Creating and coping with imaginary problems

Nations should have secure borders. That is a practical fact. Granted, nations are fictions, enforced through power acquired via sometimes dubious means, but that power is real. Maybe it would be better if we didn’t have flags and kings to die for, but that’s not how it is or how it’s going to be. The Pentagon did not levitate in 1967. Gravity exists, whether you believe in it or not.

Similarly, you don’t have to believe in the legitimacy of nations. Go on and declare yourself a sovereign citizen “free of any legal constraints” if you want. But fail to file those tax returns and see what happens.

Most of us lack the discipline to transcend this world. We accept that we have nations. Somewhere in the way back, human beings roamed all over the planet and—due to differences in geography, climate and the stories we use to explain ourselves to ourselves—developed different cultures. We became diverse.

At the same time, for reasons both biological and sociological, we formed little ethno-lingual groups with our immediate neighbors and grew suspicious of all the other ethno-lingual groups, who didn’t look or talk as much like us as our fellow tribespeople did. While it’s fair to argue human beings are far more alike than are different and that there exists a set of intangible human commonalities, we originally banded together because it was hard to make it alone in a world where hunting and gathering could be interrupted by creatures bigger, faster and sharper of tooth. We began to develop a sense of what it might mean to “own” property or have it taken from us.

Nations arose to ameliorate the misery caused by an anarchic condition where might made right. Or they arose from the perniciousness of the powerful. Doesn’t really matter. Nations are here. They have armies and borders and will ask you for your papers.

Borders mean something; not everyone is welcome everywhere. Government’s first responsibility ought to be to protect and safeguard the lives of its citizens. Establishing a government essentially means deeming some lives more important than other lives, and while saying that out loud that might give us moral pause, that’s the way nations do business. To the U.S. government, U.S. citizens matter more than other people. We worry more about our kind.

Again, I’m not saying this is right; this is how it is in the world of practice.

And since this is how it is, it makes sense to want to control who crosses the borders into our country. We don’t want bad people coming in; we’re all stocked up on bad people. We don’t want good people who might adversely affect our economy. We might not want people fleeing desperate circumstances if we think taking them in might adversely affect the quality of our lives.

We don’t have to be gracious. We don’t have to be good. We can, as a nation, be as selfish and self-protective as we decide to be. We can argue about this among ourselves. But as a practical matter, our borders matter.

In theory, there is a wall around our country already. Only part of it exists in a physical form, in concrete or steel. More more of it is natural, and a component of it is psychic. Some people don’t like that. They don’t believe in things they can’t touch, taste, smell or see. Things like nations.

Our president is one of these people. He’s willing to hurt a lot of people—a lot of American citizens— because he thinks there needs to be a physical barrier sealing off our border with Mexico. He wants $5.7 billion to get started, even though to actually build such a wall (and there is some doubt it could be built at all) would probably cost at least twice that and take many years.

It is possible that our president actually believes this wall is important and that it would be effective. But a Republican congressman from Texas, Will Hurd, whose district includes 820 miles along the border—more than a third of the total distance of the proposed wall—says “building a concrete structure sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security.”

You can find people who will say otherwise, but building a physical barrier seems a little silly when most of what we’ve decided is a problem consists of people overstaying their visas. Most of the people who are in our country illegally came here by legal means. A wall would only stop the poorest people from entering the country. It would effectively keep out people who lack the economic and intellectual wherewithal to defeat it.

Maybe that’s what our president wants to do—keep out the poorest people, the ones who lack money or imagination. (I can think of ways to go over, under and even through walls, but were I a poor bracero some of those options might not be available to me.) Maybe he really thinks that what he wants is what’s best for our country.

It is easier believe he cares less about whether an actual wall is built than about whether the people who voted for him— because they liked the idea of a physical barrier holding back a wave of murdering, raping Mexicans—think he is strong. And at least trying to follow through on his signature campaign promise to build the wall and get Mexico to pay for it.

But Mexico won’t pay for it. So he shuffles around a trade deal and says that it is so advantageous to us that Mexico (which hasn’t ratified the deal yet) really is paying for it. And he says that everyone who opposes this big expensive public works project is in favor of open borders and murder and rape.

He says that if he doesn’t get his way he might just declare a national emergency and give himself the power to order the military to build the wall. Because rapists and murderers coming in from Mexico is a bigger problem than the opioid crisis, the decimation of the American middle and working classes, and the real possibility that our latest presidential election, that came down to 80,000 key votes in three battleground states, might have been determined by a foreign power with whom this president has many disturbing connections.

That rapists and murderers (and terrorists!) coming in from Mexico is a bigger problem than the shocking number of Americans who buy into the idea that fourth-century technology and a failed businessman turned reality TV show host can save them.