Monday, January 14, 2019

SHERIFF NAPIER: WE'VE HAD A BORDER CRISIS HERE FOR 31 YEARS!

AZ Sheriff: We've Had A Border Crisis Here For The Past 31 Years
AZ Sheriff: We've Had A Border Crisis Here For The Past 31 Years
Source: AP Photo/Daniel Ochoa de Olza
In the urban bastions of liberal America, it’s not an issue. They don’t care about the border. They don’t want border security. All they see when they look at these migrants are votes. They want amnesty. And when people talk about enforcing federal immigration laws or erecting a barrier to secure the border, it must be part of some white nationalist agenda. Protecting one’s border is a national security priority. President Trump promised a border wall and an immigration agenda that actually enforced the laws on the books. The government is shut down over some of the border wall funding. The Trump White House asked for $5 billion for some of the wall. Democrats aren’t willing to give him one-cent; they just retook the House in the 2018 midterms. They were elected to fight Trump. 
It explains why Democrats rejected outright Trump’s reported proposal to re-open the government in exchange for some of the border wall funding. They’re more concerned about scoring points with Trump than having a rational counteroffer. The Democratic Party is urban and coastal. They don’t know the situation on the ground. The Border States do, and for Sheriff Mark Napier of Pima County, Arizona, he’s known we’ve had a border crisis for nearly three decades. Napier was on a New York Times podcast where he was quite clear that he’s been dealing with this crisis for the 31 years he’s been enforcing the law. With the bodies that are found, the drugs pouring across the border and the scores of human trafficking victims, Sheriff Napier was noted that out here—it’s not really a legitimate political debate about whether they’re facing a crisis or not. He also said that our current immigration system incentivizes families to trek hundreds of miles with their children on a perilous journey that often times ends tragically. That had to end (via Tuscon.com):
During the podcast interview, which was released Friday morning, Napier told host Michael Barbaro the main crisis on the border is the number of migrants who die every year while trying to cross the desert into Arizona. In 2017, 128 sets of remains were recovered in Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties, according to the Pima County medical examiner.
Napier said the current system incentivizes migrants to take their children and “walk hundreds of miles through environmental conditions that are harsh, through areas of criminality in the hope of getting to America and being able to simply walk across.”
“That’s a human rights issue that we should not incentivize,” he said.
Napier said physical barriers are part of the solution and praised President Donald Trump for leading Tuesday night’s address to the nation by mentioning the humanitarian crisis.
So, it’s a crisis, Democrats. And while you may hate Trump, he’s the only one with sensible policy solutions aimed at tackling the problem. They’re also solutions that are favored by those who, you know, are tasked with keeping our borders safe. 

ABC/POST POLL: Americans (Legals) Demand Wall Against Narcomex and the La Raza invasion!

Support for Southern US Border Wall Reaches All-Time High, Poll Shows


January 13, 2019 Updated: January 14, 2019

The percentage of those who support a U.S.–Mexico border wall has reached an all-time high, according to a new poll from ABC News and The Washington Post.
Results of the national survey posted on Jan. 13 found that 42 percent of Americans now support the border wall. The percentage is the highest in the ABC/Post’s polling since President Donald Trump first brought forth the idea as a campaign promise.
The number also represents an 8 percent increase from last year’s poll, which recorded 34 percent support. It also broke the survey’s previous high of 37 percent in 2017.
The findings come as the partial government shutdown heads into Day 23; it became the longest such shutdown in U.S. history on Jan. 12.
Although a majority still oppose the border wall at 54 percent, that opposition has been shrinking. A year ago, opposition stood at 63 percent, while a previous low of 60 percent was recorded two years ago.
Trump has requested $5.6 billion in funding for the wall, which the Democrats have staunchly opposed. Democrats haven’t negotiated any new deal since their $1.3 billion offer for border-security purposes, which doesn’t include any funding for a wall.
The debate over the border wall has dragged on over the weeks, with Trump describing it as “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul” in his Jan. 8 national address, while House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have repeatedly called such a proposal expensive and ineffective.
It comes after a Jan. 9 Rasmussen Reports poll found that 41 percent of Americans want Congress to do more of what Trump wants. The percentage marks a 12-point increase compared to the same time last year, according to the Rasmussen, one of the most accurate pollsters in predicting the outcome of the 2016 election.
At the same time, the number of Americans who want Trump to do more of what Congress wants fell by 8 percent from last year to 48 percent. Twelve percent of the respondents were undecided.
Turning to Twitter on Jan. 13, Trump again pushed for the wall and pointed to Democrats to join in the talks.
“The building of the Wall on the Southern Border will bring down the crime rate throughout the entire Country!” Trump said in a post. “I’m in the White House, waiting. The Democrats are everywhere but Washington as people await their pay. They are having fun and not even talking.”
The ABC/Post poll was conducted by landline and cellular telephone on Jan. 8 to 11, in English and Spanish, among a random national sample of 788 adults, with a margin of sampling error of 4.5 points.

