the possibility of new belonging, to distinguish between different classes of migrants so that we can see borders not simply as physical markers of territorial jurisdictions but as often invisible instruments of power (increasingly enabled by surveillance tools and digital technology, as Ayelet Shachar points out). Moreover, to say that many migrants move under duress is not to deny that they can, and do, build homes in the places where they arrive. It is to insist that their agency be recognized in full and to explain why and how, under current capitalist conditions, the burdens of integration for specific categories of migrants—typically lower income, lower skilled, working class—are so much higher.

Lind is also correct, of course, that culture remains inescapable. Within a framework of universal rights, citizenship can be released from the weight of essentialism and understood as a dynamic web of loyalties that evolve in encounters with each other. This was also Lessing’s view. But we must not be naïve about the limits of making good on this vision under capitalist conditions, as Daniel Denvir reminds us with his portrait of U.S. failures. Citizenship divides when it is treated as property and unites when it is treated as a universally inclusive practice.

Shachar, who in many ways agrees on this approach to citizenship, also suggests that I draw the line between culture and class too sharply. She is right that these dimensions are intertwined: cultural resentment often expresses economic injury, and material loss can also take a cultural form. But I do not mean to deny this complex dialectic; my aim is to highlight the one-sidedness of dominant rhetoric. Across political camps, debates on migration talk endlessly of membership, culture, belonging, and recognition while ignoring the class structures that sustain inequality. We lose sight of the economic relations that produce exclusion in the first place.

Shachar’s important empirical question follows: Why has the collapse of industrial employment and the decline of social democracy not generated cross-border class solidarity, so much so that Kukathas can call it a “romantic fiction”? The answer lies not only in people’s preferences but in the political frameworks available to them. If every credible policy alternative remains wed to national boundaries, transnational solidarity cannot appear as a viable choice. That means we must forge new political horizons. At its origin, social democracy in the nineteenth century did not begin by mirroring public opinion; it created new moral and political vocabularies through which people could understand their circumstances. And above all, in locating responsibility for injustice with the global capitalist market, it also challenged the allegiance to the state system that Shachar rightly identifies as foundational to tight control over people’s movement. Our task today is similar: to give contemporary discontent a language that connects the economic and the political, the national and the global, the internal border to the external one.

Denvir explains what that confrontation looks like in practice, showing how hostility toward migrants is manufactured—a strategy to divide workers and obscure transnational structures of domination. Against this, Denvir points to emerging movements that connect tenants, workers, and migrants in shared struggle. These are precisely the kinds of political experiments that we need.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo argues that solidarity cannot simply be proclaimed; it must be lived and institutionalized. She evokes community centers, gardens, and schools as sites where belonging becomes tangible. I agree that solidarity requires concrete practices, but these practices need a universal orientation. Local ties can nurture empathy, but they can also reproduce hierarchies. The political question is how to turn the intimacy of local cooperation into the universality of justice. Cooperation in context matters, but it must be embedded in ideas and institutions capable of confronting the global systemic forces that create local vulnerability.

Kukathas’s view is the furthest from mine in diagnosis and in prescription. He suggests that the ideals of the Enlightenment were never widely embraced and have always been imperfectly realized. Of course: that is my point. The Enlightenment is not a historical fact but a discourse—a tradition of critique rooted in the ideals of freedom and equality. It is hard to believe that Kukathas’s own defense of freedom of movement is not grounded on some version of these very values.

My further claim is that capitalism is an obstacle to these values. Kukathas likens this criticism to blaming a plane crash on gravity. But the Washington Consensus, financial deregulation, and the global race to the bottom in labor standards were not abstract laws of nature; they were specific political choices. Perhaps Kukathas would agree that they failed; after all, as he suggests, democracy rarely works even in the best-case scenario. Regardless of what we think of capitalism, he writes, politicians of the left and the right are motivated only by electoral success. In his view, we should lower our expectations.

I suspect the support that Trump and his entourage have managed to garner is one way to heed this advice. I would rather follow a different path: the socialist counterfactual, understood not as a recipe for the cook shops of the future but as the political effort to consistently apply the ideals of the Enlightenment to the real movement that tries to abolish the existing state of things.