The Left Needs A Migration Policy Based on Class Solidarity

In 1843, the Young Irelander Thomas Davis stood before a country divided along ethnic and religious lines. Although the heroism of the United Irishmen rebellion was still firmly within living memory, their dream now appeared impossible to many of his contemporaries: an Ireland that was not the exclusive inheritance of any one lineage, but a nation made of all who had washed up on its shores and chosen to stay.

What matter that at different shrines

We pray unto one God?

What matter that at different times

Our fathers won this sod?

He listed the peoples who had already become Irish. The “brown Phoenician”, the “proud Milesian”, the Firbolg, the Cymry, the “hard-enduring Dane”, the descendants of “Norman” and “Saxon” invaders. The mighty Shannon, he wrote, is a river “filled by many a rivulet”, each retaining its own source, none excluding the importance of the other, yet inseparably bound together.

And oh! It were a gallant deed

To show before mankind,

How every race and every creed

Might be by love combined.

Davis was not making a plea for charitable tolerance. This was a republican declaration. He was saying that the Irish nation was a political project, not a blood inheritance. Anyone, anyone at all, could become Irish by adopting its struggles and its commitment to self-government. The invitation was open, but, crucially, it was not empty. You became Irish by casting your lot in with the existing community and taking your own share of responsibility for its fate.

That was the republican ideal of citizenship, born on the radical edge of the French revolution. In an age when Europe was bitterly divided by faith and origin, it was open to all but equally demanding of genuine commitment. A national self-determining association. This was the Irish and European left's original political migration policy, proclaimed in arms in the great upheavals of 1848.

What remains of it today is a hollowed-out husk, merely some empty rituals. The French Republic still holds its naturalisation ceremonies. The USA administers a citizenship test. Countries demand that newcomers sign declarations of national values. None of it means anything. A government functionary who will never be seen again hands the migrant a certificate and a flag. They recite words that neither they nor the official could care less about. The community, neighbours, workmates, the people who actually are to share a life with the migrants, play no part. The republican ideal, which once, at least with some degree of sincerity, asked a person to become a citizen among citizens, is today a transaction, like obtaining a subscription service from a company. The state long ago killed it, embalmed it, and put it on display as proof of its own benevolence.

And into the vacuum left by these dead republics, two genuinely potent right-wing political migration policies have stepped.

The first is, of course, ethno-nationalism. It says that the nation is a family, and membership is a matter of descent. Perhaps the purest contemporary expression of this is the State of Israel. Its Law of Return grants instant citizenship to any Jew from anywhere on earth, while Palestinians ethnically cleansed from villages an hour's drive away cannot return, and the millions living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza have no state at all. A migration policy built entirely on the principle of blood.

The European far right are Israel’s greatest admirers precisely because they look at it and recognise themselves. Here, finally, is a state that unapologetically organises its borders around ethnic identity, that refuses to apologise for privileging one people over another. A state that calls itself a democracy while maintaining an explicit ethnic hierarchy in law. Israel demonstrates that in the 21st century an ethno-state can practise systematic ethnic exclusion, apartheid, even mass murder while retaining international acceptance. That is the model and the horizon toward which the European far right is inexorably moving.

The second basic pillar of right wing political immigration policy is market utility. It says that a nation is an economy, and migration is a procurement exercise. The points systems of Britain, Canada and Australia select migrants under the same criteria that a factory manager orders raw materials: the capacity to work as an explicit commodity.  The unspoken rationale is that this is an anti-labour policy. The wages of both native and migrant workers are suppressed, as on the one hand the wages of native workers cannot rise in the face of labour shortage, and on the other the migrants are themselves only a part of society as a condition of impeccable subservience to their employer. The alienation and mutual hatred between workers that results comes as a free bonus. Care workers, flown in to take care of the elderly and infirm, are denied the right to bring their own children. IT specialists, welcomed on fast-track visas, deny locals housing as their employers hoover up the available supply. This is all political migration policy. It answers the question - “who belongs?” with another question: “What can you do for Capital?”

These two right-wing logics dovetail neatly. Neither ethno-nationalism nor market utility has any use for republicanism. The ethno-nationalist wants the foreigner gone, particularly if their skin colour is different. The employer and landlord wants the foreigner precarious, deportable, and too frightened to complain. In the Direct Provision and IPAS system, the state pays fortunes to private landlords to warehouse migrants and asylum seekers in slum conditions. Eyed with suspicion by the locals, they are presented with a fait accompli of years of enforced idleness or illegal, under-the-table work. The devil makes work for idle hands, blackening their name further in local eyes. They enter the unregulated economy, where they clean offices or staff kitchens for cash in hand and below the minimum wage. They can never report their employer because to be visible to the state is to risk deportation. 

