WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE? The Economist: Liberals need a new approach to immigration.

Matteo Salvini, Italy’s hard-right interior minister, deputy prime minister and leader of its Northern League, is surging in the popularity polls. Mr Salvini is likely in due course to become Italy’s leader in large part because of his uncompromising stance on immigration. “People whose only contact with immigrants is with the Filipino servant who takes the dog for a walk in the evening are in favour of immigration, but they have no idea of how immigration is lived in the peripheries,” he said in July.

That, in a nutshell, is the charge made against smug liberals who champion “open borders”. They get all the benefits of large-scale migration from low-wage countries: cheap nannies, Uber drivers, decorators, waiters, sandwich-makers, chambermaids and dog-walkers. But they don’t rely on public housing, tend to have private health-care and often pay for private education so that their children are not brought up in classes where, in some cases, their native tongue is spoken by a minority.

Meanwhile those locals not so fortunate as the cosmopolitan elite (who kid themselves that they deserve their good fortune because they worked hard, ignoring that they started life on third base) often compete with people who will work for less because they are prepared to live in dorms or bedsits, having left their families at home.

If immigrants were undercutting the wages of lawyers, bankers, journalists, and politicians, every nation would have a wall.