New Support

Meanwhile, a Montana lawmaker says that the state should help pay for the southern border wall.
Scott Sales, a state Senator and president of the Senate, said that he’s going to sponsor a bill to appropriate $8 million in state money to help build the wall.
“I think this is such a critical issue at a critical time that it behooves us to take a look at maybe prompting Congress to do what they should do,” Sales told MTN News. “And, in a small token way, providing a little bit of financial resources to get that job done.”
Sales said that the $8 million Montana would send to the federal government is an equal fraction of $5 billion, accounting for Montana’s share of the national economy.
He added that he calculated Montana’s “share” of the cost of the wall by dividing the state’s gross domestic product by the national GDP and multiplying it by $5 billion.
No other states have proposed helping fund the wall through state monies but a GoFundMe fundraiser for the wall, collecting funds from private citizens who want to help build the barrier, raised more than $20 million. That money was slated to be refunded after the fundraiser organizer said his team discovered the federal government couldn’t accept the money in a timely fashion and that he’d formed a nonprofit to use the funds.
The South Dakota Senate on Thursday passed a resolution that urges the construction of the barrier in support of Trump.
At the same time, a man who came to the United States illegally said he supports President Donald Trump’s proposed border wall.
Hilario Yanez arrived in the country illegally when he was a child. He’s one of the so-called Dreamers who is protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA program.
“The president is living up to his moral duties, which is to protect this country. He has every right to ask for border security. Every past president has done this, it’s nothing new,” he said during an appearance on Fox News.
In an op-ed for Fox, Yanez wrote that he’s a supporter of Trump.

GEORGE SOROS AND THE CLINTON GLOBALIST AGENDA FOR BANKSTERS AND WIDEOPEN BORDERS
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NEW YORK — Demand Justice, an organization founded by former members of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and associated with a “social welfare organization” financed by billionaire activist George Soros, is raising money for an eventual court fight against what the group describes as President Trump’s proposed “racist, unnecessary wall.”
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“Obama would declare himself president for life with Soros really running the show, as he did for the entire Obama presidency.”
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“Hillary was always small potatoes, a placeholder as it were. Her health was always suspect. And do you think the plotters would have let a doofus like Tim Kaine take office in the event that Hillary became disabled?”