The result is a self-reinforcing crisis where the capitalist and the ethno-nationalist each benefit more, the more the social division caused by mass immigration escalates. And what has the left offered in response? A singular strategic failure unmatched in European history since the Second International supported the warring monarchies of 1914. This statement sounds like hyperbole today, but we have not yet seen the real consequences of bringing the far right to power in Berlin, Paris and beyond. Yes, the left are horrified, rightly, by ethno-nationalism, but their answer has been to conclude that the only safe position is to demand nothing and do nothing. Refusing to advocate any political migration policy at all cedes the only ground that matters in a crisis entirely to the far right; namely those of control and competence. The left’s non-policy on migration appears - because it actually is - a chaotic refusal to deal with reality, against which anything the right says appears sensible.

The result is that, by default, the question is regarded by the left as properly belonging to state policy - and that this state policy should be permissive of migration in order not to be ethno-nationalist. This further directly leads to an active disdain for the very idea that working-class communities should have any say over who joins them. The young person on the housing list who mentions that newcomers often get houses first is told she is channelling dog whistles. Any murmur about migration is met with the suspicion of nativism. The very people the left claims to represent are told that their instincts toward self-governance of their own streets are illegitimate. The basic desire to have some agency over your own neighbourhood, your workplace, your children's schools - the very foundation of what the left was supposed to be all about in the first place -  is seen as a pathology to be educated out of workers.

We live in an upside-down world in which the left betrays its own revolutionary origins. The republican ideal that Davis voiced, citizenship as a living commitment, judged by the community that makes it up, found its most radical expression in the revolutionary left's discovery of working-class self-government. No less a figure than Karl Marx looked on at the self organised neighborhoods and workplaces known as the Paris Commune in 1871 and recognised it as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour”. Taking responsibility into their own hands, they cancelled rents, handled the distribution of housing, turned businesses into worker cooperatives and ran their neighbourhoods through direct delegates. The working class governing itself is the substance of revolutionary socialism. Marx, in that same text (The Civil War in France) draws the corollary that today's left shrinks from - that the state is a "parasitic excrescence" living off the working class. Our own James Connolly knew that the purpose of capitalist governance is the safeguarding of the owning class's property rights.

The European left of today, having since convinced themselves of the ambivalence or even virtue of the role of the state in society, have inverted their politics entirely. The left learned to love the state. Now it is presented as the solution to every question. If the left has a position on immigration at all, it is that the state bureaucracy should maintain a relaxed policy and that working-class communities have no right to dictate who becomes their neighbour, their colleague, or their fellow citizen. Marx's basic insight has been stood on its head.

The far right, meanwhile, has filled the gap with characteristic cynicism. They speak of community rights and local control, the vocabulary of the left. And naturally, wherever they have ever come to power, they have never ceded an inch of control to those working class communities. Their ideology is the very opposite, to serve as Capital's right wing - to support (and if they succeed, to join) the same class of landlords and bosses who today benefit from the immigration policies of Capital's liberal wing. Tomorrow they will equally benefit from the self-dealing corruption of the ethno-national state, which is why despite the great profits brought by mass immigration, nowhere do the business community attempt to block the far-right’s ascension to power.

The left's statism, no longer merely a theoretical betrayal, has become a strategic catastrophe. When the state is made the universal arbitrator of belonging in society, even when that state is “social democratic”, the right will always effortlessly win the argument on immigration. Consider Norway. Their labour movement's old ethos, "do your duty, claim your rights", was built into the state’s architecture. Benefits are generous, health care is free, education is public and high-quality. But in the context of mass immigration it has produced “utenforskap” - outsidership. ¹ Refugees and low-skilled migrants, confronted with a high-wage economy that offers few entry points for those without credentials or language skills, drift into long-term welfare dependency. The same high wage floor that protects Norwegian workers results in “subsidised isolation”: stuck on social benefits, with poor language acquisition and residential segregation into specific neighbourhoods. A hardening sense, on both sides, that "they" are not really part of "us."

Once the state is the guarantor of welfare, housing, and recognition, the question of who belongs becomes a bureaucratic transaction between the individual and the government. Integration is not something you do with people; it is something the state does to you. Engels, in his later years, warned against the "state cult" of the German Social Democrats: the belief that the social question could be solved through the state, as opposed to building the self-governing capacities of the working class.

The state cult is a gift to the right. In fact, it is the essential precondition for both strands of right-wing political migration policy to function. For the ethno-nationalist, the state-as-arbitrator creates a visible zero-sum conflict over resources. If the state distributes benefits, and migrants receive benefits, then every krona spent on a migrant family is a krona not spent on a native one. The right can point to the segregated housing estate, the welfare statistics, the language gap, and say, with just enough plausibility to win elections: “they are taking what is yours”. This argument works precisely because redistribution is via a third-party, the state. The native-born worker sees only the cost and never the contribution. For the market-utility right, the state-as-arbitrator means that the state can simply be lobbied, captured, and bent to employer interests. Such a situation, which punishes foreign and native worker alike, could never arise were the state not in this central role. The lesson is not that welfare itself is a problem, but rather that welfare without working class self-governance is fundamentally unsustainable.

