Bernie Sanders and America’s Capitalist Realism About Migration
Yesterday, Bernie Sanders reiterated a goofy statement that he’s been saying for a long time. He said “If you open the borders, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world. And I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point. Can’t do it.”
If I were a professional and ambitious writer, I’d probably spin this into an anti-Bernie take that would get 100,000 views. But I’m not going to do that, because I’m not that craven and he’s still the best and, when it comes to left politics, the most influenceable candidate. But I do want to use this to talk about a common problem with progressives: that when it comes to border policy, they offer zero alternatives to the status quo. They re-state the conservative border policies of Bill & Hillary Clinton but with a bit more contrarian flavor, and that’s it.
A lot of issues are framed with vague trigger words. The estate tax is a “death tax.” Reproductive health is “baby-killing.” Providing political aid for the transformation of the West Bank and Gaza into medieval ghettos is “supporting Israel.” Progressives tend to change the framing when answering questions about those topics. But when any reforms of immigration policy that might benefit migrants are referred to as “open borders,” democrats — even Sanders — don’t reframe the issue. They reply with “Nope, I don’t support open borders.”
Before I continue, I’d like to say that, in my personal opinion, anti-imperialism and support for egalitarian economics abroad are a more important cause than the more immediate cause of immigration reform. I think that allowing Manuel Zelaya’s government to create a more egalitarian Honduras would have been way more effective than allowing a million Honduran migrants into the US ever could be. But, even with that in mind, the letting more and Hondurans into the US freely seems infinitely superior to locking them up forever in migrant concentration camps or deporting them back to a country where US-backed vigilantes will kill them. The reality of life in Honduras, and the US State’s direct responsibility for it, just seems like the most pressing thing to me. I think that decriminalizing migration and facilitating freedom of movement, which many people call “open borders,” is good for many social, political and economic reasons, but I also think that we shouldn’t let the ability to accept migrants get in the way of the US state’s responsibility to not make their homes uninhabitable in the first place.
In the past, I’ve thought that Bernie had good and misunderstood points about US immigration policy. He essentially had the same “this is how it is currently and it would take a lot to change it” attitude as Obama or Hillary, but he also had points about how we can change US foreign policy to stop turning other countries into plantations for US businesses, and how guest worker programs that are often seen as “pro-immigrant” by many elected democrats can actually be problematic and create exemptions from current US labor laws.
But Bernie has talked bullshit about “open borders” so much that I feel compelled to take his argument seriously as a representation for how he thinks about the issue. I think he shares the same ideas about immigration policy that most Americans share across the larger political spectrum.
Centrist Liberals see both the medical insurance industry and the military-industrial complex (which includes immigration law enforcement) the same way: you can’t shut this down overnight, so let’s accept it as a force of nature and nuanced-ly reconcile all of our big ideas with the existence of these things.
Progressives and/or socialists tend to get that the medical insurance industry can be taken on but often don’t seem to get that the same can be true of the US border regime. When progressives and socialists use “it can’t be taken down overnight” regarding the US border regime, it leads me to fear two things. One is that they think the medical insurance industry can be dismantled overnight, and once they realize it can’t, they will give up. Two is that they think the medical insurance industry should be dismantled in a carefully managed manner but that the border regime should stay there because it is actually fine. In other words, my fear is that, just like the Clintonite centrists, they have decided to reconcile their ideals with a brutal branch of the military-industrial complex.
While this essay is mostly critical of those self-described socialists who wholeheartedly agree with Bernie, I also have no love for people who call Bernie’s statements about the border “the same as Republicans,” or the even more far-fetched label of “Strasserism.” It can’t be emphasized enough that Bernie’s statements about immigration policy are identical to almost all other democrats. The central problem isn’t the mythical “Bernie and Trump equivalence” that so many mayo-brained liberals fantasize about. The problem is in American liberalism itself, and Bernie, mainstream democrats, and the voters who agree with them about immigration are all part of this consensus.
When it comes to Bernie Sanders, I have faith that he can become president and that, as president, he would be accountable to left-wing activists and advisors with a more internationalist mentality. I have faith that he is perhaps just pandering to nativist workers right now, and sees that this is the best way to reach people with a limited understanding of global politics and a distrust of mainstream liberals who combine a superficial sympathy to immigrants with a sincere neglect of people who have to work for a living. I have faith that Bernie’s conservative comments on immigration can do more good by winning those people over.
However, I fear two longer-term outcomes. One is that he might lose the election and leave behind him a trail of people who think that xenophobia is normal and progressive. Two is that he will win, and the mainstream liberal trend toward accepting the oppression of migrants will become even more solidified among American progressives.
The status quo in the USA right now is a TINA (“There is no alternative”) mentality about immigration. A decent amount of us grew up with all US political parties agreeing that “illegal aliens” are a problem that must be stopped. If I got knocked on the head and had temporary memory loss, I’d wake up and immediately figure out that I was in the country of apple pie and border patrol. Just as “left-wing” in Israel tends to mean “progressive but accepts that your kids are going to spend of their prime partying years demolishing peoples’ homes,” in the USA it tends to mean “progressive but accepts that everyone who works at your favorite restaurant is going to get abused by their boss and then deported one day.” To reinforce this very bad American norm is not a good thing.
