By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, August 09, 2016
Borders are in the news as never before. After millions
of young, Muslim, and mostly male refugees flooded into the European Union last
year from the war-torn Middle East, a popular revolt arose against the
so-called Schengen Area agreements, which give free rights of movement within
Europe. The concurrent suspension of most E.U. external controls on immigration
and asylum rendered the open-borders pact suddenly unworkable. The European
masses are not racists, but they now apparently wish to accept Middle Eastern
immigrants only to the degree that these newcomers arrive legally and promise
to become European in values and outlook—protocols that the E.U. essentially
discarded decades ago as intolerant. Europeans are relearning that the
continent’s external borders mark off very different approaches to culture and
society from what prevails in North Africa or the Middle East.
A similar crisis plays out in the United States, where
President Barack Obama has renounced his former opposition to open borders and
executive-order amnesties. Since 2012, the U.S. has basically ceased policing
its southern border. The populist pushback against the opening of the border
with Mexico gave rise to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump—predicated
on the candidate’s promise to build an impenetrable border wall—much as the
flood of migrants into Germany fueled opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Driving the growing populist outrage in Europe and North
America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites,
borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of
our age—and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language we use. The
descriptive term “illegal alien” has given way to the nebulous “unlawful
immigrant.” This, in turn, has given way to “undocumented immigrant,”
“immigrant,” or the entirely neutral “migrant”—a noun that obscures whether the
individual in question is entering or leaving. Such linguistic gymnastics are
unfortunately necessary. Since an enforceable southern border no longer exists,
there can be no immigration law to break in the first place.
Today’s open-borders agenda has its roots not only in
economic factors—the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that
native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not—but also in several
decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a
trendy field of “borders discourse.” What we might call post-borderism argues
that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs, methods
of marginalization designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress
the “other”—usually the poorer and less Western—who arbitrarily ended up on the
wrong side of the divide. “Where borders are drawn, power is exercised,” as one
European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised—as if
a million Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield
considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western
notions of victimization and grievance politics. Indeed, Western leftists seek
political empowerment by encouraging the arrival of millions of impoverished
migrants.
Dreams of a borderless world are not new, however. The
biographer and moralist Plutarch claimed in his essay “On Exile” that Socrates
had once asserted that he was not just an Athenian but instead “a citizen of
the cosmos.” In later European thought, Communist ideas of universal labor
solidarity drew heavily on the idea of a world without borders. “Workers of the
world, unite!” exhorted Marx and Engels. Wars broke out, in this thinking, only
because of needless quarreling over obsolete state boundaries. The solution to
this state of endless war, some argued, was to eliminate borders in favor of
transnational governance. H. G. Wells’s prewar science-fiction novel The Shape of Things to Come envisioned
borders eventually disappearing as elite transnational polymaths enforced
enlightened world governance. Such fictions prompt fads in the contemporary
real world, though attempts to render borders unimportant—as, in Wells’s time,
the League of Nations sought to do—have always failed. Undaunted, the Left
continues to cherish the vision of a borderless world as morally superior, a
triumph over artificially imposed difference.
Yet the truth is that borders do not create
difference—they reflect it. Elites’ continued attempts to erase borders are
both futile and destructive.
***
Borders—and the fights to keep or change them—are as old
as agricultural civilization. In ancient Greece, most wars broke out over
border scrubland. The contested upland eschatia
offered little profit for farming but possessed enormous symbolic value for a
city-state to define where its own culture began and ended. The self-acclaimed
“citizen of the cosmos” Socrates nonetheless fought his greatest battle as a
parochial Athenian hoplite in the ranks of the phalanx at the Battle of
Delium—waged over the contested borderlands between Athens and Thebes.
Fifth-century Athenians such as Socrates envisioned Attica as a distinct
cultural, political, and linguistic entity, within which its tenets of radical
democracy and maritime-based imperialism could function quite differently from
the neighboring oligarchical agrarianism at Thebes. Attica in the fourth
century BC built a system of border forts to protect its northern boundary.
