The "Mo' Borders, Mo' Problems" Edition
The “Border Problem” is a bunch of different problems that go to who we think we are
The Month
The overarching theme of the past month to me is that Russia is on the offensive. In Ukraine, they’ve taken Avdiivka and are putting real pressure on a Ukraine that hasn’t yet fully mobilized its population and is facing real troop shortages along with inadequate Western material support. The murder of Alexei Navalny—however he died, it wouldn’t have happened if he weren’t in a gulag—immediately before Russia’s “elections” just shows us the depths of Putin’s depravity.
Meanwhile, the Maga Party under Reichspeaker Mike Johnson is fully supporting Putin’s onslaught, possibly related to Johnson being significantly funded by Russians. It also turns out their attack on Joe and Hunter Biden is linked directly to a Russian disinformation operation! At best, the Magas are fucking morons. I think that gives them too much credit: the track record of their encounters with Russia makes clear they’re fully and wittingly in alliance with Putin.
The good news is that Second Confederate President Trump clearly is deteriorating, as shows in all his recent public appearances. Even appealing his losses in his New York civil cases will force him to put that much money in escrow, and he’s not that cash-rich. He can take over the Republican National Committee to suck it dry, but it’s already spending more than it’s bringing in, and I don’t think he can sell enough sneakers to get out of that hole. People talk about his performance in the Maga primary as some kind of juggernaut steamrolling Nikki Haley, but in reality he’s the incumbent for Magas, and he’s losing significant numbers in each vote, even if many Haley voters are just Democrats trolling.
What’s the Maga response? They’ve turned the Conservative Political Action Conference into an authentic Nazi rally. Reminder: if there’s a known Nazi at your event, and you don’t kick them out, you are the organizer of a Nazi event. What do you call a German who supported the Nazis only because they cared passionately about improving German highways? A Nazi.
I may have more to say later about Joe Biden’s performance in the State of the Union, but suffice to say, I’ll paraphrase Yoda here: when 81 years old you reach, look as good, you will not!
You’d vote for this guy, wouldn’t you?
The Big Idea
Strap in, folks, this is kind of a long one. If there’s one topic that’s common to international stabilization challenges that I haven’t gotten around to discussing in MSU, it has to be borders—not because I was avoiding it, just because something else always came up that I considered more important. This should be your hint that, in my view, the “American Border Crisis” isn’t really a crisis as the Magas make it out to be—even as they exacerbate it. But it’s not not a problem either. In fact, it’s at least three different problems, all of which have implications for our stability.
In every country I’ve worked in, borders and border issues have been big—sometimes insurmountable—challenges, from Kosovo and Serbia, to Kosovo and North Macedonia (a country that is a border problem all of its own), to Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Syria and Turkey. So I don’t need an opinion on good Tex-Mex cuisine to have some useful thoughts on the border.
Yes, borders are “just lines on a map.” Some have some basis in reason, like dividing along a geographical barrier like mountains or a river, or between the longstanding dividing lines between clearly different cultures. Some were surveyed responsibly as part of a diplomatic negotiation. Others are just straight lines drawn by drunk dudes thousands of miles away using hopelessly primitive maps. They frequently have shifted through history, often—but not always—with some level of bloodshed involved. They almost always are drawn across some extant population that has to continue to interact with each other whatever their governments think of it.
But they are lines that matter. People form communities, who form states to provide protection and services that people and communities can’t provide themselves. Part of that requires defining clearly who is and isn’t entitled to that protection and service. The easiest way to do that is for states to agree with each other on borders that define who is entitled to what from states, and where.
The border challenge today is global: in both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, people from the Southern are moving into the Northern. For Europe, that’s people trying to cross the Mediterranean; for the U.S., that’s people trying to cross our border with Mexico. In both cases, these people are coming from all over the Global South. This is causing “crises” in both the U.S. and Europe, and the key thing to understand is it’s more than one crisis, it’s at least three: a crisis in the countries these people are coming from, a bureaucratic crisis in the Northern Hemisphere, and an identity crisis in the Northern Hemisphere. Each one has to be understood separately if we’re to do anything about any of them.
