Vinit Ravishankar: The Rise and Rise of the Anti-Migrant Left: Reject Parochialism, Embrace Migration, The Left Berlin, January 13, 2025.
Amid all the protests against Friedrich Merz and his CDU tearing down the firewall to the AfD in the course of the joint vote for the five-point plan to tighten migration policy, the fact that the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance was also involved has been somewhat overlooked. The party was first founded in September 2023, splitting off from the The Left in order to offer voters what was then described as a socially left-wing and culturally conservative platform. Just over a year later, the alliance has moved so far to the right on migration issues that even a joint policy with the AfD no longer seems to deter anyone there. In The Left Berlin, Vinit Ravishankar places these and similar developments in Europe and the US in a broader historical context: from the “jingo-socialism” of the US labor movement in the early 20th century to the exclusion of so-called “guest workers” from trade unions and works councils in postwar Germany. Even if, as Ravishankar argues, globalized labor migration is certainly in line with neoliberal policies, this should not mean that the left should turn against the exploited migrants according to the logic of nation-state isolation; rather, the goal should be to support them in their local emancipation in the spirit of international solidarity.
↗ https://www.theleftberlin.com/the-rise-and-rise-of-the-anti-migrant-left/