A battle over building walls or bridges
It was coincidental, but clarifying, that London’s Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim elected mayor of a major Western city, landed in New York last Saturday just hours after bombs allegedly set by a radicalized Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan rocked Manhattan and New Jersey.
From Europe to Britain to the U.S., politics across the industrialized world is increasingly spinning around the same question: Are nations more likely to achieve security and prosperity by building walls or building bridges to the outside world? This fundamental choice is dividing nations not only along lines of generation, race and education, but also geography. As the insular nationalism symbolized by Donald Trump gains strength in the places that feel left behind in an integrating world, diverse global cities that thrive on connection are growing closer to their international peers, even as they grow more distant from the non-metropolitan areas of their own countries.
That was the important message in Khan’s U.S. visit. Before New York, he was in Chicago, and like the Democratic mayors of both cities — Bill de Blasio and Rahm Emanuel, respectively — Khan forcefully insists that integration, inclusion and openness to the world offer the best chance to defuse terror and maximize economic growth.
That perspective — shared by the mayors of almost all large U.S. cities and many others in Europe — views immigrants as a source of economic and cultural vitality, trade as an engine of prosperity, and integration of Muslim communities as the central defense against radicalization and terror.
“We play straight into the hands of the extremists and terrorists when we [say] … it’s not possible to hold Western values and to be a Muslim,” Khan wrote last week in the Chicago Tribune. “It makes it easier for terrorists to radicalize young people. And it makes us all less safe.”
This point of view collides with the bristling defensive nationalism championed by Trump, France’s Marine Le Pen, and nativist parties like UKIP in Britain and Alternative for Deutschland in Germany. These voices raise alarms against trade and immigration and portray greater restrictions and surveillance as the key to fighting Islamic terror. Stressing isolation over integration, Trump responded to the New York attacks by reiterating his calls for limiting Mideast immigration and expanding law enforcement profiling of “people that maybe look suspicious.”
Such messages have been shrugged off in large urban areas but have resonated in smaller places, especially those that have little tradition of racial diversity or have lost manufacturing jobs to trade. In June’s “Brexit” referendum in Britain, big majorities in London and its thriving information-economy suburbs voted to keep the United Kingdom in the European Union, while those living in rural areas and economically strained smaller cities gave the leave campaign (which stressed anti-immigrant messages) its narrow majority. In Berlin’s regional elections last weekend, the anti-immigrant, anti-globalization AfD party won only about 14% of the vote — enough for foothold but less than it anticipated and less than it carried in earlier regional elections in rural East Germany. Likewise, the choice between Trump and Hillary Clinton is virtually certain to widen an already imposing metropolitan divide: In 2012, President Obama won America’s 100 largest counties by a combined margin of 12 million votes while losing the other 3,000 by about seven million votes.
Adjusting for national differences, the mayors of global cities are setting goals antithetical to the Trump vision. “There are 50 cities, maybe 100, that are the intellectual, cultural and economic engine of the world,” Emanuel says. “We have to make our cities competitive. The jobs and companies we talk about are not only global but mobile.”
These cities’ agendas include investment in infrastructure and education; welcoming immigrants; supporting small business and information-age start-ups; promoting dense development; embracing renewable energy as an economic engine and environmental imperative; and with only a few exceptions (such as De Blasio) encouraging more international trade. The common theme, Emanuel says, is to create a “platform for private sector growth” while advancing equity and inclusion.
As Khan pointedly noted during his visit, many cities are failing to achieve that “social integration.” Instead they are divided between thriving white-collar professionals and lower-income minority communities much more disconnected from opportunity. Research consistently shows that cities face high levels of income inequality, and economic and racial segregation, in both housing and schools. And entrenched conflict in Chicago symbolizes the systematic alienation of minority communities from law enforcement in many metropolitan areas.
Yet globalizing cities, and their mayors, continue to believe they can combat these trends. By welcoming ideas, products and people from around the world, and by insisting that only extending opportunity to all communities can provide lasting security and prosperity, they are formulating an inclusive alternative to zero-sum ethnic nationalism. In the years ahead, whether Western societies are more likely to succeed as open or closed will no doubt unfold as a struggle between town and country.