First and foremost, what we’re seeing is a crisis across South America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia so severe it’s leading people to leave their homes and take insane risks to travel to Europe and the U.S. in the hopes of a better life, and we almost never hear people talk about it that way. This isn’t your dad’s illegal immigration of undocumented seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers and nannies, or Irish bartenders in Boston who can charge a premium for the authenticity of their accent. These are people undertaking treks as arduous and as the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower across the Atlantic. We have no conception of what motivates someone to do that, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that people motivated to try this, are not going to be deterred by hearing there’s a wall or razor wire waiting for them. Why do they want to do this, and how could we change their conditions at home so that they don’t have to do this?
I don’t pretend to know all of the reasons. Climate unquestionably is one of them, and of course there’s much more we could do to reduce Northern emissions and mitigate their impact on the South. It’s also a range of governance failures across the south, a toxic mix of authoritarianism, poverty, corruption, crime, and extremism that’s enough to convince people their homeland is hopeless. And no, it’s not all colonialism’s fault. Colonialism certainly didn’t help anything, but many of the pathologies we see are the same ones that made these regions vulnerable to colonization in the first place. The point is the countries losing these migrants and the countries they’re washing up in should have a shared interest in persuading many of them to stay home, and there should be intense diplomatic discussions about how to make that happen that aren’t happening.
The second problem is purely bureaucratic, in that the agencies responsible for receiving and processing migrants are overwhelmed. Understand, very few people are “sneaking in” to the U.S. and Europe as “illegal immigrants.” By the way, for America, the most common way people do that isn’t crossing the Mexican border, it’s somehow obtaining a real or fraudulent U.S. visa, coming in “legally,” and then never going home when you’re supposed to. The people coming to the U.S. and Europe now overwhelmingly are seeking out government officials and claiming political asylum.
“Political asylum” is a term we tend to associate with defecting Soviet submarine captains or gymnasts, but in fact anyone can claim asylum anywhere by asserting they have a “credible fear” of death or persecution if they are sent back to where they came from. For obvious reasons, since World War Two it has been accepted in international law that every state has to give an asylum claimant due process of law to make their case they should be allowed to stay because of their “credible fear.” This is something you all should remember if Trump wins in November!
I know from personal experience that a lot of these claimants are full of crap. They won’t be murdered or imprisoned if they go home, they’ll just be desperately poor, which is sad, but not a basis for asylum. But they all have a right to make their case, and in the U.S., they make them before immigration judges. These aren’t “judges”—they’re not Senate-confirmed or lifetime appointments, just civil servant administrative law judges, and often their knowledge of the countries people are coming from is shockingly poor. But we desperately need more of them, orders of magnitude more. They’re the single greatest bottleneck in receiving migrants, giving them a fair hearing, and then deciding what to do with them.
A shortage of judges is the biggest problem, but there are other things we can do. We can choose to be tighter in how we understand “credible fear.” In the past, we’ve said anyone coming from Cuba is at risk of persecution and thus deserves automatic asylum, while anyone coming from Haiti was an “economic migrant” and thus ineligible. Both these over-broad assertions were dumb. People have received asylum because of a “credible fear” that their government would not protect them from an abusive spouse—that’s a very generous interpretation of asylum. We’d be fully within our rights to tighten our interpretation of credible fear.
Maybe most importantly, we can pursue the “remain in Mexico” policy—or for Europe, “remain in North Africa.” That is to say, you’ll get your hearing for the U.S. or Europe in due course, but for now, you stay over there. This is perfectly legitimate: international asylum law says you don’t have to go back home, not that you get to pick the country you settle in. You were “safe” the moment you got out of where you came from.
But we can’t just leave it at that. Mexico and North Africa have enough problems of their own, and cannot absorb these populations unassisted. Helping them will be as big a challenge as trying to stabilize the countries migrants are coming from. They’ll require massive levels of assistance from us to keep their own stability as they work through the same migration challenge we do. Of course, you’ll never find the people inveighing against “illegal immigration” advocating for greater foreign aid budgets.
The one thing we can’t do is somehow persuade all these people not to try this journey. Sure, we can curb the number with what I’ve discussed here, but the overall trends of some parts of Earth becoming basically uninhabitable to humans means people are going to move to more temperate climes. The alternative is the Steve Bannon Camp of the Saints approach of gunning down unarmed refugees, many of them children, as they approach our massive border wall, presumably with a moat full of flaming gators or something else a seven-year-old would think of in a crayon drawing for art class.