Throughout history, the trigger points of war have
traditionally been such borderlands—the methoria between Argos and Sparta, the
Rhine and Danube as the frontiers of Rome, or the Alsace-Lorraine powder keg
between France and Germany. These disputes did not always arise, at least at
first, as efforts to invade and conquer a neighbor. They were instead mutual
expressions of distinct societies that valued clear-cut borders—not just as
matters of economic necessity or military security but also as a means of
ensuring that one society could go about its unique business without the
interference and hectoring of its neighbors.
Advocates for open borders often question the historical
legitimacy of such territorial boundaries. For instance, some say that when
“Alta” California declared its autonomy from Mexico in 1846, the new border
stranded an indigenous Latino population in what would shortly become the 31st
of the United States. “We didn’t cross the border,” these revisionists say.
“The border crossed us.” In fact, there were probably fewer than 10,000
Spanish-speakers residing in California at the time. Thus, almost no
contemporary Californians of Latino descent can trace their state residency
back to the mid-nineteenth century. They were not “crossed” by borders. And
north–south demarcation, for good or evil, didn’t arbitrarily separate people.
The history of borders has been one of constant
recalibration, whether dividing up land or unifying it. The Versailles Treaty
of 1919 was idealistic not for eliminating borders but for drawing new ones.
The old borders, established by imperial powers, supposedly caused World War I;
the new ones would better reflect, it was hoped, ethnic and linguistic
realities, and thus bring perpetual peace. But the world created at Versailles
was blown apart by the Third Reich. German chancellor Adolf Hitler didn’t
object to the idea of borders per se; rather, he sought to remake them to
encompass all German-speakers—and later so-called Aryans—within one political
entity, under his absolute control. Many nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century German intellectuals and artists—among them the
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, historian Oswald Spengler, and composer
Richard Wagner—agreed that the Roman Empire’s borders marked the boundaries of
civilization. Perversely, however, they celebrated their status as the unique
“other” that had been kept out of a multiracial Western civilization. Instead,
Germany mythologized itself as racially exceptional, precisely because, unlike
other Western European nations, it was definable not only by geography or
language but also by its supposed racial purity. The fairy-tale origins of the
German Volk were traced back before
the fifth century AD and predicated on the idea that Germanic tribes for
centuries were kept on the northern and eastern sides of the Danube and Rhine
Rivers. Thus, in National Socialist ideology, early German, white-skinned,
Aryan noble savages paradoxically avoided a mongrelizing and enervating assimilation
into the civilized Roman Empire—an outcome dear to the heart of Nazi crackpot
racial theorist Alfred Rosenberg (The
Myth of the Twentieth Century) and the autodidact Adolf Hitler. World War
II was fought to restore the old Eastern European borders that Hitler and
Mussolini had erased—but it ended with the creation of entirely new ones,
reflecting the power and presence of Soviet continental Communism, enforced by
the huge Russian Red Army.
***
Few escape petty hypocrisy when preaching the universal
gospel of borderlessness. Barack Obama has caricatured the building of a wall
on the U.S. southern border as nonsensical, as if borders are discriminatory
and walls never work. Obama, remember, declared in his 2008 speech in Berlin
that he wasn’t just an American but also a “citizen of the world.” Yet the
Secret Service is currently adding five feet to the White House
fence—presumably on the retrograde logic that what is inside the White House
grounds is different from what is outside and that the higher the fence goes
(“higher and stronger,” the Secret Service promises), the more of a deterrent
it will be to would-be trespassers. If Obama’s previous wall was six feet high,
the proposed 11 feet should be even better.
In 2011, open-borders advocate Antonio Villaraigosa
became the first mayor in Los Angeles history to build a wall around the
official mayoral residence. His un-walled neighbors objected, first, that there
was no need for such a barricade and, second, that it violated a city ordinance
prohibiting residential walls higher than four feet. But Villaraigosa
apparently wished to emphasize the difference between his home and others (or
between his home and the street itself), or was worried about security, or saw
a new wall as iconic of his exalted office.
