Trump’s ‘No Vacancy’ sign ignores reality, compassion
Without migrating peoples, we would have had neither canals nor railroads in previous eras nor many of the technologies we rely on today.
Having tried everything he could think of to make good on his promises to end the messiness of our incoherent immigration laws and enforcement practices, the president finally employed a tactic borrowed from his day job as an innkeeper. He hung a NO VACANCY sign in the window.
“We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full,” he recently declared while visiting the California-Mexico border.
To give this edict additional gravity, the president then sacked the tough, but not tough enough, leadership of the Department of Homeland Security. Presumably, he will find a more hard-nosed, menacing bouncer to post at the doorway of our southern border. In all likelihood, however, no matter who steps into the Homeland Security position, this latest ploy to solve a massive, complex problem with a dramatic, simple solution will fail in much the same way the recent threat to close the border with Mexico went quickly silent. Closing the border may have kept people out, but it would have caused financial disaster. No nation, including ours, remains economically self-sufficient.
As analysts have now pointed out, the United States ranks among the world’s least densely populated countries, and it needs more people and more workers, not fewer. For one thing, a capitalist economy thrives on growth and flounders amid shrinkage. For another, our declining birth rate and aging population will soon leave us with too few people to do necessary work and also too few wage earners to support things like the Social Security system upon which those entering retirement depend.
Throwing our borders open with a “Come one, come all” welcome would not improve matters either. Since the president’s coveted influx of Norwegians won’t likely materialize, available newcomers won’t look or talk like the current residents of the rural and small-town areas that need them most. Hence, we will need a fresh generation of leaders to plan and work carefully at providing new educational systems and innovative ways of acquiring acculturation skills for newcomers and old-timers alike. Both will find themselves in a different world.
The new curriculum might begin with a history lesson. For as long as human beings have walked the planet, they have migrated. That will continue, no doubt, for as long as the bees keep poking their noses into flowers to find what they need. We can’t stop it and we’d be fools to try. Without migrating peoples, we would have had neither canals nor railroads in previous eras nor many of the technologies we rely on today.
Even as we learn to grow our local populations in productive and mutually life-enhancing ways, we must also work together as quickly as possible to adapt to the new realities of a world with more water and less ice around us than at any time in the past 100,000 years. It becomes more apparent every day that we can’t stop the melting and the volatile weather that accompanies it any easier than we can halt the migrations of earth’s creatures, ourselves included. We must find new ways, not merely adjustments to old ones, to do agriculture and manage animal husbandry. We must rethink the materials and designs of the structures in which we live and work, the distances between the two, and the ways we get from one to the other.
If they ever existed, the days of simple solutions like NO TRESPASSING signs have long since passed. Today we need creative coalition builders and leaders with a vision that has room for us all. Should they have strange, unpronounceable names, we will learn them soon enough.