Sooner or later, the New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news that it has caught up with mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less developed countries is politically toxic.
That news was relayed on a Feb. 24 article and thread on X by reporter David Leonhardt, a writer of center-left sympathies and a keen analyst of statistics — and the human realities to which they are useful clues.
“The left has lost power in the U.S., Germany, Italy and Sweden,” Leonhardt writes. “Canada and Australia may be next. And the far right is growing across the west. But there is one European country where the left has won re-election and marginalized the far right: Denmark. Why?”
His answer seems, once you think about it, glaringly obvious. “Danish progressives listened to working class voters on immigration — and reduced immigration levels.”
It’s an answer that is entirely congruent with a psephological observation in JD Vance’s much resented (among European elites) Feb. 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference. “No voter on this continent,” Vance said, “went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants.” Politicians in Denmark, unlike those in neighboring Sweden and Germany, paid attention to that.
Denmark has long been known for its high taxes and generous welfare state, as well as for its democratic norms and opposition to bigotry, as shown by its citizens’ ferrying of almost all its Jews to neutral Sweden during the Nazi occupation. In his book The Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama wrote that a nation developing a competent state, the rule of law and public accountability was “getting to Denmark.”
Denmark’s national identity goes back a thousand years and it has long ranked high among nations in trust of government and large institutions. And as the political scientist Robert Putnam discovered (but suppressed his finding for years) a large influx of culturally diverse immigrants, as in Los Angeles circa 2000, sharply reduces levels of trust.
Which is one reason free market economist Milton Friedman concluded, as Denmark’s Social Democrats have, that heavy immigration and a generous welfare state are incompatible. Danes trust that other Danes won’t cheat or freeload; about the Muslim immigrants they see across the Kattegat in Sweden, they’re not so sure.
It’s noteworthy that in Munich Vance was careful to say “no voter on this continent,” for voters on another continent, North America, voted for opening the floodgates to unvetted immigrants in 2020 and (in Canada) 2021. Joe Biden and the Democrats made no secret that they would undo Donald Trump’s relatively effective (after a few rough months) immigration law enforcement.
But perhaps many didn’t expect that the Biden administration would usher in perhaps five, perhaps seven million illegal immigrants (or that Justin Trudeau would vastly expand Canada’s previously successful policy). In retrospect, it seems a clear example of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) or a logical extrapolation for those “in this house we believe … no human is illegal” signs.
For many Americans, any restriction on migration evokes memories of their own forebears from eastern and southern Europe who arrived in the Ellis Island years (1892-1914, 1919-24), and especially for those whose ancestors might otherwise have been murdered in the Holocaust.
Interestingly, the post-Civil War surge of 30 million immigrants to the North occurred while only about 1 million blacks and 1 million whites moved from South to North. The wounds of the war had not healed, and employers in the booming industrial North who couldn’t attract culturally diverse Southerners were willing to hire culturally diverse Italians, Poles and Jews instead. And in those days the people running America’s public schools did a crackerjack job of Americanizing their children.
Denmark, by the way, contributed some notable immigrants, including William Knudsen who rose to be president of General Motors and then resigned to accept a $1 a year assignment from FDR to get other industrial leaders to make America the arsenal of democracy even before Pearl Harbor. More recently, notable Danish-American politicians have included patriotic Democrats Sen. and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer.
Today, it’s not plain that the United States or European nations need and can assimilate all the millions they have been coming in, a population disproportionately of unattached, low-skill young men from low-trust Muslim or Latin cultures. Unfortunately, today’s public sector institutions here and in Europe seem disproportionately staffed by people who believe that assimilation is oppression.
Plainly there is some erosion of trust. The Biden open-border policy has tilted the immigrant flow toward law-breakers and violent young men whose crimes Donald Trump has been highlighting. German voters in recent months have watched as Muslim immigrants stabbed three people to death in Solingen in August, killed six driving a car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, stabbed a baby and passerby to death in Aschaffenburg in January, and, two days before the Feb. 23 election, stabbed a Spanish tourist at the Holocaust Museum in Berlin. Those crimes pretty much cover the German map, and every region saw gains for the AfD party, despite its roots in Communist East Germany and some of Nazi apologist members.
The result was a stinging defeat for Chancellor Olaf Scholz of the Social Democratic party, founded in 1875 (during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm I, born in 1797), and for the same reasons as the July 2024 defeat, after failing to stop the inflow, of Britain’s Conservative party, founded in 1846 (during the reign of Queen Victoria, born in 1819).
Both parties have noble heritages of opposing Nazis and prosecuting the Cold War but have been brought low. The Social Democrats won just 19%, their lowest percentage since 1945. Britain’s Conservatives, the world’s most electorally successful party, won just 24% in July, and in current polling is now running third with 22%.
Meanwhile, as voters saw the results of their open-door immigration policy, America’s Democrats, the world’s oldest political party, saw their nominee’s vote total fall 6 million below 2020, while Donald Trump’s total was up 3 million.
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The case against immigration can be overstated. In daily life native-born Americans mix with Latino immigrants and native-born Europeans mix with Muslim immigrants in shopping malls and fast-food restaurants routinely and politely. But mass immigration of culturally diverse people tends to produce economic stress and erode the trust levels. Traditions of assimilation are weak in Europe and weaker in America than during the Ellis Island era.
It’s difficult to get the balance right between the benefits and detriments of immigration. What voters have been concluding is that European and American elites have botched the job and that their task now should be “getting to Denmark.”