Breaking the Divide

Borders, Labor, and the Struggles to Come

What if the working class recognized immigration not as a wedge issue, but as a battleground for collective power?

In an earlier piece, I outlined how contemporary left-wing movements have largely failed to connect with the working class in meaningful ways. Since publishing it on Medium, I’ve received a range of thoughtful feedback from readers. Some found my analysis too narrow or overly ideological, even out of touch with everyday reality; others thought I had mischaracterized certain perspectives.

In this follow-up, I respond to key criticisms and expand on the need for an internationalist Left that doesn’t retreat into pragmatism or identity silos, but instead dares to organize across borders, confront capital head-on, and build a politics of more: more solidarity, more economic power, and more egalitarian justice in the face of planetary crisis.

To begin with, a smaller but interesting criticism came from a reader who took issue with my tone and language, particularly the idea that I might be alienating the very working-class audience I claim the Left should engage by using ‘academic’ or ‘too complex’ a language. But not all ideas can be compressed into a tweet, can they? Serious intellectual discussions are necessary to provoke thought and inspire relevant change. And the notion that valid political discourse must be filtered through a caricatured ‘voice of the working class’ is unconvincing. Writing as if I were a poor, uneducated worker when I’m not would be condescending. The challenge is rather to bridge different registers of communication without flattening thought in the process. If I were addressing steelworkers on strike, I’d likely adapt my delivery to fit the context, but not the substance of my argument.

Another reader pointed out, rightly so, that many working-class people are educated, well-informed, capable of making their own minds about issues that concern them, and care deeply about social issues such as racial and LGBTQ+ rights. I fully acknowledge that. The working class is not a monolithic group. However, my critique wasn’t about individuals; it was about laying down a major tendency, and broader societal dynamics that shape how political messages land. People make their own judgments, for sure, but no judgment exists in a vacuum. Economic shifts, media narratives, and political realignments all affect how ideas are perceived. When a message is rejected, the question isn’t only whether it was flawed, but whether prevailing conditions made it difficult for people to see its relevance. Recognizing these dynamics means acknowledging that perception is influenced by structural forces, not just individual reasoning. My argument, then, isn’t that ‘people have been corrupted’, as someone seemed to suggest; it’s that the Left has failed to effectively engage with their real needs and concerns.

One reader tossed a Nietzschean jab my way, asserting that humans are tribal, immigration a dangerous topic, and winning the working class incompatible with open borders, just like how Utilitarianism, he added, is a noble but impractical idea. Well, to begin with, are humans tribal? Sometimes, yes, but just as often, they are not. History is full of moments when people have transcended tribal instincts and reached across boundaries in favor of outgroup solidarity, collective action, and internationalism, from the Paris Commune to the anti-war coalitions of the 1960s and early 2000s. Regarding (im)migration, it’s not just a ‘topic’ up for debate; it’s a lived reality for millions (and in the decades to come, billions) of human beings shaped by forces far beyond their control. Dismissing it as a ‘dangerous idea’ erases its complexity and obscures the fact that it is also a deeply human, often tragic phenomenon.

As for Utilitarianism, that’s a strange comparison, for the matter has nothing whatsoever to do with moral calculus or cost-benefit analysis (what Rorty in another context framed as ‘moral universalism vs. economic triage’). Capital moves freely across borders, often insulated from democratic control or local regulation (see Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism, which maps out how elites have been building pockets of deregulated capitalism around the world, unburdened by national taxes, labor laws, or redistributive policies), while people, especially working-class, remain legally constrained within national borders. As the global economy is increasingly carved up in ways that privilege capital over labor, and mobility becomes a key site of that power asymmetry, expanding citizenship rights across borders is not merely a philosophical discussion; it’s a necessary step toward reversing the decline of organized labor in the 21st century.