The issue in countries like America and Israel isn’t simply that people are progressive but ignorant about one issue. It is that, when we are raised in these conservative countries, we are raised with basically conservative worldviews. It is not a coincidence that America and Israel (along with the UK) are the best wealthy countries to live in if you want to grow up with a little and die with less, or grow up with a lot and die with more. I don’t think it’s really possible to grow up thinking that people on the other side of a wall are disposable trash people without also thinking that most people on your own side of the wall are disposable trash people. The countries with the most brutal immigration policies also tend to have the most gated communities; this is one of those metaphors that seems too pithy to be true, but, the more you look at it, the more accurate it looks.
I have observed a trend among anti-capitalists in the English-speaking world, and I’d like to call it Centrist Realism. It is inspired by Mark Fisher’s idea of “capitalism realism,” in which it is easier to imagine an end of the world than an end of capitalism. In Centrist Realism, it actually is possible to imagine an end of capitalism, but that end of capitalism still has the same political compromises as centrism.
I recently read one of the only critical reviews of Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism.” This critical review, by Ben Gliniecki, argues that Fisher actually shows a deep cynicism about the viability of socialism itself. Gliniecki highlights Fisher’s interpretation of the 2008 crash and the following lack of a socialist solution. Where Fisher, writing in 2009, sees the past year as a sign of socialism’s utter failure, Gliniecki reminds us that the despair we feel at the current world isn’t the same as a lack of change. While Fisher sees the lack of social revolution after the bank bailouts and austerity as signs that the world may never change, Gliniecki sees the lack of social revolution as a more basic sign that people, at the time, trusted their leaders when they promised that if you trusted them to handle this crisis, things would eventually go back to normal. He reminds us that, historically, revolutions, and even milder reform movements, have taken much longer than a year to brew, and that they often happen because people are at the end of their rope, not because of rational anti-capitalist thought.
I originally decided to research critical reviews of Fisher after noticing that many of the self-described socialists who insist that socialism means reduced freedom of movement for working people are also coincidentally major fans of Fisher. They certainly didn’t get this affinity for migration controls from Fisher; in fact, Fisher seems to have been a lot less interested in debating policy than many of his biggest fans are.
But I think Fisher can help us see what makes this trend of Centrist Realism tick. Fisher, as a cultural theorist with a somewhat limited interest in economics, criticizes capitalism as a cultural problem, where every individual has given up on resisting a bad thing, rather than an economic force to which people are constantly reacting out of a changing sense of what is in their best interest. Because socialism is seen as so impossible, expectations are lowered when it comes to actual change. Politicians like Bernie Sanders are not seen as decent politicians who are radical within the specific context of the modern capitalist world. The Centrism Realists absorb and regurgitate the centrists standards for what is radical and what is normal. To regular capitalist centrists in DC, Sanders might as well be Rosa Luxemburg. As a result, politicians like Sanders are now seen, by these Centrism Realists, as Socialism Itself.
So the Centrism Realists grow increasingly defensive of the few public figures who represent socialism to them, and view these people as more revolutionary than they are. They also begin to see opinions that are actually held by many Americans, though not by centrists— such as the idea that crossing an arbitrary border and trying to get a job shouldn’t by default land you in a detention center— as outside the realm of respectable discussion. In the future that Centrism Realists imagine, many resources are decommodified, and the US flag has a hammer and sickle, but people are still arguing about class versus race while state-sponsored deportation gangs still roam the streets .
Bernie is the best candidate out there, and Warren, the second-best candidate is no better than he is when it comes to immigration. Nobody other than Bernie or Warren care about increasing the the power of the working class and diminishing the power of the people who extract absurd amounts of excess value from our work and from our medical bills. But the democrats’ establishment statements about immigration, and the harsh status quo that they are symptomatic of, should not be brushed off. While Bernie may be able to ride the validation that many lower-case “x” xenophobic voters feel to the presidency, I am worried about the way that progressives casually express their Centrist Realism. (By lower-case “x” I mean those who may have some fears of people who are different, and are afraid of getting literally replaced by foreign guest workers, as opposed to people with a more fully-fleshed out worldview based on race science or a “nuanced” view of how we have to violate human rights for the greater good.)
We might be going through a tough and important progressive transition in American politics. But we might also be transitioning to a world with even more Centrist Realism. The self-described center and the self-described right are already allying in support of their shared ambitions. They can be stopped.
To quote Rosa Luxemburg and the many people who have Rosa Luxemburg tattoos, the choice is socialism or barbarism. But to many of the Centrism Realists who chant “Socialism or barbarism,” socialism has been redefined to mean something more akin to “barbarism with socialist flavors.” It’s still barbarism, and the world needs something else.
