Democrats don't need to tack right on immigration to win

Pundits like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan want Democrats to move right on immigration. They’re wrong.

By Zack Beauchamp @zackbeauchamp zack@vox.com Jun 17, 2019, 8:40am EDT

In the years since Trump’s victory, a cottage intellectual industry has sprung up arguing that Democrats and European center-left parties need to move right on immigration if they want to win.

Its proponents include anti-Trump conservative writers like David Frum and Andrew Sullivan (themselves both immigrants to the United States), center-right academics like Oxford’s Paul Collier and University of London’s Eric Kaufmann, and even a few leftists like essayist Angela Nagle. The basic argument is pretty consistent: There’s a rising populist revolt against mass immigration in the West, and liberals need to adjust to this reality rather than try to fight it.

This industry has gone into overdrive in recent weeks, driven largely by the results of Denmark’s early June election. Denmark’s center-left Social Democratic Party (SDP), which had tacked hard right on immigration in recent years, defeated the conservative incumbent and won the most seats in parliament — while the far-right populist Danish People’s Party (DPP) lost more than half of its support. This, the immigration skeptics argue, is proof that they are right: Democrats and other center-left parties can co-opt Trump and the European far right simply by leaning into their anti-migrant bona fides.

“Imagine if [Elizabeth] Warren were to model her campaign on the newly elected social democrats in Denmark,” Sullivan writes. “A Democratic adoption of tighter immigration policies and less stridently leftist cultural stances could dominate [among many voters].”

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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/17/18679070/democrats-immigration-shift-right-bad