On National Review, Rich Lowry lambastes the Democrats and progressives for losing the election as if this provides the last barrage needed to bury them – nevermind the loss was by such a slight margin that it it illuminates a potential problem with our electoral system. While doing so, he ignores an important question:
Another progressive assumption is that the nation-state is bound to decline, as supranational institutions like the European Union grow and cross-border migrations increase. In a trip to Germany in April, President Obama deemed Angela Merkel’s policy of welcoming a massive wave of migrants as “on the right side of history.” Never mind that its recklessness has caused a backlash that is still brewing. Obama believed the same of his own latitudinarian views on immigration, apparently never imagining people might consider it progress to tighten our borders rather than render them more porous.
So what do you do with those refugees? It’s difficult for the xenophobic mind to understand, but kindness and generosity is often rewarded. Let’s take the opposite tack, which might have been to meet the refugees with machine guns on the beaches. News of this behavior would have filtered back to the sources of those refugees, and the nations responsible would have been branded as barbaric. And while this may, in fact, stem the tide, achieving an immediate goal, it fails in the more important, long term goal – stopping war. It’s still true that you can’t fight a war without an army, and if the citizenry is wondering why they’re being asked to fight a war against those countries which welcomed your sister’s family when they were refugees, it’s a lot harder to get that war going than if the same guy’s thinking about his dead sister, lost in the Med with bullet holes all over her.
Another question is how your nation is perceived by high value emigres. Without question, the United States has benefited from many such emigres, who bring their genius, their drive, and their insights with them from their home countries, sometimes because we were perceived as a better place – and sometimes because we were only the last, best hope. Losing all that they can bring with them is a real problem.
It doesn’t help his cause that he indulges in the minor falsehood of a porous border. From azcentral.com:
“I crossed in the middle of the city, in the daytime,” recalled Sanchez Valladares, who was deported to Mexico in 2008, leaving behind four children in the U.S., two of them in Charlotte. “It took me about 15 minutes.”
Now crossing illegally is “very hard,” conceded Sanchez Valladares, who is barred from legally returning to the U.S. for 10 years.
That is confirmed by a new internal Department of Homeland Security report, obtained by The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, that concludes ramped-up border enforcement is working, helping to reduce successful crossings to one-tenth of what they were a decade earlier across the southern U.S. border with Mexico. The research is based on complicated mathematical calculations using published and internal Border Patrol data. …
According to the DHS report, the number of successful illegal entries — including people making multiple attempts — between ports of entry along the entire southern border with Mexico has plummeted from 1.7 million in 2005 to 170,000 in 2015. The calculations are based on a mathematical formula using published Border Patrol apprehension data and internal re-apprehension data and years of data from surveys conducted by researchers in Mexico with deported migrants in Mexico.
In an interview before The Republic obtained a copy of the report, Roberts noted that the calculation is based on migrants from Mexico trying to cross the border without being caught. The number does not include the nearly 80,000 unaccompanied minors and families from Central America who turned themselves in to the Border Patrol in 2015 seeking asylum.1
The border is and has been tightening under President Obama. Now, it’s unfortunate that President Obama didn’t further explore why these immigrants are attracted to us; perhaps we could have done more to keep them at home. In a sense, our attempts to remove the dictator of Syria, Assad, is just such a tactic, although it’s an extreme case and fraught with problems.
But Lowry, in his hurry to bury his ideological opponents, feels it necessary to tear down a very humane response by world leaders to a crisis, without feeling it necessary to offer a reasonable alternative. Hopefully, those refugees, those human beings, can return to their homes someday soon, and if so they’ll have warm thoughts towards the Europeans who helped them out – and that will be helpful in the eternal fight against evil.
But to Lowry, they’re less than chess pieces, and I think that’s a sad thing.
1Even more interesting:
The DHS report calculates that the probability that a migrant will give up trying to cross the border and go home due to stepped-up border enforcement has soared from about 11 percent in 2005 to 58 percent in 2015. Roberts’ version presented at the Cato Institute calculated the change from about 12 percent to nearly 70 percent.
