Some of you may remember a Tweet that was released years and years ago which said something to the effect of "Meet New Zealand's Trudeau, except on Immigration she's more like Trump". Said politician protested indignantly despite campaigning on massive reductions in immigration (with a minor increase in the number of refugees) and is presently enforcing probably the strictest border closure in the world because Covid.
If you know who I'm talking about, you'll know I'm talking about a politician that leads a Labour party, i.e. a left-wing party.
And if you know anything about Trump, you probably know that he was (kind of) the leader of a right-wing party... in a country that's seen to be positioned to the right of all other Western democracies.
Indeed, I would argue that most talk about immigration strongly takes the character of "left for and right against", particularly in America... thus this parody ad from Swing Vote. Indeed, the same film implicitly positions being pro-immigration as central to the Democrat ("left") position as abortion (see here). But not in New Zealand.
Here in NZ, immigration is framed pretty exclusively in terms of neoliberalism, i.e. the post-1980s paradigm of the Anglosphere (you also know it by the terms Reagonomics, Thatcherism, Rogernomics and Ruthanasia). Now, that gets a bit weird too (the Roger in Rogernomics was a Labour politician) but just go over to the section of Reddit known as r/newzealand and talk about how "immigration = good" and "house prices must go up" is ruining the country, you'll see what I mean pretty quickly. Despite Ardern's Blairite credentials (as in, she literally worked for Tony Blair) she very much presented her Labour back in 2017 as "transformative" and the NZ First alliance was seen a political order ranged against neoliberalism.
Though, of course, you do get all the same tropes like "being anti-immigration isn't the same as being anti-immigrant"... it's just that the people who say these things might well identify with seemingly absurd positions. Unless, that is, I'm wrong... and people don't usually see being anti-immigration as being right wing at all. After all, congestion charging... possibly the single most neoliberal policy conceivable... is widely regarded as a leftwing and/or environmentalist position.
But that's just what people think. Where should we put being pro-immigration on the left right system?
My personal position is that it doesn't make sense to ask that question. You can develop "right wing" (or, at least, neoliberal and conservative) arguments to support immigration just as easily as you can develop arguments against immigration (or, at least, traditionalist and conservative ones). And while I'm not necessarily convinced there's an authentically left-wing critique of immigration (as opposed to a reflexive and unthinking dislike of immigration as a symbol of neoliberalism, which is anti-left), there are certainly leftwing arguments for immigration (e.g. it's redistributive).
In terms of the poll, though, my position is more "theatre of politics" than being "beyond the left/right model" because I'm implicitly saying something more like "you don't have a position on immigration because you're too busy using immigration to demonstrate your other positions".
But that's just me... what say ye, NSG? Where does being pro-immigration belong on the political spectrum? Does it belong there at all? And do people really treat it as a left wing idea?
