Dutch Left Grows a Brain

Incredible, a Western Leftwing party with the sense to oppose mass immigration on non-racist and purely economic  and pro-worker grounds. Mass immigration of labor from low wage countries to high wage countries is a disaster for the workers of the high wage country. Duh. Yet the entire Western Left is still screaming for Open Borders. Suppose I am a member of a Left party in a low wage country. Why should I support Open Borders there? On the one hand, my best workers take off to high wage countries for higher wages. I guess they send some money home if we are lucky, but how does this help develop the economy of my low wage country. Further, I bet even low wage countries have to deal with lots of immigrants from even lower wage countries flooding in. Sure, Romanians get to go to the UK and make big bucks, but how does the mass emigration our best and brightest help grown the Romanian economy? Besides, there are always workers from Ukraine or Africa or wherever trying to flood into Romania to make what to them is big bucks. I understand that India has a huge problem with illegal immigrants. From where? From Bangladesh. I guess things are so horrible in Bangladesh that workers pour across the border to head to the paradise called India, where I suppose they can undercut Indian workers. That’s a scary thought. You mean Bangladeshi workers work for 5 cents an hour and that undercuts Indian workers at 10 cents an hour. Good God. There’s no end to the nightmare of this “free movement of labor” crap and it’s hard to see how anyone but the capitalist businessmen benefit. If anything, this shows that we need to drive a stake through the heart of Marxist “internationalism.” It’s based on some future borderless socialist Kumbaya utopia that’s not on the horizon. When I die in 30 years, this utopia won’t be one step closer. So why base current policy in the capitalist world on the whimsical fancies of a Dreamworld?

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7 thoughts on “Dutch Left Grows a Brain”

  1. Dear Robert
    Agnes Kant has been leader of the Dutch Socialist party for only a few months. The party owes its success to Jan Marijnissen, who recently resigned due to bad health. Marijnnissen also opposes the import of high-skilled immigrants from poorer countries, which he denounces as encouraging the brain drain and foreign aid in reverse. Marijnissen favors an increase in foreign aid.
    One would have to be blind and deaf to ignore the wage-depressing effect of immmigration. There has been a massive inflow of Polish workers into the NL recently. Since Poland is a EU country, they can’t be stopped, but the SP has insisted on taking all the measures necessary to insure that the Poles don’t work illegally, as is now often the case. If they work illegally, they don’t pay income and social security taxes and are therefore much cheaper than legal workers.
    Here are two quotes by Wouter Bos, the leader of the Dutch Labor Party (my translation): (1) ” We have to choose between a generous welfare state and a restricitive immigration policy on the one hand and a generous immigration policy and restricitive welfare state on the other hand.” (2) “The welfare state is a national arrangement. Those who wish to practice solidarity with everybody end up practicing it with nobody.”
    He is absolutely right of course. A generous welfare state can exist only in a high-wage country. Mass immigration undermines the welfare state in two ways. It depresses wages and it makes the welfare state more expensive because a disproportionate number of immigrants will draw benefits from the welfare state while they pay less than their proportionate share of taxes.
    This is of course one reason why the plutocrats support mass immigration. It subverts the welfare state, which they don’t like to begin with. It may be pointed out that a disproportionate number of people in the US without health insurance are immigrants. Mind you, it is always possible to exclude newcomers from social assistance for the first 10 years or so after their arrival, which is what Geert Wilders proposes.
    It is no mystery why a disproportionate number of immigrants in countries like the NL and Germany draw social assistance. Many of them are low-skilled, and what they can make by working is often only a little more than what they can receive on social assistance. Low-skilled Turks who come to the NL can’t lose economically. If they get a job, they make more than in Turkey. If they don’t get a job, they can receive social assistance. The labor force participation of non-European immigrants in the NL is much lower than among the natives.
    This is not so much because the immigrants are lazier but because their ability to earn a decent income on the market is much lower and because they often arrive to work in declining industries. For instance, when the NL started to recruit the misnamed guest workers, many of them went to Twente to work in the textile industry. The textile industry in Twente no longer exists and a lot of these guest workers are now welfare recipients.
    Not so long ago, immigration enthusiasts were touting Spain as a country which combined high immigration with low unemployment. Ah yes, Spain now has the highest unemployment rate in the EU. What it did was to recruit lots of immigrants to work in construction to build houses that now stand empty. The Spanish government is so desperate that it is now offering unemployed immigrants a bonus if they go back to the old country. Needless to say, there aren’t many takers.
    Mass immigration of unskilled labor also increases welfare dependency among the natives by lowering the wages of unskilled workers. I’m convinced that, if there hadn’t been the massive inflow of Latin Americans in the US since 1965, the black underclass would be much smaller today.
    You are absolutely right in stating that prosperity is relative. There are a lot of Dominicans in the US, but in the Dominican Republic there are over a million illegal Haitians for whom the DR is an opportunity. Argentina conjures up images of a country in permanent economic crisis, but there several million illegals in Argentina because Argentina is prosperous relative to Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
    One day the politically correct leftists will wake up and realize that by supporting mass immigration they are only playing the capitalists game. They’ll have to realize that the natural enemies of workers in high-wage countries are the workers in low-wage countries, so they’ll have to choose between their support for domestic labor or their Marxist internationalism. Paul Krugman is one leftist who is fully aware of this dilemma.
    Have a good day. James

