Following Kamala Harris’ humiliating defeat, many have wondered whether the Democratic Party will moderate its increasingly far-left positions. A recent New York Times article from David Leonhardt suggests that some on the left would like that. In his piece, titled “In An Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?”, the Times’ senior writer uses the success of Denmark’s Social Democrats, who have taken a hawkish position on immigration in recent years, to make a careful case for America’s Democratic Party adopting a similar approach. 

Leonhardt is correct in his assertion that by adopting a more restrictive position on immigration, the Democratic Party could steal some of the GOP’s recent momentum. But that is unlikely to happen. The most realistic outcome is that the Democrats adopt a superficially restrictive position on immigration, one that angers their pro-immigration base and fails to attract the majority of Americans who want less immigration. 

Toward the beginning of his piece, Leonhardt frames the problem to his liberal audience: right-wing parties are gaining traction globally. “Over the past several years,” he writes, 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.”

What makes Denmark such an outlier? It isn’t its progressive policies, which Leonhardt details: housing, early retirement for blue-collar workers, rent control, abortion—you name it, Denmark’s Social Democrats have delivered. Rather, Danish progressives succeeded where other center-left parties failed because they pivoted away from pro-migration policies. 

Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen charted this new course for her party in 2015. “They were absolutely right,” she said in reference to Danish mayors who expressed alarm over unfettered migration. “My party should have listened.” 

And listen they did. After consulting with experts and reviewing the data for three years, the Social Democrats crafted a new policy, which Leonhardt outlines: 

The new policy had three pillars: tougher rules about who could enter the country, a more rigorous effort to integrate immigrants into Danish society and an expansion of foreign aid to help people in other countries. The Social Democrats also endorsed the immigration restrictions that the center-right government was implementing at the time.

The pivot worked. The Social Democrats won big in 2019. Fredriksen became the youngest prime minister in Danish history. And, shockingly, they followed through. After assuming office, Frederiksen’s party secured its borders with Germany and Sweden; implemented more restrictive asylum rules; raised the bar for obtaining citizenship; and even implemented the “parallel societies” law, which allows authorities to push ethnic enclaves toward integration – and if not, to tear them down. 

That a center-left European party would adopt such a platform is shocking to me as an American conservative. It also proved shocking to other European left-wing parties. “Activists and academics in Sweden, Germany and elsewhere described the Danish Social Democrats as sellouts to the far right,” writes Leonhardt. “Coverage in the international media tended to be withering.”

More noteworthy than the (admittedly fascinating) intricacies of Danish politics is the fact that The New York Times published an article—from a liberal, not a conservative—featuring arguments against unfettered immigration. 

“Many studies find a modestly negative effect on wages for people who already live in a country,” writes Leonhardt, “falling mostly on low-income workers.” He also cites a 2017 study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that reviewed 22 “rigorous academic studies that estimate immigration’s effect on native wages.” Of those 22 results, 18 were, unsurprisingly, negative. 

At one point, Leonhardt even addresses the relationship between immigration and social trust: 

Academic research has documented that societies with more immigration tend to have lower levels of social trust and less generous government benefits. Many social scientists believe this relationship is one reason that the United States, which accepted large numbers of immigrants long before Europe did, has a weaker safety net. 

Indeed, virtually all the research on this relationship reveals it to be negative. One meta-analysis reviewed 87 studies on ethnic diversity and social trust and found a “statistically significant negative relationship” between the two. 

For the longest time, however, those who have drawn attention to these realities (myself and many Chronicles writers included) have faced cancellation and character assassination—not only from the left but also from fake conservatives on the right. Yet now that the liberal regime’s power is waning, these arguments are no longer evidence of “racism.” Funny how that works. 

Toward the end of his article, Leonhardt proposes a compromise between progressive values and political pragmatism. “The answer…was not so different from the answer that many Democrats,” he writes, “including Barack Obama, offered not long ago.” 

The answer to the Democrats’ immigration problem, in his view, entails:

a hardheaded approach to border security and deportation with a celebration of immigrants and an effort to expand pathways to citizenship. It welcomed true political refugees. It acknowledged that the country would need immigrants as our own workers aged. It rejected both anti-immigrant racism and the false idea that immigration restrictions were inherently racist.

The fact that the NYT writer cites Obama as a Democrat with a “hardheaded” approach to immigration is telling. It is commonly claimed that Obama was responsible for record levels of immigration. But as analysis from the Center for Immigration Studies illustrates, this is not the case. The Obama administration cooked the books, with “more than one-half of removals attributed to ICE” resulting from “Border Patrol arrests that would never have been counted as a removal in prior years.” As the CIS report notes, total deportations in 2011 were at their lowest levels since 1973. 

This is the era Leonhardt and many other pragmatic Democrats long to return to: one in which the Democratic Party facilitates the Great Replacement while pretending to oppose it. 

Make no mistake, Leonhardt and other pragmatic Democrats still support replacement migration. “Yes, those richer countries, where birthrates have plummeted,” he writes, “will need to admit immigrants to keep their economies functioning smoothly. But the approach that the United States and Western Europe have taken in recent decades has failed.” 

