China Miéville has summarized in a few words what should be said about immigration in the West. Anything deviating from this agenda is total crap, in other words, intellectual bullshit made up by hypocrites. If we want to strive for more Democracy, then we should focus on what's really important: A general democratic deficit when it comes to all political and economic issues.
"Anderson says that voters have usually not been consulted about ‘either the arrival or the scale of labour from abroad’. But then, after decades of neoliberalism, what are voters usually consulted about? And on what policies do their opinions have an effect? There is no democratic mandate for almost anything: pouring shit into rivers; declining real wages; the financialisation of public goods; skyrocketing inequality; the destruction of the universities; the underfunding of hospitals; and so endlessly on. To demand that the left should concern itself with the lack of democratic accountability tout court would be welcome, if hardly innovative.
(...)
On immigration, socialist demands should include full labour and civic rights for migrants, full entitlement to benefits, unionisation across the economy, and an undoing of vulnerabilities that contribute to the super-exploitation of migrants.
Clearly immigration is distinct insofar as it is a highly effective wedge issue for the right. And that is something the left must indeed diagnose and confront. But Anderson takes the framing of the ‘problem of immigration’ as a starting point. Which is either to tail the right, or to accept its propaganda."
