3/13/21

By Josh Rubin

How are we to understand the reluctance of the current administration to take decisive action to end the anti-immigrant hysteria of the last decades? Why does policy continue to rely on the mythology of invasion when a simpler, pacific view of the movements of rational people is plainly within our intellectual reach?

Inequities and imbalances, the entropic symptoms of predatory capitalism, are not long tolerated by those who fall victim to it. In the case of migrants, often without any hint of rancor, populations move with the natural penetration of political membranes, inevitably porous, no matter how well fortified with cynical rhetoric.

We can do this the easy way, or, as they say, the hard way. I would never, no matter how much I enjoy the mantra, argue that the the arc of history has some special property that bends it toward justice. I would only say that the sharper the contrast between haves and have-nots, the more likely that the boundaries will not hold. And that the price of defending those boundaries more quickly will rise to a level that makes it downright foolish to keep paying it, rather than to yield to the modest demands and appeals of those most punished.

But still, we choose the hard way. We label them infectious. We impugn their motives. We question their values. We load them on planes, and march them by the hundreds of thousands back into danger and desolation. The best we come up with to distinguish this from what we did under the old regime is express sympathy and promise a system with better optics.

We decide to hold only one thing sacred, and that is the barrier we have built. All else may fail, to the detriment of our moral souls, but the border, whether a wall or a river or a client state or two that bolsters the barrier with brutality, is treated as sacramental.

It must and will fall. Tears will flood its foundations. History may not have an agenda, but physics does.