Immigration can cause issues, but the fastest way to put upward pressure on wages is to have labour protections and bargaining power for both native and immigrant workers. Trying to bar immigrants from coming in without actual left-wing reforms is like putting the cart before the horse and then shooting the horse just because.
I think you don't fully grasp how politics work. At least how they work in "the west" that has to really go through all the motions of some kind of parliamentary democracy. Singapore of course is a dictatorship with lipstick, political rules are somewhat different. And in a communist country rules would also be somewhat different. etc.
For the "west", which is the situation most people here live in and are coming from with their viewpoints, we have indeed 40 years of experience with erosion of labour rights. It's done through a variety of means but the open borders thing was the main definitely tool in Europe. The ECJ rewrote labour law for the whole EU based on that doctrine, to dismantle what the unions had won on the national political arena. I've offered specific examples in one of the brexit threads, or perhaps the EU one. There is no doubt that capitalists decided to import labour from the countries to pay them lower wages, and that having achieved that they undermined the unions. The relation cause-effect is clear, it's in the jurisprudence itself.
There is a current within the EU, personified by that former greek finance minister, Varoufakis, who claims that the EU is reformable from within, that things such as labour rights can be restored by campaigning politically through the EU institutions. They went nowhere. Their representation in the European Parliament, itself a Potemkin village of "democracy", failed to elect a single representative. Why, if the issues they talked about worried many Europeans?
Because the political arena remains national. That is the horizon of the community people fell part of, act as part of, live in. The few who want to be "citizens of nowhere" (meaning:
have no obligations towards any community) don't care about labour issues, they're out only for themselves thinking that moving around rather than improving a community they're part of is the way to live. So an appeal to the "european citizens" for left-wing politics went nowhere and
cannot ever go anywhere.
If the fight is national, then the fight is about changing the power relations in the fight between owners of capital and workers. That oh-so-old-fashioned class war thing. Who can relative power change in this arena?
There's revolution as an option, but let's be honest history shows that people only embark on that whet they're
suddenly oppressed, or oppressed to a point where their living conditions become unbearable.
There's democracy and state capture towards a different institutional setup, but in the EU democracy on the national level is constrained (as the Greeks confirmed and Varoufakis should know) except in the big countries. The barriers are very great, the oligarchies have the media well under control, etc. Wealth begets political power...
And there's material conditions. Which capitalists can't really change because they're a constraint on their use of capital. Lack of resources means they'll have to expend more to get what they want. Lack of available labour means they'll have to pay more for it. Immigration policy is a lever they've used to expand their wealth, they political power through it.
A democratic strategy to cut down the power of the oligarchs within a country requires attacking their wealth and their political influence by any mean available. Immigration policy is a tool that they've used to their immense benefit: undermine the political power of unions and accumulate more wealth. It's an obvious place to hit them. The left is in terrible shape. It took beating after beating. often because of stupid strategic mistakes people there did, often because leaders outright sold out.
We can't afford to assume universal brotherhood here and now. Thea's a goal, it's not the present reality.
The strategy to change the present must start from the present to get anywhere. Can you understand that?
Assuming the future instead of fighting in the present is
one of the categories of mistakes that led the left in Europe after the 80s from defeat to defeat.
These same observations are valid for the US, where the left was kindle with the trade agreements, NAFTA, the WHO... And for a number of other countries with similar makeup and also within this institutional web weaved out of the Washington Consensus in the 1990s to "globalize". The anti-globalization movement got things right. They lost the battle then but it must go on. The "thin ways" were political suicide for the left. And where the left won't deliver some "populist" will finally deliver.
Something.