“You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless
world,” Secretary of State John Kerry recently enthused to the graduating class
at Northeastern University. He didn’t sound envious, though, perhaps because
Kerry himself doesn’t live in such a world. If he did, he never would have
moved his 76-foot luxury yacht from Boston Harbor across the state border to
Rhode Island in order to avoid $500,000 in sales taxes and assorted state and
local taxes.
While elites can build walls or switch zip codes to insulate
themselves, the consequences of their policies fall heavily on the non-elites
who lack the money and influence to navigate around them. The contrast between
the two groups—Peggy Noonan described them as the “protected” and the
“unprotected”—was dramatized in the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush. When the
former Florida governor called illegal immigration from Mexico “an act of
love,” his candidacy was doomed. It seemed that Bush had the capital and
influence to pick and choose how the consequences of his ideas fell upon
himself and his family—in a way impossible for most of those living in the
southwestern United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers another
case study. The multibillionaire advocates for a fluid southern border and lax
immigration enforcement, but he has also stealthily spent $30 million to buy up
four homes surrounding his Palo Alto estate. They form a sort of no-man’s-land
defense outside his own Maginot Line fence, presumably designed against hoi
polloi who might not share Zuckerberg’s taste or sense of privacy. Zuckerberg’s
other estate in San Francisco is prompting neighbors’ complaints because his
security team takes up all the best parking spaces. Walls and border security
seem dear to the heart of the open-borders multibillionaire—when it’s his wall,
his border security.
This self-serving dynamic operates beyond the individual
level as well. “Sanctuary cities,” for instance, proclaim amnesty for illegal
aliens within their municipal boundaries. But proud as they are of their
cities’ disdain for federal immigration law, residents of these liberal
jurisdictions wouldn’t approve of other cities nullifying other federal laws. What would San Franciscans say if Salt Lake
City declared the Endangered Species Act null and void within its city limits,
or if Carson City unilaterally suspended federal background checks and waiting
periods for handgun purchases? Moreover, San Francisco and Los Angeles do
believe in clearly delineated borders when it comes to their right to maintain
a distinct culture, with distinct rules and customs. Their self-righteousness
aside, sanctuary cities neither object to the idea of borders nor to their
enforcement—only to the notion that protecting the southern U.S. border is
predicated on the very same principles.
***
More broadly, ironies and contradictions abound in the
arguments and practices of open-borders advocates. In academia, even modern
historians of the ancient world, sensing the mood and direction of larger elite
culture, increasingly rewrite the fall of fifth-century AD Rome, not as a
disaster of barbarians pouring across the traditional fortified northern
borders of the Rhine and Danube—the final limites
that for centuries kept out perceived barbarism from classical civilization—but
rather as “late antiquity,” an intriguing osmosis of melting borders and
cross-fertilization, leading to a more diverse and dynamic intersection of
cultures and ideas. Why, then, don’t they cite Vandal treatises on medicine,
Visigothic aqueducts, or Hunnish advances in dome construction that contributed
to this rich new culture of the sixth or seventh century AD? Because these
things never existed.
Academics may now caricature borders, but key to their
posturing is either an ignorance of, or an unwillingness to address, why tens
of millions of people choose to cross borders in the first place, leaving their
homelands, language fluency, or capital—and at great personal risk. The answer
is obvious, and it has little to do with natural resources or climate:
migration, as it was in Rome during the fifth century AD, or as it was in the
1960s between mainland China and Hong Kong—and is now in the case of North and
South Korea—has usually been a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or
its Westernized manifestations. People walk, climb, swim, and fly across
borders, secure in the knowledge that boundaries mark different approaches to
human experience, with one side usually perceived as more successful or
inviting than the other.
