It was the European right which clamoured for mass immigration.
Why? Because it is cheaper to keep wages down by the threat of foreign influx of labour, than to invest in R&D. The costs for the latter are direct, costs for the first are for society at large. That why Japan saw such a technological rise, and the West turned itself into a cheap workshop that not two decades later discovered it would never be as cheap as emerging countries.
The left, the trade unions, resisted mass immigration in the fifities, sixties, seventies. What the left did do, was adopt social justice in the 1970s. We brought them over, so they argued, so we can not simply discard them when we've got no more use for them. Slash-an-burn economy is for the right, they can treat the environment, individuals like that, but not entire ethnic groups, not in the social climate of Europe of the 70s/80s, when the trauma of Europe's crimes of WWII and colonialism pressed heavily on Europe's conscious.
Bookmarks