Why Democrats Oppose The Wall: Trump Will Actually Build It





The conservative consensus is that Democrats don't want to fund President Trump's  wall because they hate him.  Well, yes, Democrats do indeed hate President Trump, and yes, it's a deep-seated hatred, a visceral, soul-rotting hatred, but that's not the real reason they won't fund the wall. 
The biggest reason Democrats won't even partially fund the wall is their absolute certainty that given the money, the president will actually build the thing. 
President Trump's  not some out-of-the-loop politician who can be outmaneuvered by a Deep State whose embedded bureaucrats will tell him everything's going swimmingly while they sabotage the project with cost overruns and endless delays.  No, the president will know how much it should and will cost, how long it should and will take, and how to overcome government roadblocks.  This is his wheelhouse.  He's done it his whole adult life.
And, since the wall is his signature issue, his personal passion, President Trump's going to be all over the construction.  That looming steel show-stopper will be blocking invaders in record time, under budget and ahead of schedule. 
Knowing that the wall will become a reality if the President gets the cash brings out the cheap-labor-express, wealthy power brokers like the Billionaires for Open Borders: Michael Bloomberg; Rupert Murdoch; other distinguished members of the Forbes 500; and, as Lou Dobbs often reminds us, the "globalists, the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, Koch brothers and Wall Street." 
But it's not just the Washington insiders who like cheap renewable labor.  Retailgiants like Target, Walmart, and others reap the benefits of illegal immigration.  In fact, most industries get in on the deal.
A 2012 study shows a breakdown of unauthorized alien workers:
  • 22% in legal services, advertising, employment services, landscaping and waste management, dry cleaning, nail salons, car washes and religious organizations.
  • 18% in the leisure and hospitality sector, lodging, food services, theme parks, transportation, and other tourism oriented products and services
  • 16% in the construction industry 
  • 12% wholesale and retail trade
So most of the corporate world has some interest in stopping a border wall.  It's a top priority for many.  These interests make for a powerful force, and they will not back down.
The second reason Democrats will never fund the wall is their voter base – not unions or teachers, but illegal aliens, who broke our laws, crashed our border, and now infringe on American's sacred right to elect their government by illegally casting votes. 
One glaring example was the 2016 presidential election, where Hillary Clinton "garnered more than 800,000 votes from non-citizens."  How many of those illegal votes decided congressional or state races? 
Democrats continue to find creative ways for illegals to vote.  There's ballot-harvesting, where a third party collects ballots from voters then drops them off at polling places.  Once on the rolls, political campaigns have free license to go find that person, or even if they don't find him, just turn in a ballot in his name.
Then there's the Motor-Voter debacle: a million illegal aliens in California have Driver's Licenses.  California admitted that over 1,500 people were illegallyregistered under new automatic voter registration. 
California's not an anomaly.  Twelve states and the District of Columbia have now enacted laws to allow illegal aliens to obtain a driver's license – the gold standard for identification. 
So there's cheap labor and a growing Democrat base, but those issues were there when Democrats voted for previous "barriers," so what's the real problem? 
The deal-breaker is a missing out clause.  As I said, construction is President Trump's wheelhouse, so the wall will go up quickly.  No time to pull the legislation back or rewrite it, as they did with President Bush.
Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006 into law after it was passed by huge bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate.  The law ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to construct 700 miles of fencing along the southern border and authorized the addition of lights, cameras, and sensors to enhance security.  The law explicitly required the wall to be constructed of "at least two layers of reinforced fencing."
When Democrats took control of Congress a few months later, an amendmentwas added to the 2008 spending bill that gutted the law.  So Democrats and open-border Republicans were able to avoid a politically unpopular vote against the wall, then quietly gut its construction.  President Trump will not allow that recourse.
Herein lies the real threat to the open-border gang: that the wall a will be built and is a permanent fixture, not a fence drug dealers can build a ramp to roll over and deliver their poisonous drugs.  It is not a fence easily scaled or easily dismantled by future Democrat presidents.
No, the Trump wall will be steel, will be permanent.  If a Democrat is elected POTUS at a future date, he will not be able to simply undo the wall and reopen the border.  That's the non-negotiable piece: the fact that a steel wall is irreversible.  No escape clause. 
Is the Trump wall impenetrable?  No, even a steel wall can be breached.   A Department of Homeland Security test of a steel slat prototype proved that it could be cut through with a saw, a "common tool".
DHS Spokeswoman Katie Waldman responded:
The steel bollard design is internally reinforced with materials that require time and multiple industrial tools to breach, thereby providing U.S. Border Patrol agents additional response time to affect a successful law enforcement resolution.  In the event that one of the steel bollards becomes damaged, it is quick and cost-effective to repair.
Rush Limbaugh said the conventional wisdom is that the president will declare a national emergency to build the wall, then reopen the government, making Schumer and Pelosi the winners on the government shutdown, the ones who held the line. 
I'm all in for the national emergency, but hopefully the President will then resume negotiations.  At that point, the wall will no longer be a sticking point, so surely Democrats will fund drones, 750 U.S. Border Patrol agents, 2,000 new officers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), more judges and attorneys to reduce the 650,000 immigration case backlog;" and new technology along the southern border".
After all, Democrats advocate for many of these solutions instead of a wall, so why wouldn't they eagerly embrace these security measures once the wall's off the table?  Or is their position going to be no border security of any kind?
The standoff over the wall looks like a lose-lose, a Mexican standoff, but the president can be totally victorious in this battle.
In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins. Ulysses S. Grant
Stay strong, Mr. President, the American people are with you.




Imagine There’s No Border

A world without boundaries is a fantasy.
Summer 2016
The Social Order






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Border 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 notdrawn, 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.







H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel "The Shape of Things to Come"; envisioned a borderless world run by transnational superelites. (KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES)
H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel "The Shape of Things to Come" envisioned a borderless world run by transnational superelites. (KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES)

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.

What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs.

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 nonelites 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.

Migration has usually been a one-way street, from the non-West to the West or its Westernized manifestations.

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.