Who Benefits? How Immigration Went From the Employers' Cause to the Left's Hope

Mass immigration began as an employer's request, and the political left came to it later, and for different reasons. The sequence matters more than the motives we assign to it.

For most of the last century the case for importing labour was made by those who hired it. West Germany signed its first recruitment agreement with Italy in December 1955, then with Greece, Spain, Turkey, Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Yugoslavia, to feed a booming economy short of workers. When Bonn stopped recruitment in 1973, the workers stayed and their families joined them. That is the pattern in every rich country: labour was invited for a few years, and people arrived for decades. This column traces who gained at each stage, what the evidence supports and where it stops.

THE FIRST PHASE: BUSINESS

Employers wanted labour that was available and cheap, and governments of every colour obliged. Britain's net migration reached a record 906,000 in the year to June 2023, under a Conservative government. Kemi Badenoch, now Conservative leader, called it "a collective failure of political leaders from all parties".
Giorgia Meloni's government, elected on a promise to cut arrivals, has authorised 497,550 entries of foreign workers for 2026-2028 after 450,000 for 2023-2025, calling them labour "essential to the productive system".
France issued 336,710 first residence permits in 2024, 1.8 percent more than in 2023, under a centrist government that also boasts of a 27 percent rise in expulsions. Marine Le Pen called the permit figure a record. One outlet reports 384,000 for 2025, which we could not confirm.
In Washington the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sued over Trump's $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas, the rare case of big business suing this president in public.

THE SECOND PHASE: THE LEFT

The left did not start here. In the United States the AFL-CIO, the main union federation, backed penalties for employers who hired illegal workers until February 2000, when it unanimously called for repealing them and legalising millions of unauthorised workers. Migration News called it "an historic reversal." Once the unions reversed, the political case followed.

The change was gradual. In his 1995 State of the Union Bill Clinton said that Americans everywhere were "rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country", and he backed the Jordan Commission, which proposed cutting family-based green cards by about a third. The Democratic Party that moved on from that position did so over the following two decades. By fiscal 2022, under Joe Biden, US authorities recorded 2.4 million encounters at the southern border, the most ever (Migration Policy Institute).

Strategists wrote it down. In 2002 John Judis and Ruy Teixeira argued that ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics and Asians, would give Democrats a lasting majority. In 2011 the French think tank Terra Nova, close to the Socialist Party, advised the left to move from working-class voters to urban graduates, people of immigrant origin and active minorities.
One Labour insider wrote it down too. In 2009 Andrew Neather, a former adviser, said New Labour's immigration policy was meant "to rub the Right's nose in diversity". He later said this was exaggerated, and the government denied it.
Marcuse supplied the theory. His 1964 book *One-Dimensional Man* ended with the hope that "the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors" might replace the working class that had been absorbed by capitalism.
On 9 April 2026 Jean-Luc Mélenchon told a debate at the Institut La Boétie, in the full video: "If you are counting on white Catholic workers to make socialism in France, you will have to wait a while, because it will not happen." In the same passage he asked who "the actor" of history could be, and left the question open. He has been more explicit elsewhere about a new France made by "créolisation".

THE THIRD PHASE: WHEN THE LABOUR IS NOT NEEDED

The first phase rested on the employers' need for workers. If machines make that need disappear, the people who came for it will not. West Germany learned this in 1973: it stopped recruiting guest workers, and the workers stayed and brought their families. Whether the need will disappear is a forecast, not a fact, and the evidence so far is mixed.

White-collar work is hit first. A Stanford study of US payroll data (Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen) found that workers aged 22 to 25 in the occupations most exposed to AI saw employment fall by 16 percent relative to others, while experienced workers were stable. The authors call it early evidence, not proof.
Manual work is a longer story. Forrester reports that humanoid robots are still in early deployment, mostly in warehouses, logistics and manufacturing. A Morgan Stanley model, as summarised by a robotics blog and not checked against the original, rates construction, production and farming as the most replaceable jobs by 2050, at about 67 to 70 percent.
Care work is growing. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects home health and personal care aides among its fastest-growing jobs to 2034 because of an ageing population. Robots have not yet replaced the work, and the pay is low.

If the forecasts for AI come true, countries could be left with large immigrant populations, some of them unemployed and badly integrated, and no economic reason for their arrival. If they do not come true, the need for workers returns. In both cases, the people are here.

THE COST QUESTION

Critics say the people who arrive cost more than they give and commit more crime. The evidence depends on the country and the origin group.

Denmark. The Finance Ministry's analyses put the net public cost of non-Western immigrants and their descendants at about 27 billion kroner in 2019, down from 42 billion in 2015. The ministry says the cost is mostly due to the group's low employment rate. The calculation does not measure religion.
Sweden. The crime-prevention council Brå found that foreign-born residents were about 2.5 times as likely to be registered as crime suspects as people with two Swedish-born parents. Controlling for age, sex and living conditions cut the figure to 1.8. The excess varies by country of origin and type of crime.
United States. A study of Texas arrest data (PNAS, 2020), which records immigration status, found that US-born citizens were more than twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as undocumented immigrants.

So the claim holds for some groups in some European countries, and mostly because of low employment, and it fails in the American data. I did not verify the National Academies' 2016 finding that second-generation immigrants are strong net contributors.

WHAT IS NOT PROVEN

The votes follow the theory only in part. In France they largely do: an Ifop survey found 69 percent of Muslim voters backed Mélenchon in the first round of 2022, against 14 percent for Macron and 7 percent for Le Pen, and a CEVIPOF-Ipsos analysis puts the Muslim vote for left-wing parties at 80 percent in the first round of 2024. Those are Muslims, not immigrants as a whole; we found no data on naturalised immigrants. In other countries the picture is mixed: Muslim voters in the Netherlands and Germany split between left-populist parties and parties such as the AfD. Many immigrants cannot vote for years, and in France 23 percent of Muslim voters abstained.
Nobody has shown a coordinated plan. A think tank paper, one adviser's remark and one speech are signs of interest, not of a conspiracy, and the three men were not part of the same project.
Motives cannot be read from outcomes. "It started as compassion and became a hunger for power" may be true of some people, but no document shows it.

The left found a use for what business had asked for. The result looks like a plan, and it is mostly a convergence of interests.

What follows is the editorial view.

THE VIEW FROM THIS DESK

Parties of the centre and the right carried out most of the biggest intakes, and they did so after promising their voters less. Two of the most powerful interest groups in Western politics, employers and a left that has lost its old working-class base, have found they gain from the same policy. Neither needed to conspire. That is the point: when the people who gain are also the people who decide, the voters who pay the costs, through wages, rents, schools and public order, have no one speaking for them. The citizens who objected were told their objections were prejudice, and the argument was ended before the evidence was shown.

The remedy is open numbers and open debate. Publish how many come, in which jobs, at what cost and to whose benefit. Put the numbers to a vote. And let the critics of immigration and its supporters be answered with data, not accusations. An argument that survives scrutiny does not need to forbid the question.

WHAT TO WATCH

Whether the fall in graduate hiring in AI-exposed jobs spreads to manual work as humanoid robots are deployed.
Italy's next decreto flussi and whether the quotas are filled. Contracts under the earlier three-year decree were reported well below the authorised numbers.
UK net migration figures from the ONS, and whether the fall from 906,000 continues.
Whether the Institut La Boétie or Mélenchon states the "actor of history" answer outright.
The outcome of the U.S. courts on the H-1B fee, and what business does next.