Kyle Sammin: Open borders are anti-worker

In 2019, the moderator of a Democratic primary debate asked ten people running for president to put their hands up if they would decriminalize illegal entry into the United States. Eight of the ten raised their hands, including then-Senator Kamala Harris. Joe Biden, as if to summarize his entire political career in one gesture, placed a finger in the wind, raising one digit but not the full hand. Only one candidate, Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, saw any problem with a policy that would lead to de facto open borders.

Despite his lukewarm support in 2019, Biden effectively followed the policy Harris and others wholeheartedly advocated. Not by convincing Congress to change the law — we don’t do that anymore — but by repealing Donald Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy (itself imposed by executive order, not law) and not enforcing the law with anywhere near the vigor required to deter the millions who then streamed over the border.

Open borders are nowhere in our statutes, but Biden and Harris signaled to the world in 2019 that when they took office, the doors would be wide open. And the world answered with millions upon millions of illegal immigrants.

At the same time, Biden, Harris, and other Democrats like to present themselves as friends of “working people,” a term that does not mean “everyone who works,” but rather “everyone who works but is not especially rich or well-off.” That includes most Americans, so what party wouldn’t want to look like their friend? And to the extent that such workers are union workers, the Democrats want to fall all over themselves to let you know that they are the successors in interest to those construction workers, mine workers, farmhands, and everyone else Pete Seeger ever sang about.

But looks can be deceiving. 

Labor is, in some ways, like any other market good. Its price is set by supply and demand — markets are not perfect, but they are especially good at spontaneously figuring out prices. We don’t look at labor as a pure market good — selling your time and expertise is different than selling your car or buying a pair of shoes — but it’s all wrapped up in the same process, and the price people will pay for labor can never be free of those market forces.

So when we add millions of laborers to the market, it keeps the price of labor down. It’s true that immigrants — even illegal immigrants — also induce demand: more people means more demand for the things we all buy. But the supply of labor is also increased and that effect is spread across the economy very unevenly. 

Legal immigrants will compete with citizens across all sectors, but illegals will only compete in those fields that don’t require a lot of certification or paperwork. The lawyers and lobbyists who write the Democratic Party platform will never lose their jobs to an illegal immigrant, nor will their wages be reduced by pressure from those illicit laborers. But other people will — mostly those of the working class whom Democrats pretend to value.

As the Wall Street Journal demonstrated in an article this week, the number of lawful immigrants has remained steady for decades, but the number of illegal immigrants has skyrocketed since 2021. “An outsize share of post-2020 immigrants are working in low-paying jobs,” the authors write. “The most-common occupations, according to the census data: construction laborers, maids and housecleaners, and cooks. Such jobs are more likely to be held by immigrants, especially those who arrived recently, than by American-born workers.”

So Kamala Harris will gladly accept the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union and UNITE HERE (the hospitality workers’ union), but she will also just as joyfully continue the policies that depress their wages. She and her big donors do not have jobs that are threatened by competition from illegal immigrants — and they’ll reap the benefits of keeping wages low in other industries. 

This is probably the contradiction Trump was getting at in his June debate against Biden when he talked about “black jobs.” It’s always a fool’s errand to try to translate Trump’s campaign speeches into concrete policy, but the gist of what he said seemed to be that jobs held by the middle and lower classes are threatened by Biden’s and Harris’s lack of immigration enforcement, and that those jobs are disproportionately held by black Americans.

A better way to put it, I think, would have been to say that Democrats’ laxity on illegal immigration hurts black Americans because it hurts all Americans — it’s not a racial question, but a class question.

Open borders are union-busting, but the people responsible for them get most of the unions’ endorsements. How’s that work? It’s simple, once you understand that the people sitting in unions’ national headquarters aren’t the same ones sweating on a hot construction site or wearing themselves out cleaning a hotel room. Maybe they were once, but now they are little different than those in any other trade group’s offices in the nation’s capital. They’re Democrats first, workers second.

The Democratic Party’s hold on labor (organized or otherwise) has been slipping for years. This year, Republicans are even making a play for those workers’ votes. Their best path toward making that effort a success is to hammer this contradiction: you can’t support American workers and open borders at the same time.

Kyle Sammin is the managing editor of Broad + Liberty.