  2. One more comment. The Dutch SP is not the only leftist party in Europe that is growing. Another one is die Linke = the Left in Germany. They are a merger of former East German communists and dissidents from the Social Democrats. As the German social democrats moved to the right, they lost votes to die Linke, in the same way that the Dutch Labor Party lost votes to the SP.
    Regards. James

  3. Very good to see indeed. This is the sort of independent leftism I support.
    I don’t have a link or source to prove it but I read somewhere that the American Old Left was instrumental in the Immigration Act of 1921 for similar reasons. In Britain there is also the Independent Working Class Association which opposes immigration and multiculturalism from the class perspective. They are not a formal political party and do not run in elections.
    The Netherlands also had Pim Fortuyn until he was shot by some animal rights nutter for “scapegoating those poor, defenseless muslims.” He was more of a libertarian it seemed but in a European sense and thus supporting social democratic elements that would get one labeled a ‘socialist’ here in the USA. After his untimely death there was party formed around his ideas called something List Pim Fortuyn but there is not enough information in english on them for me to know their platform. They folded after an election.
    IWCA website:

  4. ” we need to drive a stake through the heart of Marxist “internationalism.” ” Robert.
    “They’ll have to realize that the natural enemies of workers in high-wage countries are the workers in low-wage countries, so they’ll have to choose between their support for domestic labor or their Marxist internationalism.” James Schipper
    No! the natural enemy of ALL workers is the finance capital class. This ‘internationalism’ you decry (and so do I) is not ‘Marxist’ at all – it’s a form of class collaborationism effectively, arising out of the type of ultra-leftism Lenin decried in ‘ Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder’; or alternatively arising from heavy secret state security service infiltration into the entire ‘left’. I should have thought of drawing your attention to that Dutch party; they’re a glimmer of hope. They just have a different interpretation of internationalism, a practical one, based on the time-tested adage of ‘charity begins at home’. It’s not rocket science to figure that mass immigration destroys organised labour in the powerful countries, so favouring the continuation of right-wing governments who will force unjust, exploitative terms on E. European and third-world countries. The Dutch Socialist Party advocate European aid to countries like Poland to enable their economies to ‘grow’ and their workers to stay at home. Of course there would be problems with that – the hopelessly corrupt EU will have to be completely re-negotiated e.g. all the money invested in Southern Italy seems to have gone into the pockets of the mafia – but it’s the right tack. It can be hard to pin the lefties down to how exactly they think that leveling the wages of first world workers is going to help create international socialism; they usually come out with something like there’s a need for international labour agreements and ‘solidarity across borders’, rather than ‘attacking the most vulnerable/ scapegoating immigrants’ ( you’ve noticed, I know, that they ALWAYS accuse you of being a nazi KKK type if you have doubts about the value of mass immigration), But ‘international agreements’ between who? Who’s going to fight for these agreements if there are 10 guys showing up to do every job at half the rate? There seems to be a vague notion that forcing organised labour down will spread it out, that it may be thinner and weaker but it will be wider till it includes the whole world. I think this is dangerous nonsense. We have gained little enough over the last century or so; allowing the boss class to stamp on the few lighthouses of relative liberty and working class power that are left won’t spread socialism; it will just put out the lights and set the whole world back hundreds of years, if not for ever.

  5. l just can’t understand how anyone can blablabla about Lenin said this or that blablabla bullshit.
    l have explained a great length that the marxist-leninist mumbo-jumbo bullshit is all about hiding that the JEWS controls the state. Communism-Marxism is all about JEWS taking control of the state – with out the stupid non-jews understanding that JEWS control their state.
    Only a compleat retard can keep blablabla about what Lenin said. Bush is more “intellectual” than Lenin.

  6. I am reacting to all your old posts about my country.
    You are talking about the socialistische partij from jan marijnisen(interesting figure btw).
    In the olden days they where the Maoistische partij(Maoist party but i guess you could guess that).
    This was based on lenins writings, that polly-culture is a bad idea.
    For all the obvious reasons i think but i have not read them.
    The socialistische partij is pretty successful in recent years.
    Funny to notice that the right and right-centrist are willing to work with
    Geert Wilders’s PVV(could be described as national socialist,really a lot of similarity).
    But nobody(social democrats and progressive liberals) wants to work with the socialistische partij.

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