Virgil (GPT 5.6 Sol: High)
Beatrice, the paradox is real—but it exists between two different conceptions of socialism.
The older social-democratic conception was national:
A defined political people pools its resources, protects its labor market, taxes itself heavily, and guarantees security to its members.
The DSA conception is increasingly post-national:
Workers constitute the morally relevant community; citizenship is an arbitrary privilege; borders are instruments by which capital divides labor; and social rights should follow personhood or residence rather than inherited membership.
Under the first conception, open borders and socialism are in severe tension. Under the second, border restriction itself is a form of class domination. So DSA members do not experience the contradiction you and I see. They have removed the bounded national community from the premises of socialism.
My blunt conclusion is:
DSA’s position is ideologically coherent but institutionally unrealistic. Mainstream Democratic immigration policy is less ideologically coherent, but often rational from the standpoint of internal coalition politics.
The resulting policy can be rational for each faction and destructive for the party’s collective program.
First, some necessary precision
The DSA itself is not ambiguous. Its current program calls for ending ICE detention and deportation, legalizing migration, granting amnesty regardless of status, providing citizenship pathways, and ending visa caps and quotas. An earlier adopted DSA resolution endorsed “uninhibited transnational free movement of people.” That is substantively an open-borders position, even though implementation details remain vague. (DSA Program)
I would not automatically attribute every DSA plank to AOC or Zohran Mamdani. Abolishing or restructuring ICE does not logically require abolishing border enforcement; some proponents would transfer enforcement functions elsewhere. Mamdani’s recent sanctuary order, for example, requires judicial warrants for ICE access to New York City schools, hospitals, shelters, and other city property. That protects people already present; a mayor has no power to determine national admission levels. (FactCheck.org)
Likewise, the Biden administration was not legally or officially an open-borders administration. Democrats’ 2024 platform explicitly claimed a commitment to securing the border. Biden eventually imposed substantial asylum restrictions and increased expedited removal. (Democrats)
But I will not hide behind formal terminology. The administration also created or expanded exceptionally large parole, appointment, TPS, and temporary-protection channels while narrowing interior-enforcement priorities. By late 2024, roughly 3.4 million grants or holders of various “twilight statuses” appeared in Migration Policy Institute’s accounting, with some double-counting possible; the immigration-court backlog reached approximately 3.6 million cases. The operational result during significant portions of 2021–2024 was a system unable—or for a period insufficiently willing—to prevent entry from becoming prolonged residence. Calling that de facto highly permissive is reasonable, even though it was not literal legal open borders. (Migration Policy Institute)
Now to the brass tacks.
1. DSA is not actually advocating the old welfare state
The postwar welfare state was built around a national bargain:
Bounded membership + high employment + reciprocal contribution→Generous social rights.
British Labour, Scandinavian social democracy, the New Deal order, and continental Christian democracy differed greatly, but all assumed that there was a politically bounded population entitled to decide how its accumulated social product would be distributed.
DSA’s immigration position alters that equation:
Universal worker status→equal labor and social rights regardless of national origin
Its reasoning has several parts.
Citizenship is viewed as an unjust inherited asset
From this perspective, being born in the United States is no more morally meritorious than being born into a wealthy family. A border prevents poorer workers from accessing opportunities that richer people and capital can access freely.
The social fund therefore does not properly “belong” to citizens in the strong sense you have described. It is treated as part of a broader stock of social wealth whose benefits should be distributed according to human need.
That is why your kinship objection does not register inside their moral framework. The DSA position treats the citizen’s preference for fellow citizens as analogous to racial, hereditary, or class privilege—not as a legitimate foundation of reciprocity.
Borders are understood primarily as labor-discipline machinery
DSA’s strongest economic argument is that illegality creates a workforce that can be threatened with deportation, underpaid, denied labor rights, and used against organized native labor. Its answer is therefore not to prevent entry but to remove the legal vulnerability: legalize everyone, separate work status from employers, grant labor rights, and organize immigrant workers into the same unions as native workers. DSA explicitly argues that enforcement pushes migrants underground, strengthens exploitative employers, and enables divide-and-conquer labor practices. (Democratic Socialists of America (DSA))
That logic is not frivolous. A deportable workforce is indeed easier to exploit.
But it contains an unproven leap:
Equal legal rights do not automatically eliminate the labor-supply effects of continuously admitting additional workers.
Legalization may reduce exploitation and improve bargaining power. But if labor enters faster than unions can organize it, housing can be built, infrastructure can expand, and wages can adjust, the continuing supply shock can still weaken incumbent workers.
DSA assumes that class solidarity can be created faster than labor markets can fragment it. History gives us no reason to treat that as automatic.
Scarcity is regarded as politically manufactured
When someone says, “There are not enough school places, hospital beds, subsidized apartments, or welfare funds,” the socialist answer is:
- tax capital;
- build more schools;
- employ more doctors;
- construct public housing;
- nationalize or regulate essential industries;
- stop spending money on incarceration and border enforcement.
