Kryptonite to the Right: How Denmark is Bucking the Rightward Trend

David Leonhardt’s argument is crystal clear and highly persuasive.

Stop what you’re doing and read this New York Times magazine article by David Leonhardt with the subtitle: “Around the world, progressive parties have come to see tight immigration restrictions as unnecessary, even cruel. What if they’re actually the only way for progressivism to flourish?”

It’s a long article but there’s no padding. I found every word to be a sinew in a set of muscular arguments making the following case:

The Trumpian right in the US and authoritarian movements elsewhere are successfully deploying anti-immigration politics and policies to gain and maintain power. The Democratic left typically takes the other side of that argument, and that placement is costing them votes and elections. Except in Denmark, where the leadership believes that tighter immigration policy isn’t just necessary to win. It’s sensible, fair policy that doesn’t contradict, but firmly supports a highly progressive agenda.

I don’t agree with everything Leonhardt says or the Danes are doing. And, as is often the case in articles that say “[some Scandinavian country] is doing X, and we should too!,” there’s the over-arching problem that we’re not them. But my quibbles are small and Leonhardt crafts an extremely compelling argument that progressives ignore at our peril.

First, let’s be very clear that the Danish Social Democrats are not, outside of immigration policy, faking left and going right:

Since the Social Democrats took power in 2019, they have compiled a record that resembles the wish list of a liberal American think tank. They changed pension rules to enable blue-collar workers to retire earlier than professionals. On housing, the party fought speculation by the private-equity industry by enacting the so-called Blackstone law, a reference to the giant New York-based firm that had bought beloved Copenhagen apartment buildings; the law restricts landlords from raising rents for five years after buying a property. To fight climate change, Frederiksen’s government created the world’s first carbon tax on livestock and passed a law that requires 15 percent of farmland to become natural habitat. On reproductive rights, Denmark last year expanded access to abortion through the first 18 weeks of pregnancy, up from 12 weeks, and allowed girls starting at age 15 to get an abortion without parental consent.

While our current administration, supported by Congressional Republicans, appeases Russian aggression and lies about who attacked whom, Denmark has contributed more, as a share of their GDP, to the Ukrainian cause than any other country. And their generous welfare state remains fully in place, supported by the highest tax share of GDP among OECD countries.

But when the current prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, took office about a decade ago, she did so in no small part due to their path-breaking, for Social Democrats, platform calling for “lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally,” all policies they’ve implemented.

The result is lower levels and less growth of the immigrant share of their population. Over the past decade, that share has grown from 10.5 to 12.6 percent. “In Germany, just to Denmark’s south, the share is almost 20 percent. In Sweden, it is even higher.” In the U.S., we’re now above 15.6%, up from 12.9% in 2010.

Frederiksen and SD’s position is not at all some version of “we would love to be more open to migrants, but this is the only way to stay in power.” They view their restrictions on immigration as a fully complementary part of their progressive agenda. “To Frederiksen and her aides…a tough immigration policy is not a violation of progressivism; to the contrary, they see the two as intertwined.”

Their reasoning emphasizes collective solidarity and the view that “Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation.” Unmanaged immigration undermines this cohesion, and importantly, its costs fall largely on the working class (my bold): “High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.”

Leonhardt offers a careful examination of the evidence for such claims. His description of the empirical economics is, I thought, a bit off, particularly regarding immigration’s impact on wages and inequality, where he has the signs right but overstates the magnitude. For example, he cites this table of statistical estimates of immigration’s impact on native-born wages, arguing that “18 of the 22 results are negative.” But not only are many of the coefficients (negative wage effects) in these studies insignificant, they often refer to numerically small groups, such as native (or immigrant) high-school dropouts.

But I still think he’s right, especially in the context of the political debate, where it’s the sign that matters, and what economists call “small effects” sounds uncomfortably like affluent analysts dismissing working-class impacts. As Leonhardt puts it, “The Brahmin left sometimes waves away these effects as too small to matter. The workers who experience them feel differently.”

Towards the end of the article, Leonhardt made an observation that struck me as extremely important.

Since 2019, Social Democrats have again won some lower-income areas far from Copenhagen. It is akin to the Democratic Party winning blue-collar counties in Pennsylvania or Texas…The Social Democrats have been able to do so because immigration no longer dominates the political debate. As Frederiksen told me, “If we lose the next elections — and maybe we will, I don’t know, of course — then it will not be because of immigration.” The fading of the issue has been particularly damaging to the far right.

What Leonhardt is suggesting here is that if progressives could take immigration off the table, it would be kryptonite to the hard right. Of course, what that means in terms of actual policy warrants an urgent and important discussion in which progressives need to engage, as I’ve argued elsewhere. But given the stakes and the muscular evidence presented in his piece, it’s a suggestion that progressives must take seriously. Just consider why Trump torpedoed the bipartisan Lankford immigration bill last year. He knows that the Dane’s position here is kryptonite for his project.

One last caveat. I’ve read many articles that take the form of “there’s something cool happening in [a Scandinavian country] that we should do too!” My knee-jerk response is always, “sure, but we’re not them.” “US not equal to Denmark” is of course true in many impactful ways, but there is a salient difference in this case. The “something cool” is more from the right than the left, and perhaps that scrambles this eternal truth.

Let’s be unequivocally clear about the following: too often, anti-immigrant sentiment is motivated by racism and xenophobia. And progressives can never ignore the unjust impact of that force. We cannot put that dark force aside as part of a political strategy. But that’s not what the Danish Social Democrats are doing. They’re pursuing a rational, defensible policy that’s keeping them in power while creating the space for them to pursue an agenda that American progressives will recognize as precisely where we want, and, on behalf of economically vulnerable Americans, both native and foreign-born, need to get to.