THOMAS FRIEDMAN: We need a high wall with a big gate on the southern border
Wednesday, April 14, 2021 -- This latest flood of illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers, including thousands of children, mostly fleeing chaos in Central America, only reinforces my view that the right border policy is a high wall with a big gate. I wish we could take in everyone suffering in the world and give each a shot at the American dream, but we can't while maintaining our own social cohesion, which is already fraying badly enough. Making immigration policy today requires a tough-minded balance between hardheartedness and compassion.
Posted — UpdatedAfter reading as much as I can about the latest surge in illegal immigration along our southern border, I’m still not clear how much is seasonal, how much is triggered by President Joe Biden’s announcement that he was halting construction of Donald Trump’s border wall and reviewing Trump’s asylum policies, and how much is just the lure of jobs in a rapidly vaccinating United States.
I wish we could take in everyone suffering in the world and give each a shot at the American dream, but we can’t while maintaining our own social cohesion, which is already fraying badly enough. So, making immigration policy today requires a tough-minded balance between hardheartedness and compassion.
If we just emphasize the high wall, and wear cruelty as a badge of honor, as Trump did, we lose out on the huge benefits of immigration. But if all we do is focus, as many on the left do, on the evils of a wall and ignore the principles of a big gate — that would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers need to get in line, ring our doorbell and enter legally, and those who don’t should be quickly evicted — we will also lose out on the huge benefits of immigration.
Biden has to get this right, and I know it won’t be easy. Because while maintaining a controlled inflow of immigrants has never been more important, the forces driving more waves of illegal migrants have rarely been more powerful.
Those forces are surging because, quite simply, it’s harder to be a viable country today. The 50 years after World War II were a great time to be a weak little country. The Cold War meant that two superpowers were throwing money at you to help feed your poor, educate your kids, sustain your government and prop up your army; China was not in the World Trade Organization, so everyone could be in low-wage industries; populations were moderate; climate change was limited; and no one had a cellphone and social networks to talk back to leaders or easily organize opposition.
Today, all of that has flipped. Now no superpower wants to touch your country because all they can win is a bill. China is in the WTO, so it is much harder to compete in low-wage industries. Populations have exploded. Climate change is hammering small-scale farmers, so they are leaving their lands for the cities and beyond — and everyone has a smartphone to complain or find a human trafficker to be smuggled north.
Without proper border controls and simultaneous investments in stabilizing weak countries — which Biden has smartly proposed — we and the European Union will face many more surges. And you can be sure that another Trump-like figure will emerge to exploit them — and undermine support for legal immigration right when we need it more than ever.
Because, we are also at the dawn of a cold war with China in which both the economic and the military battlefields will be around technology — artificial intelligence, quantum computing, drones, autonomous vehicles, microchips, software, cyberwarfare, biotech, new materials and batteries. In this competition each side will be trying to leverage as much brain power, patents and startups as possible.
Steve Jobs’ biological father came here from Syria to be a student, and the result was Apple. Sergey Brin’s family moved here from Russia and the result was Google.
“We were the melting pot for risk-takers,” Mundie told me. “And for many years we reaped the benefits of being overstocked with high-IQ risk-takers. To now curtail our overweighting mechanisms” — welcoming immigration and the education of foreign students — “at a time when other countries are becoming more hospitable, we run the risk of losing our single greatest competitive advantage and just reverting to the global mean.”
That is not a formula for success.
Other countries get it. The pharmaceutical company BioNTech, which developed a COVID-19 vaccine with its U.S. partner Pfizer, was founded in 2008 by Dr. Ugur Sahin and his wife, Dr. Ozlem Tureci. Both were born to Turkish parents who immigrated from Turkey to Germany in the 1960s.
So, there is a lot at stake in getting this border issue right. I would love to see Biden use his narrow majority, and maybe get a few Republicans as well, to drive through a law that simultaneously hardens the border, provides a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here and increases the quotas for legal immigrants — and ignores all the critics from the left and the right.
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