Western rules that promote a greater likelihood of
consensual government, personal freedom, religious tolerance, transparency,
rationalism, an independent judiciary, free-market capitalism, and the
protection of private property combine to offer the individual a level of
prosperity, freedom, and personal security rarely enjoyed at home. As a result,
most migrants make the necessary travel adjustments to go westward—especially
given that Western civilization, uniquely so, has usually defined itself by
culture, not race, and thus alone is willing to accept and integrate those of
different races who wish to share its protocols.
Many unassimilated Muslims in the West often are confused
about borders and assume that they can ignore Western jurisprudence and yet
rely on it in extremis. Today’s migrant from Morocco might resent the bare arms
of women in France, or the Pakistani new arrival in London might wish to follow
sharia law as he knew it in Punjab. But implicit are two unmentionable
constants: the migrant most certainly does not wish to return to face sharia
law in Morocco or Pakistan. Second, if he had his way, institutionalizing his
native culture into that of his newly adopted land, he would eventually flee
the results—and once again likely go somewhere else, for the same reasons that
he left home in the first place. London Muslims may say that they demand sharia
law on matters of religion and sex, but such a posture assumes the unspoken
condition that the English legal system remains supreme, and thus, as Muslim
minorities, they will not be thrown out of Britain as religious infidels—as
Christians are now expelled from the Middle East.
Even the most adamant ethnic chauvinists who want to
erase the southern border assume that some sort of border is central to their
own racial essence. The National Council of La Raza (“the race”; Latin, radix) is the largest lobbying body for
open borders with Mexico. Yet Mexico itself supports the idea of boundaries.
Mexico City may harp about alleged racism in the United States directed at its
immigrants, but nothing in U.S. immigration law compares with Mexico’s 1974
revision of its “General Law of Population” and its emphasis on migrants not
upsetting the racial makeup of Mexico—euphemistically expressed as preserving
“the equilibrium of the national demographics.” In sum, Mexican nationals
implicitly argue that borders, which unfairly keep them out of the United
States, are nonetheless essential to maintaining their own pure raza.
Mexico, in general, furiously opposes enforcing the
U.S.–Mexican border and, in particular, the proposed Trump wall that would bar
unauthorized entry into the U.S.—not on any theory of borders discourse but
rather because Mexico enjoys fiscal advantages in exporting its citizens
northward, whether in ensuring nearly $30 billion in remittances, creating a
powerful lobby of expatriates in the U.S., or finding a safety valve for
internal dissent. Note that this view does not hold when it comes to accepting
northward migrations of poorer Central Americans. In early 2016, Mexico ramped
up its border enforcement with Guatemala, adding more security forces, and
rumors even circulated of a plan to erect occasional fences to augment the
natural barriers of jungle and rivers. Apparently, Mexican officials view
poorer Central Americans as quite distinct from Mexicans—and thus want to
ensure that Mexico remains separate from a poorer Guatemala.
When I wrote an article titled “Do We Want Mexifornia?”
for City Journal ’s Spring 2002
issue, I neither invented the word “Mexifornia” nor intended it as a
pejorative. Instead, I expropriated the celebratory term from Latino activists,
both in the academy and in ethnic gangs in California prisons. In Chicano
studies departments, the fusion of Mexico and California was envisioned as a
desirable and exciting third-way culture. Mexifornia was said to be arising
within 200 to 300 miles on either side of an ossified Rio Grande border. Less
clearly articulated were Mexifornia’s premises: millions of Latinos and
mestizos would create a new ethnic zone, which, for some mysterious reason,
would also enjoy universities, sophisticated medical services,
nondiscrimination laws, equality between the sexes, modern housing, policing,
jobs, commerce, and a judiciary—all of which would make Mexifornia strikingly
different from what is currently found in Mexico and Central America.
