“The imaginary war on American workers.” That's the title of the opening salvo from The Argument, a new magazine backed by some $4 million in start-up cash supposedly intent on rescuing liberalism from the intellectual doldrums. Tone deaf? Sure. Politically naïve? Absolutely. But worse than this, the essay fails to make a convincing case on its own terms. And along the way, it proves just what’s so rotten among liberalism’s literati.

Staff writer Jordan Weissman sets out to make the case that frustrations about immigration are anything but rational. And actually, America’s “trial run with open-ish borders” was “basically all upside.” This might come as a surprise considering that Donald Trump won the 2024 election in significant part by making the opposite case. Alas, Weissman contends, the MAGA-chuds are misguided, and Democrats shouldn’t internalize the wrong lessons. Political backlash be damned, what we on the left need to realize is that America simply needs more immigration if we’re to grow the economy. The Democrats must bravely go forward with the preferred policy of the ruling class: for growth’s sake, we must endeavor to make labor cheaper and more liquid.

To be fair, Weissman recognizes that his case for liberalized borders is politically fraught, and that “being seen as lax on the border has cost Democrats dearly with working-class voters who’ve become the party’s Achilles’ heel.” But he thinks it's all worth it because there is simply no way to grow the economy other than through opening the borders. His theory is that if we can get the economy rip-roaring hot, then voters will reward Democrats for their foresight, at which point we can do what we really want, which is to expand the welfare state.

There are a few obvious problems with this theory, including that it quite literally puts the economic-growth-cart before the political-argument-horse. But deeper than that, it misunderstands just what voters are frustrated by when it comes to immigration. 

Why is it that workers are so quick to believe the “conservative fairytale,” as Weissman calls it, that excessive immigration hurts working people? As he shows, jobs numbers are not actually adversely affected by the influx of new labor market entrants. And, as countless economists have shown, immigration does help grow the overall economic pie. As Weissman reiterates regarding the 2022-2023 surge in immigration, “the labor market absorbed [immigrant workers] smoothly and there's no evidence it did so by taking opportunities from native workers.” But maybe Weissman (and, ironically, Trump) are focused on the wrong thing. It’s not job “opportunities” that are threatened by the mass-influx of new entrants in the labor market. It’s wages. 

As the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City boasted in 2024: “Rising Immigration Has Helped Cool an Overheated Labor Market.” According to them, the “flow of immigrant workers has acted as a powerful catalyst in cooling overheated labor markets and tempering wage growth across industries and states.” What’s more, the workplaces where this wage “cooling” effect was greatest were those full of the kinds of workers that most gravitated toward Trump: “sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (specifically, average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023.” This makes sense: one way employers fill job vacancies is by raising wages to attract a broader pool of applicants. Yet, in a situation of rising labor market participation, vacancies are more easily filled, and therefore, wages stay flat. Maybe the chuds aren’t so stupid after all.

Nor are they necessarily thrilled with Trump’s “gulag policy,” or guided by boneheaded xenophobic ignorance. As opinion data from the Center for Working-Class Politics shows, workers want a more restricted border and a pathway to citizenship for those lawful immigrants who are currently here. Again, this makes sense: by becoming citizens, immigrant labor ceases to pose the same threat precisely because citizens have more rights and protections in the workplace, and they no longer act as a wage-depressing under-class of workers. This is something progressives should support. Liberals, by contrast, celebrate the growth-potential of immigration without acknowledging that its benefit for “the economy” comes precisely from the fact that these workers are hyper-exploited.

Beyond the wage squeeze, Weissman argues that immigrants also help us reduce the deficit. This is a common argument from progressives, but it’s rarely interrogated. Weissman’s minimalist case is that growth is good for the budget because it means more taxpayers. That’s defensible on the face of it, but immigrants aren’t purely net-plus budget inputs as Weissman implies. Some of the strongest welfare states of Europe—including Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands—have come to the conclusion that immigration is remarkably expensive from a budgetary standpoint. The strain has threatened, not strengthened, social benefits. The reason this isn’t the case in the US is twofold: 1) we have a threadbare welfare state, which means immigrants to the States can’t draw from a wide range of universal benefits as they can in Europe, and 2) we’re actually quite selective when it comes to high-skilled immigrants. The US courts super-skilled immigrants from around the world. These workers have very high incomes, and their work itself is often a growth multiplier. Yet, if we were to listen to Weissman and expand “openness” while also expanding the welfare state, immigration would cease to be a budgetary boon.

But it’s not just economics that’s at issue here. Weissman, to his credit, acknowledges that a big reason for backlash against excessive immigration is the rise in social disorder associated with it. “The chaos at the border became a political albatross for the Biden administration. The busloads of Venezuelans and Salvadorans brought to New York put a multi-billion-dollar strain on the city’s budget.... Homelessness increased nationally.” Still, somehow, he waves these social challenges off as if they ought not deter the reasonable liberal who understands that, above all else, that the growth-monster must be fed.

The trouble is that most voters aren’t liberal economists who pour over macro-economic spreadsheets to see the net-effects of immigration on the budget or the Gross National Product before casting their ballot. They are living breathing workers, farmers, fathers, mothers, and neighbors, and they have twice now voted for the guy who says he wants to restrict immigration. Probably because in the actual lives that they live, excessive immigration has not been a big benefit to them. And even more likely because mass immigration has come to symbolize the dysfunction of hyper-globalization writ large, whereby American trade policy has inflicted remarkable damage across the country, allowing for high-wage manufacturing jobs to drain out of the country by the millions, shuttering an untold number of small-family farms, and devastating communities from North Philadelphia to North Dakota. This is the war on workers that our enlightened political and financial elite has waged, and it’s far from imaginary.

This gets to the rub of what’s so wrong with Weissman’s approach. “There is no real plan,” he concludes “for American economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration.” It doesn’t occur to him that there ought to be an alternative plan; that sometimes democracy intervenes in the best laid plans of economic policy makers. If dramatically increasing immigration, as Weissman himself acknowledges, is a tough political sell, putting immense strain on municipal budgets, causing intense social friction, and generating support for right-wing governments, it doesn’t offer progressives a real path to power.

Ironically, Weissman actually does hint at an alternative strategy for growth and stability:

There are ultimately just two ways for a country to grow its economy: It can become more productive—meaning it can get better and more efficient at making things—or it can expand its workforce. Economists typically prefer to focus on the productivity side of the equation, since it helps raise living standards [emphasis mine].

A robust industrial policy that encourages efficient domestic production is at least part of the economic alternative to importing ever larger sums of cheap labor. And it has the benefit of looking far enough past our noses to imagine an economic world-system after globalization.

It may not be much, but the promise of good jobs in infrastructure and renewed domestic industries offers a sturdier political and economic launch-pad for the Left than simply saying that everyone skeptical of immigration is imagining things or that ‘real open-borders has never been tried.’ In the age of populism, these arguments can’t win.

Dustin Guastella is Director of Operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia and a Board Member of the Center for Working-Class Politics.