[...] In the past thirty years, mass migration to the US reached levels unseen for a century, and those thirty years have not been a period of prosperity and wage growth for the working class, but the opposite. For those American workers who have experienced declining wages, long periods of unemployment, and the hollowing out of public services, the claim that the economic dynamism of immigrants will benefit everyone must read as a kind of trickle-down economics of the Left or a fossil fuel company’s questioning of climate science — a self-interested rejection of common sense. If material anxieties are the primary driver of working-class nativism, then neither strategy — of emphasizing humanitarianism or minimizing workers’ material concerns — can lead the way out of the dilemma that immigration presents to the Left. The path has to be through confronting those anxieties and actually offering solutions. Here, the labor movement has done a better job than the Democrats. While acknowledging that immigration can impact wages, they proceed from here by making the argument that whether immigration actually has this effect is largely the result of politics, that the limitation of wage competition, collective bargaining, and an expanded social safety net can nullify any potential negative impact of immigration on native workers.