In other words, replacement migration must continue. Westerners must replace themselves with Third Worlders because they aren’t reproducing. Of course, immigrants have fewer children over time once they come to the West, but that’s okay. Just keep the floodgates open forever and we won’t have to confront the anti-natal, anti-life realities of modernity. 

—Patrick Casey
Arlington, Va.

Prof. Gottfried replies:

Mr. Casey’s discussion of the efforts of the Danish government to control immigration and the reaction this policy has produced among other European states speaks volumes for what the left has become in the contemporary West. 

Denmark is now stigmatized as xenophobic by other culturally and socially leftist countries, although internally it is not much different from its European neighbors. High taxation, extensive social programs, permissive abortion laws and gay rights all belong to the Danish political model. But the cost of maintaining these programs for Danish citizens has led its political leaders to limit immigration and to discourage migrants from residing in their country. These protective policies have caused other progressive European states to view Danes as reactionary and “anti-democratic.”

The reaction of these critics, which are typically encountered in Germany—which is now an ex-nation featuring a particularly bizarre version of democracy—indicate how little Western Europeans share with the traditional left. There is nothing intrinsically anti-leftist about restricting and even doggedly opposing immigration. Historically, the left was happy to take an anti-immigration position. Limiting the influx of foreign labor has been traditionally viewed by the normal left as protecting the jobs and wages of the indigenous work force. Thus, until his late-life wokeification, socialist Bernie Sanders was critical of the immigration-intoxicated politics of Bush Republicans and The Wall Street Journal, which Sanders understandably thought would negatively affect unskilled and semi-skilled American workers.

Black Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Jordan gained renown as a critic of immigration. She argued quite forcefully that letting into the country more competitors for low-paying jobs imperiled poor blacks. In 2000, economically leftist Ralph Nader ran for president with a similar anti-immigrationist position. Not surprisingly, European socialist and communist parties also opposed immigration, because their voters believed this policy hurt their already vulnerable workforce. Immigration would drive down wages as well as jobs in favor of foreigners, who would make fewer demands on their employers. 

The French Communist Party after World War II supported anti-colonial revolutions in Algeria and Indochina but also opposed importing foreign workers into France. Carl Schmitt observed quite perceptively that universalist ideals went together with support for a globalist economy and a universal state. Citizens of a democracy thought first about protecting their own nation. (No Schmitt was not a neoconservative; neither was George Washington nor the tariff-advocating Abraham Lincoln.) 

Another long-held notion was that the growth of welfare programs for citizens would necessarily limit immigration because citizens would not want to share with nonmembers of their national community the programs to which they were heavily contributing. The French socialist political economist Pierre Bordieu explained in the 1990s that the popular acceptance of immigration had an inverse relation to expanding welfare state programs. Citizens who pay for these programs will naturally oppose letting others, particularly free riders, have access to them.  

That connection still seemed axiomatic to me while I was writing After Liberalism in the late 1990s. Although I was not at all pleased with an expanding government bureaucracy, which was unfailingly on the left and which favored costly social programs, I mistakenly believed the expansion of the welfare state would help prevent Western countries from opening their gates even more widely to Third World immigration. Voters would try to protect the programs they had, against foreigners trying to take advantage of them. This, of course, didn’t turn out to be the case. In the last four years, prior to election of Donald Trump, America’s more powerful national party threw open its borders to tens of millions of illegals, many of whom were proven criminals and members of drug cartels. What describes itself as the progressive or “antifascist” side in Europe has pursued similar politics, one very receptive to Third World Muslim immigration.

Two factors have transformed what styles itself the left or the “democratic” side. One is the possibility of monetizing debts caused by social spending. This has allowed ruling parties and party coalitions to hand out goodies to their favorites, not least of all immigrants, without immediately passing on the expense to taxpayers.  The downside of this course of action is the problem of spiraling inflation but much of this can be hidden for a time. In any case, the obliging media will blame this problem on what they perceive as the more right-leaning parties, something that we observed in the US when our legacy media for almost four years either denied inflation was taking place or found some way to blame it on an earlier Republican administration. 

Two, the left itself has changed fundamentally in its ideology and social base. It no longer represents in most Western countries a working-class movement. Rather it has become a collection of culturally radical, anti-Christian, and/or governmentally or nongovernmental-organization-employed groups that acquire and keep power by doling out favors with devalued currency. This power bloc flourishes precisely by encouraging unlimited immigration, which expands its clientele and voting base. Population replacement exacerbates cultural conflict, while leaving the governing class in control of a fragmented society that it can re-educate. By now, this ruling class runs almost entirely the educational system and legacy media.

In any case, what makes the Danes seem right-wing is that they’re lagging behind other Western “liberal democracies” in going over to the new version of the left. It may be irrelevant that there is nothing traditionally leftist about this left, which is heavily funded by culturally radical global capitalists. But it has achieved political and cultural primacy throughout much of the West and will clearly tolerate no deviation from its multicultural orthodoxies. Against this intolerant elite stands increasingly the working class, which throughout most of the West now votes for the populist right. We must note these changes to understand why Denmark is giving offense to the European Union’s inquisitors.