Take Sweden as another example. For much of the post-war period, Sweden did something really extraordinary. It allowed trade unions to control labour immigration. The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) operated what amounted to a de facto veto over the entry of foreign workers. Its position was simple and uncompromising: any migrant worker entering Sweden must receive the same wages, the same working conditions, and the same social rights as a native Swede. It even forced employers to accept mandatory union membership for immigrant workers. ² A migrant could not be brought in to undercut the existing workforce because the union had the power to ensure, in law and in practice, that no such undercutting could occur.

The result was a labour immigration system that was, by international standards, strikingly restrictive. Not because the unions were hostile to foreigners, but because they refused to let migration become a mechanism for wage suppression. At its peak in 1985, Swedish union density reached 85 percent. But the union veto rested on a state-mediated tripartite deal with bosses, not on the independent power of the working class. It was contingent on the willingness of the employers' confederation to remain at the table. In 1991, they unilaterally withdrew. The system went into decline, union density fell. And with it fell the unions' capacity to serve as the gatekeepers. By 2008, the centre-right government felt strong enough to introduce a new labour immigration law that turned the situation upside down, making Sweden into one of the most employer-driven, rather than union-regulated, immigration systems in the OECD.

The Swedish experience proved that union-led regulation of immigration can work. It also proved that if this regulation is built on the interests of employers and the scaffolding of the state, it can be demolished the moment the balance of forces shifts. A future Irish socialist republic needs to learn these lessons of history, and socialist and republican parties should take account of this in their current programmes. The left needs to develop what the right already has: political migration policies. A firm belief in borders yes, but political borders that protect the organised working class and working class communities. Those borders would then be democratic, not bureaucratic; participatory, not exclusionary on ascriptive grounds.

It is essential to reclaim the idea that the political community can define its terms of entry and belonging, but on class and solidarity-based grounds rather than ethno-national or employer dictated ones. This is the tradition from which the left descends and to which it should return. The self-governing community. The union branch as a unit of social and political power. The community assembly deciding its own affairs. The principle that the people who share a life should decide together who joins that life, and on what terms. A complete about-face, in other words, from today’s left non-policy.

A socialist political migration policy needs to rest on at least two pillars. The national pillar is, I think clearly, the Union Card. To achieve residency, an applicant must demonstrate a record of continuous trade union membership in good standing. This is a key replacement for the hollowed-out rituals of the current system. Instead of reciting a meaningless oath, you have your union card. The effect is immediate and structural. Every migrant who seeks citizenship must, from the moment they enter the country, join a union, even before finding employment. Union density rises with every newcomer. The employer can no longer use migrant labour as an alternative to native workers. The calculation of Google and the meat-packing companies alike changes, and both the IPAS centres and mass buying up of city apartments starts to lose their rationality. The union movement itself becomes a vehicle of integration, because every migrant who wants to stay must walk through its doors. The union is no longer a lobby group petitioning the state; it is made an institution of the class interest.

But as we have seen in Sweden, this alone doesn’t work. A second pillar is needed. Neither the state, the unions nor employers should be made responsible for determining the actual status of ongoing residency, as these institutions are third parties, not the communities themselves. We can take our starting point instead as Barcelona’s experiment with the “Document de veïnatge” (Neighbourhood Document), through which the migrant’s “degree of integration as a neighbour of the city” is assessed. This integration takes the form of social and labour activities - including knowledge of the Catalan language, work life and participation in social activities. ³ It is not issued by a remote ministry but by a local process that looks at the person in the context of the community. For a few years it was a successful programme under the mayorship of Ada Colau and several thousand documents were issued, but was then deprioritised when her Catalunya en Comú party lost municipal elections in 2023.

As in this case, an Irish community card, at the neighbourhood level, should provide residency rights and access to local services. Local voting rights, council housing lists, and, crucially, the card becomes the primary evidence in a national application for regularisation. A migrant would have to demonstrate active participation in the life of the community and a trade union. Not merely an address, but evidence of engagement in residents' groups, community events, Irish language circles and so on. But it is necessary to go further: the neighbourhood makes a decision on residency which is documented and appealable. 