Which brings me to other objections I received, also centered on immigration. Some viewed my call for a borderless world as too idealistic. But I don’t see how my stance on immigration and immigrant rights should be dismissed as unrealistic fantasy; it is rooted, rather, in the material connections between mass displacement, colossal economic inequality, climate change, declining labor conditions, state violence... Some readers argued that focusing on immigration is impractical because it places unsustainable pressure on Western economies. My response here is simple: the real issue is not just immigration itself, but how it fits into broader economic and social policies, and whether Western nations are willing to reckon with the role they’ve played (and continue to play) in destabilizing the very regions people are fleeing from. Many of the crises driving migration – political instability, endemic conflicts, scarcity of resources, the economic meltdown of whole countries and regions, even environmental cataclysms – haven’t just emerged organically in the so-called Global South. They’ve been shaped, and often directly caused, by imperialism, economic dependency, and a long history of Western interventionism. From colonial exploitation to Cold War-era military coups to structural adjustment programs and the ongoing support of authoritarian regimes that serve Western economic and strategic interests, industrialized nations have had their hands on the wheel, playing a major role in creating the very conditions that currently force people to flee.

Another critique I received was that immigration dilutes the wages and collective bargaining power of native laborers, hurting them while the wealthy get bigger profits by underpaying workers. This is a familiar argument, and a misleading one. Not only does it ignore the history of internationalist labor movements, it also misses the real political stakes of cross-border solidarity and the defense of migrants' rights.

Following Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis in No One Is Illegal, a humanizing counter-history to mainstream immigration discourse, I take a different (if not radically opposite) view. Instead of treating immigration as a threat to labor’s power, we should recognize that fighting for full citizenship rights for immigrants, alongside strong unionization efforts, strengthens collective bargaining power. When immigrant workers are protected by law, they’re less easily exploited, which raises working standards for everyone. A good reason why, rather than allowing capital to use immigration to drive a wedge between workers, as a tool to undercut wages and working conditions, we should be organizing across national lines to ensure all workers (whatever their origin) have the power to push back against exploitation.

Pro-immigrant action at a national level is thus a strategic necessity. Chacón and Davis’ account of the Wobblies’ struggle to organize all outcast workers, regardless of ethnicity, is both inspiring and exemplary in this respect: fighting for immigrant rights and labor protections within core societies actively weakens capital’s ability to pit workers against each other globally. When we demand rights and protections for immigrant workers, we don’t just appeal to the goodwill of bourgeois governments; we consolidate our power, change narratives, disrupt the usual divide-and-conquer tactics, and lay the foundations for broader transformation.

The first step toward a renewed internationalist Left movement is to name the real enemy in front of us: not immigrants, but capital, and its obscene concentration in the hands of the few. What I argued in my original piece, and what I still hold, is that the Left must focus on building institutions, networks, and movements capable of protecting people now while also fighting for structural transformation.

On that note, I want to conclude by addressing the accusations of idealism or utopianism. While I don’t think our task is to out-fantasize the Right with empty spectacle or mythic schemes, it’s worth remembering that the whole move to reject grand narratives – by Lyotard and his pomo pals – was aimed largely at delegitimizing Marxism, severing the Left from its historical imagination and sense of trajectory. Daring more and rejecting pragmatism is not the same as retreating into fantasy. We should reject the idea that practical solutions can only emerge from mainstream political approaches, the kind of managerial liberalism that tweaks the edges of collapse while pretending it’s stability. We must focus instead on uniting workers from all walks of life, not around fancy dreamworlds or narrow identity issues, but in pursuit of shared economic interests. And we need to organize beyond electoral cycles, and reach people not just with policies, but with real solidarity, framing real economic transformation in bold, compelling terms, matching the scale of the crisis with the scale of the vision.

Take the climate crisis. What actually resonates with people who’ve been systematically stripped of power, stability, and agency isn’t moralizing about carbon footprints or lifestyle tweaks. As Matthew T. Huber argues in Climate Change as Class War, that kind of neoliberal, bourgeois-bohemian rhetoric around degrowth and austerity – individualized guilt about flying or eating meat – falls flat when you’re unemployed, working multiple shitty jobs, facing housing insecurity, and living paycheck to paycheck.

We on the Left can’t afford to offer less to people who’ve already been given nothing. On the contrary, we need a politics of more: more public power, more housing, more transit, more community organization, more popular control over the economy, over the energy and food systems... And all that framed as the kind of climate justice that materially benefits the working class. That’s the sort of visionary story that can ignite imagination and build commitment; not abstract fantasy therefore, but grounded, collective ambition. Something people can see themselves in, fight for, and build together.