With the German election yesterday, another left-leaning government has been swept away largely because of the immigration issue. As I wrote this morning, the center right won the election with the AfD coming in second place thanks in part to a series of violent terror attacks that have shaken Germany in the past few months.

Germany's story is the same as many other countries, including Sweden, Italy and the US, where immigration has played a role in electing right-wing governments. It's hard not to see the pattern.

In Austria, Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and elsewhere, the far right has grown. In Germany’s election on Sunday, the governing center-left party finished third, behind the center right and far right. In both Canada and Australia, polls suggest that center-left governments will lose elections this year. And in the United States, Joe Biden left office with dismal approval ratings, and Trump won the popular vote for the first time last year. In each of these cases, a major explanation is that working-class voters have drifted from their historical home on the political left and embraced some mix of populism, nationalism and conservatism. Over the past several years, there is arguably not a single high-income country where a center-left party has managed to enact progressive policies and win re-election — with the exception of Denmark.

To be clear, Britain did elect a left-wing Prime Minister though his approval rating immediately plummeted. But Denmark remains a clear outlier as they have a left-leaning government and relatively little challenge from the far right. Why? Because in Denmark Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and her Social Democratic Party have adopted strict controls on immigration.

Nearly a decade ago, after a surge in migration caused by wars in Libya and Syria, she and her allies changed the Social Democrats’ position to be much more restrictive. They called for lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally. While in power, the party has enacted these policies. Denmark continues to admit immigrants, and its population grows more diverse every year. But the changes are happening more slowly than elsewhere. Today 12.6 percent of the population is foreign-born, up from 10.5 percent when Frederiksen took office. In Germany, just to Denmark’s south, the share is almost 20 percent. In Sweden, it is even higher.

These policies made Denmark an object of scorn among many progressives elsewhere. Critics described the Social Democrats as monstrous, racist and reactionary, arguing that they had effectively become a right-wing party on this issue. To Frederiksen and her aides, however, a tough immigration policy is not a violation of progressivism; to the contrary, they see the two as intertwined. As I sat in her bright, modern office, which looks out on centuries-old Copenhagen buildings, she described the issue as the main reason that her party returned to power and has remained in office even as the left has flailed elsewhere.

The decision to move right on this issue looks pretty strategic to me but PM Frederiksen claims that's not the case, that her party really believes being tough on immigration is the more progressive approach.

“There is a price to pay when too many people enter your society,” Frederiksen told me. “Those who pay the highest price of this, it’s the working class or lower class in the society. It is not — let me be totally direct — it’s not the rich people. It is not those of us with good salaries, good jobs.” She kept coming back to the idea that the Social Democrats did not change their position for tactical reasons; they did so on principle. They believe that high immigration helps cause economic inequality and that progressives should care above all about improving life for the most vulnerable members of their own society. The party’s position on migration “is not an outlier,” she told me. “It is something we do because we actually believe in it.”

There's a pretty obvious lesson to be learned here for a Democratic Party that just lost an election that was focused significant on immigration policy. Joe Biden's open borders approach cost the Democrats dearly. That should be obvious to them by now.

During the Biden administration, the United States experienced its most rapid immigration on record, with a pace of entry that surpassed even that of the peak years of Ellis Island. More than eight million people entered the country, about 60 percent without legal permission. In all, about 16 percent of U.S. residents today were born abroad, exceeding the previous high of 14.8 percent in 1890.

But for the most part the left has been unwilling to acknowledge that immigration critics might have a point, one that doesn't just boil down to racism and xenophobia. There are significant costs associated with mass immigration.

As liberals recognize in other circumstances, a policy that lifts G.D.P. doesn’t necessarily benefit everyone. Rapid immigration can strain schools, social services, welfare programs and the housing market, especially in the working-class communities where immigrants usually settle (as happened in Chicago, Denver, El Paso, New York and elsewhere over the past four years). Many studies find a modestly negative effect on wages for people who already live in a country, falling mostly on low-income workers. A 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, intended as a comprehensive analysis of the economic effects of immigration, contains a table listing rigorous academic studies that estimate immigration’s effects on native wages; 18 of the 22 results are negative...

A healthy political debate over immigration would have grappled with its complexities. It would have acknowledged that immigration increases G.D.P. in unequal ways, with the affluent enjoying more of the advantages, while poor and working-class people, including recent immigrants, bear more of the costs. Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist, Nobel laureate and immigrant from Britain, points out that some large sectors where many immigrants work provide services that wealthy people disproportionately use. Restaurant dining, landscaping and construction are all examples. Immigrants have created a larger labor pool, which holds down both wages (hurting workers) and prices (helping upper-income people who dine out frequently and live in large homes with nice yards). As Deaton says, the expanded pool of landscape workers has been good for the well-heeled residents of Princeton, N.J....

The advocates’ position, in essence, was: More is good, and less is racist. Voters disagreed, and they rebelled.

It's a lengthy article but worth reading. The reactions from NY Times subscribers, including many on the left, was mostly positive.

This should be required reading for Democrats.  Immigrants are essential for critical parts of the economy: construction (housing, infrastructure), harvesting and services on the lower end; healthcare, research, and tech on the higher end.  But that's where it ends.  

Allowing mass migration to save millions from warfare, political oppression and climate change is unsustainable, for the reasons explained in the article and clearly understood by the Danes.  Is this unfair?  Perhaps -- but that's how life is.  Everybody can not (and should not) get a trophy.  

What's needed is an efficient and effective system to manage immigration -- one that matches talents and skills to economic realities.  Another is policy that works to minimize the drivers of migration: addressing the climate crisis while supporting good governance where we can.  As the global south becomes unlivable, the pressure to migrate will intensify, but the means to accommodate migrants will remain a limited resource.  It's not fair.   It's reality.

From a reader in Europe:

The only way to heal Western societies in both Europe and the US is to tighten illegal migration to the point where it's no longer an issue. Then we can get back to bread and butter left vs right issues. Left leaning parties are being destroyed everywhere for not enforcing the law around migration, it's as simple as that.

Lots of good comments here but I'll just include one more which is full of exasperation from a self-described far-left progressive. 

FINALLY.

Someone addressing this, the fundamental question of what actually constitutes a nation state, a country, its identity, and what de minimus action a government must take to preserve the existence of those things.

Even hard left progressives like myself, in the main, fully support the preservation of the things about our society and culture (embodied in what our nation used to stand for) and hence the strict management of immigration.  Otherwise even a happy, wealthy, and successful country eventually just follows a kind of Gresham’s Law of culture where the flood of very different incoming peoples drives out of existence the very things that made the place so attractive to so many to begin with.

Unfortunately, the blindness of left wing culture warriors to this reality has brought us the current US government and its widespread democratic support.  God help us all.

Can Democrats learn from there mistakes? If so this is an obvious place to start. Stop listening to far-left NGOs and move right on immigration if you want out of the electoral dog house. Or don't and stay there. Either way, Americans win.