A sign of just how the open-borders narrative has swept the public conversation is that it seems like news to hear that the left used to support immigration policies that protected workers and advanced the national interest. But the liberals and socialists of old did so and, for decades, also stridently opposed illegal immigration. Among may U.S. voices, JFK advisor and Democratic Party fixture Arthur Schlesinger devoted a book to the problems mass immigration imposed on the liberal agenda. Civil rights icon Barbara Jordan used a blue-ribbon committee to recommend cutting immigration in half. And for his efforts to physically block illegal aliens from being transported to industrial farms near the U.S. border, celebrated farm labour activist Cesar Chavez was called the original “Minuteman.” Other voices cautioning against untrammeled immigration were Coretta Scott King and Gaylord Nelson, the Democratic Senator who would go on to found Earth Day. The story was not much different in Canada.

Today, there’s growing recognition of the American left’s immigration radicalization. Substantial articles have explored the issue, including by ex-Canadian David Frum writing for the Atlantic, U.S.-based Irish progressive Andrea Nagle in American Affairs, and the editors of the quarterly journal The Social Contract, who dedicated their last issue to the subject. A big question the recent discussions raise but don’t answer is whether today’s liberals and progressives can ever return to the former stance. For reasons rooted in a shift in the movement’s fundamental moral outlook, the chances appear slim. This has clear implications for Canada’s politics. The tendency to support open borders and to denounce patriotism as indistinguishable from racism is gripping most Western countries, ours included.

Rooting immigration policy in moral psychology

New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s renowned work on the psychological divisions between left and right helps unravel today’s immigration debate, especially the former’s relatively recent rush toward open borders. Haidt’s research found that the public policy-related motivations of liberal moral psychology today are mainly a mixture of kindness/empathy and the left’s view of justice (which is to say, outcomes that the left favours, rather than the traditional definition of due process). These are the virtues contemporary liberals tend to elevate above all others, such as group-loyalty, patriotism and the rule of law, historical virtues which conservatives still tend to emphasize. They represent big shifts in the liberal moral paradigm over the years. Today’s liberals, Haidt argues in his groundbreaking 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, not only de-emphasize a virtue like loyalty, they view it as immoral. For them, he says, “[L]oyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle [and] is the basis of racism and exclusion.”

This shift is perhaps most pronounced in the immigration debate. Speaking before Congress in the early 1990s, the late, far-left senator and 1972 presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy stated: “The moral priority for this nation is to address the needs of that segment of the descendants of slavery who remain mired in the underclass…to the extent that largescale immigration interferes, the poor in other countries must wait.” (Emphasis added.) Such citizen-first sentiment was still common on the left at the time.

These sentiments were long echoed among Canada’s left. Early 20th century Western Liberal party figures such as William Gallagher, Robert Macpherson and “Fighting Joe” Martin long assailed Ottawa over the union-busting effects of the federal government’s mass immigration policies. Along with scores of regional unionists, they would successfully push Ottawa to curb immigration, a policy that held until the 1960s. Contemporary U.S. labour activists like Samuel Gompers were able to do the same, also in the name of workers’ rights.

In his polemic Strangers Within Our Gates, J.S. Woodsworth, founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (later to become the NDP), attacked the practice of what he called

“unnatural immigration” or the importation of “paupers and assisted emigrants…induced and brought about by the unscrupulous and greedy” and “those who desire to obtain cheap labor or to sell land.”

Speaking to big business interests, Woodsworth put the issue this way:

“[A]s more and more [immigrants] remain in the cities, we shall find competition keener…[w]ithin a few years the people with lowers standards of living will drive out other competitors. The economic question becomes a social question…Can we afford, for the sake of immediate gain, to sacrifice those standards and ideals which we have most faithfully cherished? True prosperity cannot be measured by the volume of trade or bank clearings. It consists in the social and moral welfare of the people.”

The NDP (in immigrant-heavy B.C., at least) would openly discuss restrictionism until the mid-1970s. Since then, having become preoccupied with appearing open and inclusive, the contemporary left has so elevated the principles of empathy and justice that even the concepts of “fellow citizen” and “national borders” are considered too discriminatory to be justified. There is little doubt NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is channelling a strong strain of his party’s sentiment when he lobs charges of racism even against critics of the risible practice of “birth tourism.” What might normally be interpreted as rank opportunism may well represent the members’ authentic emotions.

In a recent New York Times piece entitled “There’s Nothing Wrong With Open Borders”, opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo (an Indian immigrant to the U.S. by way of South Africa) exemplified this preoccupation when he wrote that having immigration standards and limits “assumes that people born outside [the U.S.’s] borders are less deserving of basic rights than those inside.” He called it a “mere accident of geography” that native-born Americans “were given freedom” under that country’s Constitution “and others were denied it.”

Elsewhere, writing originally in the Guardian, leading British leftist George Monbiot took a more strident tone when it comes to considering those “born inside” and “outside” a given country (well, his own U.K., at least). Haidt cites Monbiot:

Internationalism…tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington….Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How…do you distinguish it from racism?

Such a willing erasure of Western countries’ national boundaries, all in the name of generalized ideals like tolerance or anti-racism, received perhaps its most official endorsement when our own prime minister proclaimed our country to be a “post-national” one and without a “core identity” of its own. While Justin Trudeau’s father, Pierre, had disdain for both English- and French-Canadian nationalism, he still recognized the distinction between fellow-citizen and foreigner. As prime minister, he proved willing in the early 80s to reduce immigration because of the country’s poor labour market conditions. This policy was to be reversed and immigration numbers dramatically increased by the pro-big-business Progressive Conservative prime minister, Brian Mulroney. By contrast, Trudeau Jr. has increased immigration to the highest it’s been since 1913.

The historical willingness among people on the left to put nation-first “parochialism” ahead of universalist considerations has all-but evaporated. Haidt writes that it’s American liberals’ fundamental lack of patriotic loyalty and their zeal to ostensibly liberate the oppressed and embrace the excluded which motivates them to continuously “fight to break down arbitrary barriers.” The fight against any and all perceived inequalities is paramount, even if it “weakens groups, traditions, institutions, and moral capital.”

Among these groups are some that historically formed core constituencies of left-leaning parties, such as blue-collar unions. Their members (and former members) have especially borne the economic costs of virtually unrestrained immigration, especially illegal immigration. The left’s abandonment of these long-time supporters – indeed, their denunciation as ignorant, bigoted “deplorables” in the infamous word-choice of Hillary Clinton – has helped drive the populist waves in multiple countries, most notably the U.S.