Border Line Hysteria

Discuss this on our boards!

Border Line Hysteria
by James Hall, Associate Editor

June 26, 2002

"Leaning Left"

James Hall Berlin Wall under construction in 1961 (FNC) The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall (being constructed in 1961, right) are down a decade now, symbols of a long-lasting tyranny and colossal human stupidity. Now some confused Americans want to recreate these barriers -- and that tyranny -- on our own shores. Seal off the borders, call out the army to defend the marches, build the Great Wall of Texas, the Iron Curtain of Canada. Illegal immigrants are flooding the country, undermining the American Way of Life, they say. Is it really time to put up a wall of barbed wire around the land of the free and create a new INS Gestapo?

How does a nation of immigrants become suspicious of immigration? When did freedom and justice for all become an Americans-only club? When did the land of opportunity become a two-tiered state, with one set of rules and rights for citizens and another for foreign residents and visitors? And most importantly, how many of our rights and principles do we trade in for an utterly false sense of security?

Some have advanced the argument that it's okay to subject non-citizens to all kinds of draconian measures -- fingerprinting, photographing, and regular check-ins with an INS officer -- as though they were all on probation for having committed the crime of coming from a country where there are terrorists or looking suspiciously Middle Eastern. This argument runs counter to the assertion of our founding fathers that the rights enumerated in our Constitution are human rights -- that they are rights inalienable even to aliens. It's also stupid -- why waste resources screening and keeping track of the 99.9% of the people who come to visit that are perfectly law-abiding?

We need a Declaration of Independence from the so-called patriots who mouth pious platitudes about the spirituality of the founding fathers but ignore the meaning of their words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." This is a universal statement of principles for the world, not the bylaws of an Americans-only club.

Let's place the blame for September 11 where it clearly belongs -- at the lax and confused bureaucracy that knew who the September 11th hijackers were and let enter the country and board those planes without warning the proper local authorities or stopping them at the airport gates. Let's blame the bureaucracy that for the sake of "secrecy," or to cover their own butts, refused to warn the American people of the potential dangers ahead of time.

The solution to the problems of September 11 is to put law enforcement and intelligence together and let them do their job, not to erect a foolish wall or create more paper-shuffling bureaucracy. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security may just be an improvement, but only if it takes responsibility for law enforcement out of the hands of Attorney General Ashcroft, who appears to be willing to stamp out any liberty that lends the slightest advantage to terrorists.

Let's focus on good communication and good law enforcement to keep this problem under control. Walls and restrictions aren't the answer. Walls usually fail to keep out (or keep in) anyone with the gumption to challenge them.

What they do keep out is the good that can come to us through trade, tourism, and scholarly exchange. 45 million foreigners visit America each year. Their spending helps balance our horrendous trade balance and provide jobs for Americans. Those who come and stay bring great contributions to our country.

By teaching foreign students the skills of higher education, America passes on its values to the world, making the world a far safer place for Americans, and skims the cream of the foreign student crop to work in our corporations, our research labs, and in our academic classrooms. Other nations complain about the "brain drain" which brings their finest minds to live and work in the United States. We have a net flood of good brains into this country that draconian immigration measures threaten to dam up.

Our trade with the rest of the world depends on the free flow of goods, services, and travelers in and out of the country. Everything from oil to cars to toys to clothes comes from abroad these days. Go to the Mall and check the labels if you don't believe this. And we're shipping lots of stuff back, too. Stupid and unnecessary travel restrictions can only slow or even stop this flow, raising the price of everything and for what reason?

Immigrants also enter this country and do the jobs no citizen wants. Go to any construction site, any steamy restaurant kitchen, janitor's closet or meatpacking plant and you'll listen in vain for any sign of English being spoken. Immigrants do the dirty jobs in this country. Turning them away means they don't get done, or that we all have to pay more to get them done.

The last three terrorists caught entering the United States were French national Zacharias Moussaoui, Richard Reid the English shoe-bomber, and Jose Padilla, an American interested in building a "dirty bomb." Restrictive immigration, including nation-profiling would have caught none of them, and racial profiling only Moussaoui. A complete ban on foreigners would still have let Padilla into the country.

Erecting huge barriers on the borders, hiring the guards to watch them, and creating layers of restrictions for foreign visitors that must also be administered by the bureaucracy simply makes no sense. Let's invest the money where it belongs -- on law enforcement aimed at the law breakers, on good intelligence here and overseas, and on military and diplomatic efforts overseas to destroy al Qaeda before they get here. To hassle 45 million foreign visitors each year in order to catch a dozen or so terrorists will only hurt us. Walls don't work -- ask the Chinese and Roman Empires, or the Communists -- if you can find any. ***

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files
Photo of Berlin Wall under construction (1961) courtesy of FOX News Channel