When Latino youths disrupt a Donald Trump rally, they
often wave Mexican flags or flash placards bearing slogans such as “Make
America Mexico Again.” But note the emotional paradox: in anger at possible
deportation, undocumented aliens nonsensically wave the flag of the country
that they most certainly do not wish to return to, while ignoring the flag of
the nation in which they adamantly wish to remain. Apparently, demonstrators
wish to brand themselves with an ethnic cachet but without sacrificing the advantages
that being an American resident has over being a Mexican citizen inside Mexico.
If no borders existed between California and Mexico, then migrants in a few
decades might head to Oregon, even as they demonstrated in Portland to “Make
Oregon into California.”
***
Removing borders in theory, then, never seems to match
expectations in fact, except in those rare occasions when nearly like societies
exist side by side. No one objects to a generally open Canadian border because
passage across it, numbers-wise, is roughly identical in either direction—and
Canadians and Americans share a language and similar traditions and standard of
living, along with a roughly identical approach to democracy, jurisprudence,
law enforcement, popular culture, and economic practice. By contrast, weakening
demarcated borders between diverse peoples has never appealed to the citizens
of distinct nations. Take even the most vociferous opponents of a
distinguishable and enforceable border, and one will observe a disconnect
between what they say and do—given the universal human need to circumscribe,
demarcate, and protect one’s perceived private space.
Again, the dissipation of national borders is possible
only between quite similar countries, such as Canada and the U.S. or France and
Belgium, or on those few occasions when a supranational state or empire can
incorporate different peoples by integrating, assimilating, and intermarrying
tribes of diverse religions, languages, and ethnicities into a common
culture—and then, of course, protect them with distinct and defensible external
borders. But aside from Rome before the fourth century AD and America of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, few societies have been able to achieve E pluribus unum. Napoleon’s
transnational empire didn’t last 20 years. Britain never tried to create a
holistic overseas body politic in the way that, after centuries of strife, it
had forged the English-speaking United Kingdom. The Austro-Hungarian, German,
Ottoman, and Russian Empires all fell apart after World War I, in a manner
mimicked by the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s. Rwanda and
Iraq don’t reflect the meaninglessness of borders but the desire of distinct
peoples to redraw colonial lines to create more logical borders to reflect current
religious, ethnic, and linguistic realities. When Ronald Reagan thundered at
the Brandenburg Gate, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” he assumed that by
1987, German-speakers on both sides of the Berlin Wall were more alike than not
and in no need of a Soviet-imposed boundary inside Germany. Both sides
preferred shared consensual government to Communist authoritarianism. Note that
Reagan did not demand that Western nations dismantle their own borders with the
Communist bloc.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Robert
Frost famously wrote, “That wants it down.” True, but the poet concedes in his
“Mending Wall” that in the end, he accepts the logic of his crustier neighbor:
“He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ ” From my own experience in
farming, two issues—water and boundaries—cause almost all feuds with neighbors.
As I write, I’m involved in a border dispute with a new neighbor. He insists
that the last row of his almond orchard should be nearer to the property line
than is mine. That way, he can use more of my land as common space to turn his
equipment than I will use of his land. I wish that I could afford to erect a
wall between us.
***
The end of borders, and the accompanying uncontrolled
immigration, will never become a natural condition—any more than sanctuary
cities, unless forced by the federal government, will voluntarily allow
out-of-state agencies to enter their city limits to deport illegal aliens, or
Mexico will institutionalize free entry into its country from similarly
Spanish-speaking Central American countries.
Borders are to distinct countries what fences are to
neighbors: means of demarcating that something on one side is different from
what lies on the other side, a reflection of the singularity of one entity in
comparison with another. Borders amplify the innate human desire to own and
protect property and physical space, which is impossible to do unless it is
seen—and can be so understood—as distinct and separate. Clearly delineated
borders and their enforcement, either by walls and fences or by security
patrols, won’t go away because they go to the heart of the human condition—what
jurists from Rome to the Scottish Enlightenment called meum et tuum, mine and yours. Between friends, unfenced borders
enhance friendship; among the unfriendly, when fortified, they help keep the
peace.
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