The Left That Was But Won't Be Again

Bernie Sanders showed us a fleeting glimpse of a leftist opposition that might actually do Trump good

For a moment, I thought we were back in 2016 or something.

Wading in to the recent H-1B debate, Senator Bernie Sanders put out a Tweet and a statement that really blew away the cobwebs and made it seem like the Bernie of old was back—Bernie the left populist, Bernie the Democrat answer to Trump, Bernie the man who described mass immigration as a “Koch brothers thing.”

Remember him?

“Elon Musk is wrong,” Bernie Tweeted on Thursday.

“The main function of the H-1B visa program is not to hire ‘the best and the brightest, but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad. The cheaper the labour they hire, the more money the billionaires make.”

Attached to the Tweet was a statement. Some of it’s worth reproducing at length, since it lays out quite nicely the terrain on which this debate is being fought.

Are H-1B visas really about elite talent—elite talent America, for whatever reasons, is unable to produce for herself—or are they simply a way to depress wages by driving Americans out of jobs and replacing them with foreigners who will work for far less?

I’ll let Bernie speak for himself.

“In 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers. There are estimates that as many as 33 percent of all new Information Technology jobs in America are being filled by guest workers. “Further, according to Census Bureau data, there are millions of Americans with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math who are not currently employed in those professions.

“If there is really a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, why did Tesla lay-off over 7,500 American workers this year – including many software developers and engineers at its factory in Austin, Texas – while being approved to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers?

“Moreover, if these jobs are only going to “the best and brightest,” why has Tesla employed H-1B guest workers as associate accountants for as little as $58,000, associate mechanical engineers for as little as $70,000 a year, and associate material planners for as little as $80,000 a year? Those don’t sound like highly specialized jobs that are for the top 0.1 percent as Musk claimed this week.”

Bernie goes on to call out the “Big Lie,” peddled for 30 years now, that offshoring and the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs would not harm the American people—that in fact, they would benefit. Americans were promised high-quality white-collar jobs to replace the lost blue-collar ones, but now they’re being offshored via the H-1B program too. This system, Bernie says, only benefits the rich while it impoverishes and ultimately destroys the lives and communities of hard-working American people.

So that’s what Bernie Sanders had to say.

I don’t want to rehash the whole H-1B debate. My position on the program is clear, and I’m sure it’s not much different from yours, if at all. What I want to talk about, instead, is what this throwback intervention, from a politician who hasn’t spoken like this in years, means or could mean for the future of American politics. In particular, what it could mean for opposition to Trump, since the Democrats are now in the wilderness, looking to understand Kamala Harris’s historic failure and return with an agenda that has a better chance of winning them power than whatever the hell it was Harris and Walz were offering. White-guy tacos? A day-drinking president? I can’t even remember.

In short, Bernie showed us a glimpse of an alternative leftist opposition to Trump. It’s one that would be like the class-based popular leftism of old, a leftism that understood how foreign workers could be weaponised in the interests of big business, against the native people, and wasn’t afraid to say so. This is the left before DEI and identity politics made it virtually impossible to say anything negative about foreigners coming to the US legally or otherwise, without being shunned and disowned and of course labelled “racist.”

Like I say, this is basically Bernie 2016. The Bernie who had to be screwed out of winning the Democrat nomination to make way for Hillary—even Pocahontas, Senator Warren, said so. That Bernie.

Make no mistake, that Bernie or that kind of Bernie-ism could be a huge threat to MAGA at the midterms if Trump strays off course and underestimates the genuine strength of feeling about H-1B visas and barely restricted legal immigration.

Illegal immigration matters, of course it does, and it must be brought under control and reversed, but legal migration is no less of a problem and Americans care about it more or less just as much. There is broad popular support for reducing or even ending legal migration programs like the H-1B. As I reported last week, 60% of Americans—72% of Republicans and around half of Democrats—believe America has enough home-grown talent to obviate the need for special programs to bring white-collar workers from abroad.

A 2016 Bernie-style leftism could do serious damage if Trump makes the mistake of thinking Americans don’t care about legal immigration.

At the same time, there’s a potential positive here too for genuine America First people. Awareness of this threat could be a necessary spur to keep Trump on the straight and narrow. Now isn’t the time for hubris or complacency, and having an effective opposition, one campaigning on core MAGA issues from the other side and holding Trump’s feet to the fire to make sure he really is as good as his word—well, I think that could only be a good thing.