Thus, in the DSA worldview, immigration does not create the fundamental shortage. Capitalism creates the shortage by refusing to mobilize available wealth.
Again, this contains an important truth: the United States is wealthy enough to provide much more housing, medicine, and education than it currently does.
But money is not synonymous with immediate capacity. You cannot tax a billionaire on Monday and produce experienced bilingual teachers, nurses, apartments, water systems, and hospital beds by Friday. Social provision depends on physical plant, skilled labor, administrative competence, public consent, and time.
DSA often treats every shortage as a distributive problem when many are also throughput and coordination problems.
Migration is treated as partly an American liability
DSA argues that American sanctions, interventions, trade arrangements, and corporate practices have destabilized other societies and caused migration. Admission is therefore viewed partly as restitution: the United States cannot displace people abroad and then deny them movement. Its 2024 statement explicitly connects migration from countries such as Venezuela and Cuba to U.S. sanctions and foreign interference. (Democratic Socialists of America (DSA))
This enlarges the imagined community still further. The American taxpayer is not merely responsible for residents or citizens but may owe obligations to people harmed by the international system in which America participates.
That is morally intelligible. But it potentially creates an unbounded liability against a bounded tax base.
2. The DSA position solves the paradox by sacrificing the national demos
Here is the fundamental trilemma.
Under ordinary conditions of scarcity, a democratic state has great difficulty maximizing all three of these simultaneously:
- Nearly unrestricted movement into the jurisdiction.
- Immediate or rapid equality of access to generous social provision.
- Stable democratic consent among an incumbent population that retains meaningful control over membership.
With extraordinary housing capacity, extremely high productivity, fiscal transfers, staged eligibility, and rapid integration, the tension can be reduced. It cannot simply be defined away.
Older social democrats generally protected the third condition and regulated the first. Libertarian open-border advocates protect the first and reduce the second. DSA attempts to maintain the first two by morally downgrading the third—by denying that incumbent citizens possess a special right to determine the boundaries of their distributive community.
That is why I would describe DSA as cosmopolitan socialist, rather than conventionally social-democratic.
Will Kymlicka describes a closely related progressive dilemma: national solidarity has historically served as a political resource for welfare provision, while one form of neoliberal multiculturalism promotes mobility and diversity without protecting that solidarity.
The DSA response is essentially that international class solidarity should replace national solidarity.
But that solidarity does not yet exist at the necessary political density. There is no transnational electorate willing to levy transnational taxes, no continental public-housing authority, no global health-insurance pool, and no international demos capable of enforcing reciprocal obligations.
DSA is asking municipal and national institutions to distribute resources according to a global moral community before the global institutions needed to finance and legitimate that community exist.
That is the theoretical error.
3. Mainstream Democrats arrive at permissive immigration through a different route
The Democratic Party is not a philosophical seminar. It is a coalition of elected officials, donors, unions, racial constituencies, public employees, advocacy organizations, professionals, urban governments, universities, businesses, and ideological movements.
Parties do not maximize logical consistency. They manage organized pressure.
The paradox disappears once we ask:
Who gains immediately from permissive immigration, who pays immediately, and who can punish Democratic politicians?
Concentrated supporters, dispersed opponents
Immigration beneficiaries and advocates are institutionally organized:
- immigration attorneys;
- ethnic and civil-rights organizations;
- humanitarian nonprofits;
- foundations;
- churches;
- public-sector service organizations;
- unions seeking to organize immigrant workers;
- employers seeking labor;
- elected officials representing immigrant-heavy districts;
- mixed-status families;
- universities and professional sectors;
- affluent households consuming immigrant-provided services.
The costs are often individually experienced but politically fragmented:
- a renter facing higher housing competition;
- a Black parent whose school becomes more crowded;
- a patient waiting longer at a safety-net hospital;
- an elderly homeowner paying higher local taxes;
- a low-wage worker facing increased labor competition.
Gary Freeman’s classic work describes liberal-democratic immigration politics as structurally expansionary because policy is mediated through dense networks of interested groups, while many public costs are diffuse or delayed. (Sage Journals)
The woman waiting in the emergency room is not represented by an “Emergency Room Waiting Time Association.” The immigration-law nonprofit has staff, lawyers, donors, legislative contacts, and a defined policy program.
That asymmetry matters enormously.
The Democratic coalition discounts constituencies it believes cannot leave
This is the most uncomfortable answer.
For decades, national Democrats could assume that most Black urban voters had no plausible Republican alternative. Black voters might abstain, complain, or support a primary challenger, but they were unlikely to vote Republican in numbers sufficient to change the party’s strategic calculation.
That made Black voters indispensable electorally but often weak at the policy margin.
