The "Border Crisis" is not at the border...

...and shuttering USAID will make it worse.

February 8, 2025

In a recent New York Times column, Lydia Polgreen opined on the impact of immigration flows around the globe, with everyone headed in the general direction of the more prosperous economies of the United States and Western Europe, each offering sanctuary or at least the possibility of a better life for their family. Around the globe, over 280 million people now live outside the county where they were born, including over 50 million refugees forced to flee their home countries because of conflict and disaster. This surge of humanity, currently encompassing 3 percent of the world’s population is disrupting economies across the globe, most prevalently in the United States and Europe, each of which are struggling to absorb the new immigrant populations. The impact on these economies, disrupting housing markets and employment along with local and national social services budgets, has spilled over and inflamed our national discourse, polarizing communities.

Reflecting our national polarized conversation, Polgreen stated the obvious:

“Migration has become the critical fault line of politics. Donald Trump owes his triumphant return to the White House in no small part to persuading Americans, whose country was built on migration, that migrants are now the prime source of its ills.”

President Trump has made this issue the focal point of his politics since June 16^th, 2015, the day that he rode down the Trump Tower escalator, promising to take back our country from what he described as hordes of Mexican drug dealers and rapists, in that day’s hate filled speech: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Little did we know that he was testing a new stump speech that he would build into a brand.

Trump’s brand of nationalist populism was not all that different from those of other nationalist leaders that were emerging around the same time. Boris Johnson rode the nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment of Brexit to victory in Great Britain. Viktor Orban’s “them v. us” message in Hungary resonated with Tucker Carlson and the Fox News crowd long before Trump rode down the escalator to preach the same sermon. Trump’s leanings and affection – or at least admiration - for authoritarians like Orban, Putin and Xi Jinping evidenced itself later. Trump’s anti-immigrant brand of populism was there from the start, I believe born out of rank opportunity, not any closely held values. That would have required that you have values, any values.

People have their own reasons for feeling strongly about immigration, and by extension, immigrants. Unfortunately, many if not most form those opinions in a vacuum, without any first had knowledge of the reasons behind the immigration. I had the luxury of growing up surrounded by immigrants and that certainly contributed to my worldview. I touched on this subject in a prior post.

Viewed from a macro-economic standpoint, economies can only grow with an increasing population to expand production, and in world of declining birthrates, that will require vastly increasing productivity - or more people from somewhere else. Some countries are already suffering from the negative effects of stagnant population growth coupled with nationalistic immigration policies – see China currently or Japan over the last thirty years. They provide more than enough data to support more expansive - not restrictive - immigration policies.

On a much more personal note, my discomfort with the current anti-immigrant rhetoric is the humanitarian side of this story, not the economic one. Categorizing the estimated eleven or twelve million undocumented immigrants already in this country as criminals is one, reprehensible, but importantly, inaccurate. Crossing the border into the United States is not a “criminal” act. Being here without documentation is not a “criminal offense”. It is a civil matter, not a crime against the state. You are not a criminal just for being here.

I live in northern New York State, a little more than one hour from the Quebec border. I think about what I would do if I lived in a community that offered no job prospects, or any legal way to feed my family. Or if, like many immigrants from Venezuela, I lived in a community that was ruled by gangs, putting my wife and kids in jeopardy every day just to go to the market or to get the kids to school. I imagine myself in those circumstances, and I further imagine that I have a few friends and cousins from my hometown who have moved and found work in Quebec. They invite me to come stay with them and send some money back home to feed my family. I am not committing any crime. I am probably not even taking anyone’s job. If I get caught, I will be sent back to New York. The job is seasonal and probably in agriculture, or working in landscaping, or in a restaurant kitchen washing dishes, or milking cows on a dairy farm, all jobs going begging because no one locally wants to do that work. Would I do that? I would do that in a heartbeat and so would you. You would do what you had to do to feed you family.

I do not have an immediate resolution for a way to deal with this tidal wave of migrants that hope to build a life for their families in the United States. I do know what will not work. I do know what not to do. You cannot build a wall high enough to keep out 50 million immigrants looking for a better life. The answer is not how you deal with the border – at the border. The answer lies in dealing with the issues that are forcing this mass of humanity to flee their home countries. The answer lies in foreign policy - not domestic policy. As the most prosperous country on the planet, you cannot build a nationalist dome around us and hope that the rest of the planet will sort out their problems. “Globalist” is not a dirty word, it is a description of reality. What happens anywhere on the globe impacts us. An integral component of foreign policy is foreign aid - the very same US Foreign Aid program that Trump and Musk have decided must now be abandoned. I am not going to examine some of the ridiculous reasons cited by the new administration as examples of waste in the program - $50 million which somehow grew to $100 million dollars (Trump, of course) in condoms for Hamas militants? Seriously? If there ever was an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face, cutting off all US foreign aid would be it.

I believe that the beginnings of an answer to our “border crisis” can be found in the ancient “Parable of the River Babies”:

While working to harvest a field next to a river, the villagers see a flotilla of baskets floating down river, each containing a small child. The villagers wade out into the river to rescue the children, but the number of floating babies is overwhelming the rescuers. One of the villagers is not helping the rescuers, but instead she is walking upstream along the shoreline. The others angrily call to her – where are you going? Why are you not helping? She responds - I am going upstream to see who is putting these babies in the river.

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