By Albert Gustafson

The 2016 election cycle was a referendum on long-standing values of the American project. Immigration and trade, in particular, came under intense scrutiny. Since then, the Republican administration has pulled the country out of a new free trade agreement, threatened to scrap a long-standing one, waged a draconian war on immigrants, and galled long-time liberty-loving allies while appeasing strongman enemies like Vladimir Putin.

For Republicans with traditional views about free markets and foreign policy, the party of Lincoln and Reagan is unrecognizable. Some conservative leaders are already eyeing the Democratic Party. But can the Never-Trumpers really find a home with the Democrats? Forgive me if my experience as a pro-lifer in the GOP has jaded me to a party’s interest in providing much more than lip service to its interest groups. I fear Never-Trump Republicans would find much the same in the Democratic Party.

During the Trump presidency, Democrats in Congress have naturally stood as the strongest opponents to his agenda. When the president waged trade wars, Democrats pointed out the damage it would do to the economy. Granted, the Democrats’ criticism is likely grounded more in political expediency than in sound economic reasoning, but in the partisan game, political expediency is important. When the president instituted a zero-tolerance border policy, Democrats called the loudest for rational and humane immigration reform. When the president put old alliances in jeopardy, Democrats decried moves that discredit America’s global leadership.

Those Democrats were not alone. A few Republicans in Congress, like Jeff Flake and Ben Sasse, have refused to bow to Trump’s nativist takeover, but their isolation from the rest of their party has rendered any resistance from within futile.

For Republicans who care about maintaining America’s position as a dynamic, open economy and a leader in global affairs, Democrats seem like natural allies at this juncture.

Yet just two short years ago, the Democratic Party was struggling with a nativist streak of its own. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described Socialist, pushed the rhetoric in the debates further into left-nativist territory. much as then-candidate Trump pulled those who shared the debate stage with him further to the nativist right. By the end, even Hillary Clinton, the very image of the globalized elite and the presumptive heir of the Obama presidency, turned her back on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—the free trade agreement that constituted the crowning achievement of President Obama’s “pivot to Asia.”

With a thin veneer of compassion for the poor, Senator Sanders’s anti-trade views catered to the same (mostly white, elderly, and poorly-educated) interests as Trump’s “America First” ideology. It certainly ignores the livelihoods of the truly poor in other countries.

Two years later, and Democrats seem to have the same hostility to globalization as the Trump Republicans.

The far-left wing of the party, symbolically led by Senators Sanders and Warren, are experiencing a windfall in Democratic primaries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another self-described socialist, won New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District Democratic primary. Likewise, almost all the rising stars for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, from Senator Sanders himself to Cory Booker, are from the far-left of the party. If anything, the Democrats are moving in a more populist direction, not less.

Opposition to free trade remains a central plank of the far-left’s platform, but that goes for the Democratic Party’s mainstream, too. Democrats falsely frame free trade with foreign countries as a bogeyman that steals American jobs, just like pro-Trump Republicans.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s far-left struggles to form a coherent position on immigration. On one hand, the prominence of the Republicans’ anti-immigrant agenda ostensibly makes Democrats and anyone on the left pro-immigrant. But this party alignment is a recent development.

During the Reagan-era political alignment, the Republican party was heavily influenced by fusionist classical liberalism, so their economic policies reflected a laissez-faire stance on most economic issues. Reaganite Republicans didn’t just back free trade, however, they also supported free movement. Giving a statement on the Cuban refugee crisis, President Reagan proclaimed, “More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands,” before going on to advocate reforms that would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who had “become productive members of our society and [were] a basic part of our workforce.” The Republican Party was the pro-immigration party. Still today, to be a conservative is to value immigration as a bedrock of the American project.

Back then, the Democrats, were predominantly the party of minority rights and unions, and this remains largely true today. As such, their economic agenda largely catered to the political whims of organized labor. As the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) points out, immigration poses unique problems for labor interests. While in one sense immigrants often are the laborers whose rights the Left claims to protect, in their view, “waves of migration” also “[impoverish] the majority of U.S. workers.”

Indeed, immigration allows industries to produce more at lower costs, and that can put downward pressure on domestic workers’ wages in the same industries because the higher supply of labor keeps wages in check. But in reality, only men without high school diplomas, who constitute less than 10 percent of the labor force, experience lower wages as a result of immigration, and the effect is almost negligible—about one or two percent lower wages. That’s a small price to pay for the economic growth and culture of dynamism that immigration has historically brought to the United States.

Nevertheless, unions, whose political objective remains to raise the wages of a narrowing segment of the American workforce, still set the Democrats’ political agenda. As a result, Democrats’ support for reforms that encourage immigration looks like the Republicans’ opposition to Obamacare or abortion: It sounds better in stump speeches than in legislation.

As a voter who cares about immigration and trade and what they have meant for America as a country of growth and opportunity, I would like to believe that casting the Never-Trump for the Democrats in 2018 and 2020 will help rebuild America’s international credibility and restore stability in the global economy. Looking at them now, the Democrats are, at their best, ambivalent to the nativism that has siezed the Republican party.

Never-Trumpers need to support candidates who share their vision for the United States, not give their votes away to nativist candidates in a different party. Democrats, meanwhile, should approach the ballot box with caution. Reversing the damage of the present Republican administration and addressing America’s fiscal and social problems will require a bigger tent—one that the radical left will not provide.