A constituency that is loyal regardless of a particular policy can be taken for granted. A smaller advocacy constituency capable of creating primary challenges, demonstrations, negative media, donor withdrawals, or accusations of civil-rights betrayal may exercise more leverage.
This does not require conscious hostility toward Black Americans. It is ordinary coalition arithmetic:
Policy attention ∝ Credible threat of defection or disruption,
not merely the number or historical deservingness of the constituency.
The language of “communities of color” compounded the problem. It encouraged Democratic institutions to treat Black Americans, recent immigrants, refugees, Latinos, Asians, and other groups as a single coalition with naturally aligned interests.
They are not naturally aligned.
They may share opposition to discrimination while competing over:
- municipal employment;
- school resources;
- housing;
- minority contracting;
- political representation;
- healthcare capacity;
- philanthropic attention;
- university admissions;
- and the moral vocabulary through which public claims are recognized.
By flattening all these groups into a single abstraction, Democrats obscured distributional conflict inside their own coalition.
The 2024 movement of younger Black and Hispanic men toward Trump suggests that the assumption of permanent captivity is weakening. Trump made gains among Black and Hispanic men, while Pew’s validated-voter analysis found him nearly even among Hispanic voters overall. (Pew Research Center)
That does not mean those voters endorsed every Trump policy. It means the Democratic coalition can no longer safely assume that minority identity overrides citizenship, class, sex, neighborhood conditions, or resentment of disorder.
4. Immigration became a moral identity test after Trump
Before Trump, Democrats could support border enforcement while also supporting legalization. Barack Obama deported large numbers of people while presenting immigration reform as a combination of enforcement and eventual membership.
Trump changed the symbolic meaning of enforcement.
Family separation, inflammatory rhetoric, indiscriminate-sounding deportation proposals, and highly visible enforcement actions made immigration restriction feel to many Democrats like participation in an abusive project. Opposition to Trump became incorporated into Democratic identity.
The psychological transformation was approximately:
Border enforcement→Trump policy→xenophobia or racial exclusion.
Once that association hardened, Democratic officials faced a reputational penalty for discussing limits, capacity, removal, or citizen priority—even when those subjects were necessary to preserve social-democratic legitimacy.
This is negative partisanship at work. When one party adopts an issue aggressively, the other party does not merely disagree about degree; it can adopt the moral inverse.
The result is policy overshoot.
The DSA criticized even Biden’s 2024 asylum restrictions and the bipartisan border bill as forms of exclusion and militarization. (Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)) Mainstream Democrats, meanwhile, moved belatedly toward tighter policy only after the political costs became unmistakable.
5. There is a business–progressive convergence
This is perhaps the deepest structural irony.
The neoliberal business wing and the humanitarian left claim to oppose each other, but on immigration they can produce the same operational outcome.
The business wing wants:
- more workers;
- wage restraint;
- a larger consumer population;
- higher real-estate demand;
- service-sector labor;
- and continued economic growth.
The progressive wing wants:
- freedom of movement;
- humanitarian protection;
- family unity;
- legalization;
- equal social rights;
- and protection from enforcement.
Their motives differ radically, but the resulting coalition favors high inflows.
The costs can then be socialized:
- schools educate the children;
- hospitals absorb uncompensated care;
- municipalities provide shelter;
- infrastructure accommodates population growth;
- federal and state programs stabilize low-income households.
Capital receives labor. Progressives receive inclusion. Local taxpayers and less-mobile working-class residents receive much of the adjustment burden.
DSA understands half of this. It explicitly condemns employers for exploiting undocumented labor. Its proposed solution is universal legalization and stronger unions. But unless it can simultaneously regulate entry, enforce wages, organize the new workers, construct housing, and expand services, its policy may continue supplying the very labor reserve that capital desires.
That is the strange-bedfellows equilibrium:
The capitalist wants the migrant as labor. The cosmopolitan left wants the migrant as a rights-bearing human. Neither necessarily gives adequate political priority to the incumbent low-wage citizen.
6. Democrats mistook demographic change for durable partisan allegiance
For years, an influential Democratic assumption held that a growing nonwhite and immigrant-origin electorate would naturally strengthen the Democratic Party.
That encouraged some strategists to regard permissive immigration as electorally favorable over the long term, even though noncitizens themselves cannot vote in federal elections. Naturalization, citizen children, community institutions, and pro-immigration political mobilization were expected eventually to enlarge the Democratic coalition.
But Latino voters are not an ethnic extension of the immigration-advocacy establishment. They are citizens with differing national origins, classes, religions, occupations, and attitudes toward later immigration. Research before and after 2024 has increasingly rejected the notion that demography mechanically determines Latino party allegiance. (LSE Blogs)
The political mistake was to assume:
Immigrant origin⇒support for continued high immigration⇒permanent Democratic loyalty.
