Imagine There’s No Border

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...

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...

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.”...

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...

Throughout history, the trigger points of war have traditionally been such borderlands...

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...

Few escape petty hypocrisy when preaching the universal gospel of borderlessness...

While elites can build walls or switch zip codes to insulate themselves, the consequences of their policies fall heavily on the nonelites who lack the money and influence to navigate around them...

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...

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...

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 [illegal] 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...

[originally published July 17, 2016]

Related article

Trump and the American Divide, by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal, January 16, 2017.