Angela Nagle's article on why leftists should support migration restriction is terrible garbage in its politics and it's also poorly researched. I wouldn't think it's worth engaging but people in milieus I care about for some reason are engaging her. So, some thoughts. First, as
counterpoint to her repugnant call for stricter use of E-Verify people should read this by the National Employment Law Project. s27147.pcdn.co/wp-content/upl… The gist: lots of negative effects in the penumbra of e-verify, and a clear alternative=confer legal status. I'll that I wish
the NELP report made a stronger appeal to principled internationalism. It's implied though, in the ending, the points on page 4. The core of those points: increase migrant workers' real access to rights through better enforcement and limits on employer ability to use immigration
status to retaliate against migrant workers who try to access their rights. (That report links to the Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers report that NELP [co?]authored which shows rampant abuses of migrants; more e-verify will intensify those abuses, as this document argues.) This
does not strike me as complicated but somehow Nagle and her fans manage to miss it: the problem is state facilitation of a specific vulnerability of migrants to employer abuse. End that facilitation and the things Nagle's really complaining about will be fixed. It would also end
the abuse of migrants upon arrival, to which Nagle offers a tepid gesture
of sympathy. She gestures toward another argument that's worth taking seriously, which is getting into the politics and political economy of why people migrate - conditions in the 'sending' areas. That's
of sympathy. She gestures toward another argument that's worth taking seriously, which is getting into the politics and political economy of why people migrate - conditions in the 'sending' areas. That's
very important, but it's a mistaken formulation to be like 'instead of let in migrants, exercise concern over where they're migrating from!' Removing the legally constructed vulnerabilities of migrants would allow migrants to form a constituency better able to advocate for the
well-being of the places they migrated from (and in some cases migrate to and from multiple times as sojourners). So the point implied in her empty gesture of 'I care about the people left behind in those places!' would in fact be worse served by her policy proposals and better
served by increased access to economic rights -- full access to those rights, equal to those of citizens -- for migrants. Also, since Nagle writes like she's a hard-headed pragmatist, fixing conditions in the 'sending' countries means re-organizing the global economy and ending
imperialism. I'm for both. But that's a bigger task than improving the conditions of migrant workers in the US. And if conditions for migrants were improved thatd be another constituency that could join the struggles for those larger restructurings of global politics and economy.
I will also note that every single person I know on the left who supports open borders has this extension of rights in mind when they say open borders. So the implication in the article that left calls for open borders are just literally 'let people cross, end of story' is
laughably ill-informed about actually existing leftists at least in the US. Final thing: she's right that there was a historical link between trade unionism and control over labor supply.The AFL to its great discredit backed laws to exclude Chinese migrants - Nagle cites
these laws approvingly without mentioning any of the specifics, which is either atrociously poor writing or intellectually dishonest. (That people in the Jacobin milieu will have anything to do with an author who cites Chinese exclusion laws approvingly is fucking crazy, by the
way.) AFL support for that policy was likely in part the result ofstraightforwardly racist ideas about Chinese people being allegedly biologically and/or culturally inferior. But it was also the result of the political-economic vision of trade unionism, which, Nagle rightly
notes centered on controlling who got access to the labor market. But the article is misleading for posturing like this was THE sensible union position. There was also industrial unionism, which centered less on controlling labor market entry and more on controlling the
workplace. To put it simplistically, trade unionism tended toward stopping workby withholding labor, while industrial unionism tended toward stopping work by seizing production. (Joe Burns has recently-ish called for a revival of the latter in his very good book Reviving the
Strike.) This latter vision pushed unions to organize the workers, rather than restrictwho could become a worker. Some of this was about ideas; just as many of the trade unionists who backed racist laws were in their hearts and minds racists, many industrial unionists were in
their hearts and minds socialists and internationalists. But, again, the political-economy so to speak of each form of organization encouraged practices regardless of the minds of the individuals. All that is to say that Nagle postures in a 'bah! this newfangled
identitarianism! back to the old left and the old labor movement!' kind of way, a posture I'm actually quite sympathetic to when done well (Nagle does NOT do it well) but there was another better old left + old labor movement.
The people she aligns herself as the historical heir to were the enemies of that better left, just as her positions now are the enemies of a renewed left worth having.