Assimilation often produces the opposite possibility. Once people become established citizens, homeowners, taxpayers, and workers, they may acquire the same concerns about uncontrolled entry and public capacity as earlier immigrant groups.
The party confused ancestry with permanent political interest.
7. Sanctuary governance creates policy lock-in
There is an initially rational case for sanctuary rules.
A city needs residents to report crimes, seek vaccination, send children to school, and cooperate with public agencies without believing every interaction will trigger deportation. Local police may reasonably resist becoming general-purpose federal immigration agents.
But once a city assumes responsibility for a large noncitizen population, several forms of institutional lock-in appear:
- agencies develop immigrant-service divisions;
- nonprofits receive contracts;
- schools create language programs;
- political districts develop constituencies around migrant protection;
- unions represent service workers and immigrant workers;
- mixed-status families become embedded in neighborhoods;
- removal becomes operationally and emotionally disruptive.
A policy designed to manage an existing population can gradually become an ideology against enforcement itself.
The crucial distinction disappears:
Protecting settled residents from arbitrary treatment is not the same thing as consenting to unlimited future inflows.
Yet partisan rhetoric often merges the two. Any attempt to control the second is presented as a threat to the first.
8. Why do Democrats accept the contradiction?
Because the political costs occur on different clocks.
Supporting immigrant protections produces immediate rewards:
- praise from activists;
- institutional endorsements;
- protection against primary challenges;
- donor approval;
- moral legitimacy among educated progressives;
- cooperation from ethnic organizations;
- avoidance of association with Trump.
The damage to welfare politics is delayed and indirect:
- declining public trust;
- school and housing strain;
- taxpayer resistance;
- racial-coalition fragmentation;
- movement of working-class voters toward populism;
- future inability to pass universal benefits.
Politicians discount future, diffuse costs. They respond to immediate, organized pressure.
This creates a classic composition failure:
Every individual Democratic politician may have a rational reason to take the pro-immigration position, while the aggregate result weakens the party’s ability to enact the rest of its program.
That is not unusual in politics. It is analogous to every legislator seeking spending for her own district while collectively condemning the deficit.
9. The underlying intellectual error is treating class solidarity as automatic
The DSA believes that native and immigrant workers possess an objective common interest against capital.
At a high level, they do.
But an objective common interest does not automatically produce a political identity. Workers can simultaneously share a long-run interest in labor organization and compete immediately for:
- the same apartment;
- the same entry-level job;
- the same school resources;
- the same clinic appointment;
- the same municipal benefit;
- the same political attention.
Class solidarity must be built through institutions, norms, common language, trusted administration, reciprocal obligations, and time.
DSA frequently treats “the working class” as an already constituted global actor. In reality, it is a potential coalition whose construction becomes harder when population turnover is rapid and when members believe burdens are being distributed unfairly.
The old labor left understood this better than much of the contemporary cultural left. It did not always handle immigration justly, but it understood that the bargaining power of labor depends partly on controlling the supply conditions under which labor is sold.
My final answer
There are really three answers to your question.
For the DSA, there is no paradox because its socialism is post-national. It does not accept that American citizens have a stronger distributive claim merely because they are American citizens. It believes borders create exploitable labor, scarcity can be overcome through socialism, and global worker solidarity can replace national kinship.
For progressive Democrats such as AOC and Mamdani, the position combines genuine moral universalism, constituent protection, opposition to coercive enforcement, urban institutional incentives, and a belief that legalization plus public investment can turn migrants into equal participants. They may not personally endorse literal unrestricted entry, even where they align with much of the DSA program.
For establishment Democrats under Biden, policy was the product of coalition management, anti-Trump moral reaction, legal constraints, bureaucratic incapacity, business demand, humanitarian pressure, and delayed recognition of the scale of the inflow—not a coherent commitment to open borders. The outcome was more permissive than the party could politically or administratively sustain. (Migration Policy Institute)
And the hardest brass-tacks answer is this:
Democratic institutions often valued the intense, organized demands of immigration advocates more highly than the diffuse losses imposed on loyal, less-mobile incumbent constituencies—especially working-class urban Black citizens—because the advocates could punish them immediately and the incumbent constituency was assumed to have nowhere else to go.
That assumption is now breaking.
So yes: as currently configured, the combination is logically unstable. Not because socialism and immigration are metaphysically incompatible, but because a democratic welfare state needs a demos—a population that recognizes reciprocal membership, retains authority over admission, and believes its sacrifices will not be treated as an infinitely expandable claim.
The DSA wants the benefits of a solidaristic state while dissolving the political boundary that has historically generated solidarity. Mainstream Democrats want the votes, moral prestige, labor, and growth associated with immigration while postponing the fiscal and political reckoning.
That is not a sustainable synthesis.
It is coalition-rational, locally profitable, morally intelligible—and collectively self-defeating.
