By Michael Barone
Tuesday, October 04, 2016
‘The president believes the world will be a better place
if all borders are eliminated — from a trade perspective, from the viewpoint of
economic development, and in welcoming people from other cultures and
countries.”
That’s a paraphrase of a speech former president Bill
Clinton made only months after leaving office, on September 10, 2001, in
Melbourne, Australia. There’s apparently no transcript; the quotation is from
the businessman who hosted the forum, appearing in an article in the next day’s
Melbourne newspaper, which, thanks to time-zone differences, was about twelve
hours before the airliners hit the twin towers.
The words are an interesting indicator of a general
attitude, a prevailing sentiment taken largely for granted not just by
Democrats and Americans like Clinton but also by elite leaders of many parties
in the advanced democracies around the world.
Call it Lennonism, after John Lennon’s lyrics in
“Imagine.” “Imagine there’s no countries,” Lennon sang. “Nothing to kill or die
for. . . . Imagine all the people living life in peace. . . . And the world
will be as one.” It’s an appealing vision but perhaps an odd one for someone
born, as Lennon was, when and where the Battle of Britain was raging in the
skies overhead.
Today, 15 years after Clinton’s talk in Melbourne,
Lennonism remains the credo of many elite leaders but is in grave trouble with
voters.
Examples A and B are the so-called comprehensive
immigration-reform legislation, backed by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama,
and the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union, led by Prime Minister
David Cameron. Both failed.
The key provision of the immigration bills was to
legalize the presence of many or most of the estimated (by the Pew Research
Center) 11 million to 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States
before border and workforce enforcement provisions could take effect. Both
parties had political motives for this.
Democrats favored it because they figured most
undocumented immigrants would vote for their party. Many Republicans, notably
Bush, favored it because they didn’t want to see Texas and Florida go the way
of California — where immigrant votes seemed to have made a Republican-leaning
state safely Democratic.
What both ignored is that many voters think that borders
and laws should mean what they say. American citizenship should be reserved,
they think, for those inclined to obey American laws. Legalizing undocumented
immigrants’ status without assurance of future enforcement, they argue
plausibly, would incentivize further waves of illegal immigration.
The Lennonist actions of Barack Obama and the campaign
rhetoric of Hillary Clinton provide support for this view. Obama, in an
executive order now blocked by federal courts, moved to legalize the presence
of 5 million undocumented immigrants.
Clinton has indicated she would legalize the presence of
millions of undocumented immigrants and would deport no immigrants who have not
broken any laws other than immigration laws. Apparently, she has not repudiated
her Ohio campaign’s tweet, in response to Donald Trump’s statement that “no one
has a right to immigrate to this country”: “We disagree.” That’s pure Lennonism
— no borders.
Current polling suggests she’s likely to win in November.
But comprehensive immigration legislation still looks like a goner. Most
Americans don’t want all borders eliminated.
Britain’s Cameron — a product, like the Clintons and the
Bushes, of elite universities — staked his prime ministership on persuading
British voters to go along with a status quo in which unelected European Union
commissions and courts could overturn British laws and compel parliament to
pass unwanted legislation.
Cameron and financial elites made dire predictions that
Brexit — leaving the EU — would damage Britain’s economy. They acknowledged
that EU diktats could be irritating but implicitly accepted that the EU
leaders’ goal of an “ever closer union” was inevitable.
Fifty-two percent of a record turnout of British voters
thought otherwise. Almost everywhere outside inner London and Scotland,
majorities voted to take the economic risk — which currently looks to have been
greatly overstated — and to give control of Britain’s borders back to its
voters’ elected representatives. Cameron resigned and was replaced by Theresa
May, who opposed leaving the EU but now says that “Brexit means Brexit.”
The British vote came against the urging of Obama and his
threat that Britain would go “to the back of the queue” if it ignored his
advice.
Obama believes that “the arc of history” bends in the
Lennonist direction. It might be nice if it did. But continued terrorist
attacks since the day after Bill Clinton spoke in Melbourne, like the bombs
raining down on Britain as John Lennon was born, leave plenty of reason to
doubt that the world is ready to “live as one.”
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