This brings us to the real nub of our problem: not that people are coming, not that we don’t have the bureaucratic infrastructure to absorb them, but that we don’t know whether we want to accept them or not. We’re quite torn on this in the U.S., while Europe, despite its liberal attitudes to many things, is less supportive of immigration than we are.
I’m not unsympathetic to Europeans’ feelings. European societies are more defined by distinct cultures than ours is, and some of those cultures are built very much around resisting invaders from the south and east. For all we blame European imperialism for many problems of the “Global South,” parts of Europe were under others’ colonialist empires for far longer. Spain’s empire in Latin America lasted about 300 years, but Arab Muslims dominated Spain for 700! The Ottoman Empire ruled a large chunk of Europe for about 500 years, a lot longer than the British Empire ruled anyplace. Visit Vienna, and you can see the old city walls where the Ottoman Empire’s advance was checked in 1683. So Europeans being a bit nervous about a migration wave isn’t unfair, even as I’d submit it’s in their best interest to get over it.
We have no such excuse here in the U.S. I won’t linger on the obvious hypocrisy of all of us children of immigrants deciding our ancestors were the “right sort” (mine were not!) and these aren’t, or the fact that most of those coming are Spanish-speaking Christians, which isn’t really that “foreign.”
We and Europe need immigrants to go on being vibrant and growing societies. One common trend across industrialized societies is that their birth rates fall as empowered women choose to have smaller families. Different societies are struggling to adapt, as is shown in their economic growth rates. Japan and South Korea appear so committed to their cultural purity they might seriously choose societal suicide as they try to train robots to care for the elderly. The U.S. and Europe are struggling to choose between our economic growth and our “purity,” whether you define “purity” in a racial/ethnic sense or just “my neighborhood looking as I remember and like it.” God forbid your Irish pub be replaced by a tacqueria! What will happen to your house’s price?
There’s a reasonable middle in that discussion, but I’m honestly much more on the side of Matt Yglesias (can’t believe I just typed that) and his book One Billion Americans. America’s super power is that smart and hard-working people want to come here and create opportunities for themselves they couldn’t create at home. The people coming to the southern border are walking from as far as Venezuela. The people who have the physical and mental stamina to accomplish that trek have endured challenges that make Marine boot camp look like a summer camp trip. Your kid will write their college essay about their summer sailing adventure, but they didn’t try dead-reckoning a rubber raft across the Mediterranean! The people succeeding in getting to us are the people who can add the most to us.
The problem I see is that Americans seem to be of three minds with immigration: a third agree with me, a third broadly support better-managed immigration, and a third suffer from the violent delusion of a mythical “American purity.” It looks like right now that middle third is aligning with the purists because they value order and process over immigration qua immigration, and that’s not unfair for taxpaying citizens to expect. So how do we win them over to the openness side by November?
I’ve already mentioned improving our bureaucratic infrastructure at the border via speeding up processing, which is exactly what the bipartisan border legislation Trump and Johnson killed would have done. Another way to dissipate the impact of mass migration would be to regulate where migrants are permitted to settle.
In 2018, James and Deborah Fallows wrote Our Towns, chronicling five years of traveling by small plane around smaller towns in the U.S.—the places we coastal elites like to think of as the “flyover” and characterize as “decaying.” But they went looking for places that seemed to be working and succeeding, and one of the most common characteristics they saw in the 25-odd towns they looked at was that the successful ones were very welcoming of immigrants, seeing what they added to their population with labor, but also cultural and intellectual capital. For every community that doesn’t want migrants, there is a smarter community clamoring for them.
Most migrants upon getting processed through immigration judges are a) going to large cities with big existing migrant populations—where often the new migrants have relatives—or b) are staying near the border. In both cases the numbers coming in are swamping the absorptive capacities of these historically-welcoming communities.