And yes, the panel must have the power to simply refuse. Without the capacity to say no, the power to say yes is meaningless theatre. And communities, particularly working-class communities, can smell theatre a mile away. The grounds for refusal are written into law and restricted to solidarity-based criteria: anti-labour activities, documented refusal to participate in community life without good cause, anti-social behaviour or conduct hostile to the cohesion of the locality. Race, religion, nationality, and ethnicity are explicitly excluded as grounds. A refusal triggers a departure order after appeal, but it is the community's democratic process that initiates it. The state enforces the outcome, but the community makes the judgment. This is the hard edge without which the policy collapses into the same bureaucratic emptiness it needs to replace.

This returns to the left a language of legitimate exclusion. It restores agency to communities, channelled through the institutions of solidarity, unions and residents' associations, not through the institutions of xenophobia. It is critical to understand - and this is an argument that only the left can make - that a community which has no power to say no also cannot meaningfully say yes. If everyone gets the card regardless of their behaviour, the card is worthless as a token of belonging, and the community has no incentive to invest in the integration of newcomers. It is then just an administrative measure, like the state providing a visa. It is only when a community knows that it actually can refuse someone who undermines its collective life, that it will be more willing to welcome generously those who genuinely do engage. The power to exclude, used sparingly and on principled grounds, underwrites the power to include. Indeed the latter can never exist without the former.

Note that this implies a deeper political transformation. When the state makes all the decisions about immigration, it is extraordinarily easy for communities to default to a blanket “no”.  There is no need to weigh the claims of someone sleeping in the hotel down the road against the housing list that you have been on for years. The choice is abstract. Opposition to mass immigration in the form that we see it today arises precisely from this abstraction.

But the moment a community is given the real power to decide, the moment a panel of residents must sit and listen to the applicant speak, weigh contribution against need, to look them in the face and say yes or no, the entire dynamic shifts. The choice becomes concrete. It becomes, in the deepest sense, political. The same communities that will, in the abstract, say “send them all back” will often, when handed the responsibility, say “actually this one stays, she has been minding our children. He has been working in the community. Bhí siad ag foghlaim Gaeilge.” This is not starry-eyed optimism, but the basic observation that responsibility changes people, while bureaucratic exclusion infantilises them. The act of deciding transforms the decider, and the far-right’s power which depends on the state to be the arbiter, abstracting the process, evaporates when the community itself decides.

The left must have the courage to trust working-class communities with this power, and indeed fight to give it to them. It must believe that when working people are given the tools of self-government, they will use them more humanely, and not less, than the state or the profit-driven employer. If we do not believe that workers and communities can govern themselves wisely, then what are we even doing? The left’s job is not to protect communities from their own worst instincts by denying them agency. It is to create the institutions through which their real interests can find honest expression. The community card, with its hard edge of real decision, is precisely this kind of institution.

Perhaps paradoxically such a left political migration policy would fulfill the ostensible goal of the ethno-nationalist right in greatly curtailing immigration. But this would not be because communities would reject immigrants to some unreasonable degree, but rather because the biggest driver of immigration today is not people being pulled into Irish society by some kind of affinity with the idea of joining the Irish working class - if it was, immigration would be stable over the decades. Rather, immigration is being pushed into working class communities by conscious state policy and big business, through a pipeline that they fully control and which they have currently settled on profiting from. This is the major dynamic the left has somehow forgotten: that in capitalism it is Capital that dictates policy, and the wishes of the migrant is not the driver of the process. Only working class self-governance dissolves the whole political problem of triangulation between, on the one hand, advocacy for permissive state immigration policy, and on the other, an immigration-sceptical working class. 

However, it is true that this proposal also raises an important and fair objection which can be made from the left: would this not result in a two-tier working class, where migrants must prove themselves while the native-born do not? The answer is that the asymmetry already exists under the current system: the migrant is tied to the employer or state bureaucracy, deportable at will, and isolated from the community. The proposal is to replace that asymmetry with a better one - a temporary solidarity test. The condition falls away later upon citizenship. The native-born worker who never joins a union still benefits from the higher wages and stronger bargaining position that the migrant's compulsory membership helps to build, undermining racist arguments. And the institutions through which migrants prove their commitment, the union branch and the residents panel, are the same institutions in which native and naturalised workers sit together and deliberate together. This is then just a probationary gateway, at the end of which stands full and equal membership in the only community that should matter to republicans and socialists: the democratic community of labour. 

1. Grete Brochmann. “Norway: Rising Immigration in a Welfare State.” migrationpolicy.org, February 12, 2025. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/norway-immigration-welfare-state.
2. Boräng, Frida, and Lucie Cerna. “Swedish ‘Revolution’ in Labour Immigration Policy | COMPAS.” Ox.ac.uk, 2015. https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/article/swedish-revolution-in-labour-immigration-policy.
3. parainmigrantes.info. “Neighbourhood Document Brochure,” 2018. https://www.parainmigrantes.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/documento-de-vecindad-bcn.pdf.