>Please explain why they [the welfare state & open borders] are
incompatible.
-Will there be enough jobs for all who would come if there were open -borders? What would be the impact of uncontrolled immigration on -wages?
Uncontrolled flow of capital to low-wage countries has a similar effect on wage competition as uncontrolled flow of workers to high-wage countries. Both put pressure to lower wages in developed countries while providing capital to increase the productivity (and potentially the wages) of low-wage workers.
The key issue is in which situation will workers be able to organize better to demand higher wages commensurate with the increased productivity due to available capital (and whatever additional gains they can extract from capital). If immigrants to developed nations are given full support for unionization demands and other wage support, then there is a reasonable argument that, in a world of unlimited capital flows, developed nation workers will do better, especially over the long run, if they allow unlimited flows of workers. Workers immigrating to developed nations are likely to have better leverage against capital than if they are forced to stay in their own poor country and have capital find them there. Maintaining a strong welfare state is all part of strengthening workers' power.
Of course, in a world of unlimited flows of workers, to be most effective, the welfare state would have to be extended globally. With the proper subsidies available, which would be cheaper to provide for unemployed workers in their home countries, few would immigrate and leave their families and communities unless actual jobs were waiting for them, as long as the comparable benefits were is as good in their home countries.
One thing the left has to move from is rhetoric of "foreign aid" to demanding global aid for the unemployed, period. We have to move from a paradigm of country-to-country aid and move the focus of working families to supporting other working families around the world, people who deserve their sympathy out of altruism and deserve their support out of self-interest of preventing capital from pitting them against them over job scarcity.
But the reality is that immigration controls may keep wages up in the short-term, due to hording fixed capital accumulated over the years for first world workers, in the long term wage pressures of global competition will continue to lower real wages there, whether in direct pay or benefits or in lowered regulatory standards demanded by capital to be "competitive."
So better to open the borders and embrace global solidarity, then to hang onto an ultimately self-defeating country-to-country competition over flows of capital.
-- Nathan Newman