Immigration and Security

Victor Davis Hanson's latest, on immigration, is the usual mixture of dubious assumptions, half-truths, platitudes, misread polling data, and just plain craziness. You can skip all that. There's one line that encapsulates the nuttiness behind Hanson's (and the other wingnuts') nativist hysteria:

The public thinks anti-terrorism efforts are futile when hundreds of miles on our southern border are, for mysterious reasons, left wide open.

Yes, for reasons that are completely inexplicable, a 1,951-mile border between a wealthy country of 300 million people and a poorer country of 100 million has not been magically sealed so as to guarantee that nobody from the latter can ever enter the former illegally.

Go figure.

What Hanson never discusses is just what 'closing the border' would entail. A great big fence? As somebody or other said, if you build a 50-foot fence somebody else will build a 50-foot ladder. Massive troop deployment? I'm afraid our soldiers are otherwise occupied. Some kind of force field? Hasn't been invented yet.

The reality is that any solution that would be non-trivially effective would entail vast expenditures of money and personnel, neither of which would magically materialize; something else would have to be drastically shorted. In practice, 'closing the border' would make us less safe, not more, by diverting resources on a massive scale from more effective security measures (port safety, anyone?) to a hopeless and misdirected effort that even if it succeeded beyond the most improbable expectations would at best make us marginally less vulnerable in one particular aspect of the overal security situation.

In other words, 'closing the border' is exactly like 'victory in Iraq': an empty phrase that glosses over both the impossibility of the thing it describes and its irrelevance to the goals used to justify it.

Empty phrases, of course, are Hanson's shock troops in his own Global War on Liberal Ideas. For Hanson, for most of the wingnuts, there is no difference between an empty phrase and the thing it describes; to express the desire for 'victory in Iraq' is the same as achieving it. Practicalities aren't even an afterthought--they're not a thought at all, for Hanson. It doesn't matter that the war in Iraq has sown chaos across the Middle East, has weakened our military, has strengthened the very people who most want to attack us. What matters is that you use the right empty phrases to describe the thing.

What would really improve border security would be removing artificial barriers to legal entry. If the vast majority of people who want to come here to work could do so through official channels, the remainder would no longer pose the enforcement nightmare we have created for ourselves. The enormous resources we currently spend on catching people who have done nothing wrong beyond crossing an arbitrary and fictitious line in the sand could be redirected to real security measures. That's if, of course, we wanted to pursue a strategy based on practical effectiveness rather than conformity to the slogan du jour.

But then, if America wanted that, we wouldn't be in Iraq.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]