American practice has been to let migrants move where they wish to, but migration to the U.S. is a privilege, not a right. We could canvass those communities that welcome migrants and require migrants to move to those communities, where they’d be welcome and have opportunities, and where they’d be liable to deportation if they moved elsewhere until they were qualified for citizenship, when of course they could go wherever they pleased. This isn’t my optimal solution, but it’s one that might make absorbing migrants easier and still beneficial to all parties.
Of course, the purists who believe in The Great Replacement Theory won’t be satisfied, but again, they’re rooting for moats with flaming alligators in them. We can’t persuade them, only out-vote them.
One last point here: there is a straight line from the “American purity” anti-immigration view to the repression of women’s rights and control over women’s reproductive freedom. Preventing “poisoning of our blood” while maintaining a labor force to sustain our economy means controlling women.
Just Security is starting an online tracker of all the ways Trump and Magas promise us they’ll be authoritarians. Share with your friends, there’s no reason you should panic alone!
I think it’s really important to mainstream Simon Rosenberg’s “Hopium Chronicles,” because while he writes as a committed optimist, he’s a very reality-based optimist. Don’t just read what he says, repeat it!
Always read Rachel Bitecofer. I’m looking forward to her new book. Her key point: most Americans are about as interested in politics as they are in soccer. You’ve got to capture their imaginations to get their attention, not talk about your boring play-by-play.
Elie Mystal makes two excellent points: of the two old men running, Biden is the one who isn’t an evil lunatic, and Kamala Harris unquestionably will be a better presidential backup than whatever lackey Trump picks for a running mate. Seriously, the best Trump can do is a Hermann Goering knock-off.
Brian Beutler reminds us the Magas are either dupes or completely in bed with Putin. And the Russian disinformation is already happening.
Security Sector Reform
Crime is way down across the country, but still alarmingly high in my hometown of DC. The problem is, we have very little idea why that is, and thus no real idea what to do about it.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is mobilizing the National Guard to secure the city’s subways when—actually, they’re pretty safe. This is bad public policy if you believe policy should be based on actual reality. It’s also really bad because the Guard is full of people doing other productive jobs in society who now are standing around guarding turnstiles.
Crime is down in NY, but abuse reports against the NYPD are way up. If this is okay with you, it’s because you assume you’re more likely to be a crime victim than a police abuse victim. But the most vulnerable in our society are equally at risk of both.
Ethan Corey has a really great look at what we think we know about crime. A few things here that jump out at me: between 2018 and 2022, ten major newspapers ran almost 5,000 articles about retail theft and about 100 stories on wage theft, even though wage theft costs Americans about $50 billion per year. Also, rising homelessness creates an impression of disorder even though homelessness and crime have no correlation. Oh, and there’s also high latent fear of just getting shot by a psycho and/or terrorist with an AR-15!
Good Reads
Professor Nancy MacLean looks at the risks of extreme right-wingers convening a new constitutional convention. I’m not saying she’s wrong about these risks, but I’m also not as worried about a convention as she is. Hey, our current Constitution isn’t working for us anymore; we should be thinking less about how rightists want to change it and more about how we would want to change it.
You’ve heard me advocate for compulsory voting. Research from the University of Buffalo has empirical evidence it reduces polarization.
Michael Brendan Dougherty in National Review notes that younger generations are defying tradition by not becoming more conservative as they get older. He blames some of this on “grooming” by liberals, but he also captures that much of older generations’ “growing into” conservatism probably came from home ownership and starting families, which has been increasingly inaccessible to Millennials and particularly Gen-Z. He also recognizes the decline of religiosity. I’d also flag women’s empowerment.
OMG, it turns out between 2008 and 2022 there have been big racial disparities in voter turnout in counties that used to be supervised by the Feds before the Supreme Court’s Shelby vs Holder decision! Who could have anticipated that other than LITERALLY EVERY FUCKING BODY?!?
Are you a white man trying to get in better shape? Me too! Don’t do it by joining an “Active Club.”
Finally, I’m not going to push Masters of the Air on you. It’s pretty good, though definitely not Band of Brothers quality. But this rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “Tear the Fascists Down” should be really inspiring to you.
If you have thoughts, ideas or contributions for MSU, I’d love to get them at monganjh1@gmail.com, and have you follow MSU on Twitter @MoreStableUnion. Share with all your friends so they can subscribe at morestableunion.substack.com.