The Left has found its response to the idea that Syrian refugees should be carefully screened to make sure they aren’t Islamic terrorists.
As though catching a whiff of something unpleasant, it dismisses the idea as unfit for polite conservation. Contempt is a useful substitute of cogent argument. Even with 129 dead in Paris, some murdered by a terrorist disguised as a refugee, the thundering voice of the Left says it’s unacceptable to start talking about tighter border control.
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France has already reimposed controls, and other countries are likely to do the same. Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination and a slew of GOP lawmakers in Congress argue that the jihadis’ assault on western civilization last week should prompt a rethink about President Obama’s plan to accept 10,000 refugees from Syria.
The Islamic State has long said it would sneak killers into Europe under the cover of mass migration, and it has. So it is reasonable and humane to insist on checking carefully before refugees are let in.
Yet the New York Times editorial board wrote last weekend, “The sort of attacks the Islamic State, or ISIS, has launched are hard to anticipate or prevent, yet in Europe each one intensifies the raucous xenophobia of far right nationalists ever ready to demonize Muslim citizens, immigrants and refugees, and shut down Europe’s open internal borders.”
Just like that, shutting borders is demonized as raucus xenophobia. The Schengen Agreement, which erased them, dates back only to 1985. And its signatory nations were just as civilized — arguably more so — before they signed it as they were afterwards. Strengthened national borders, controlled by citizens within them, are not symbols of revanchist bigotry?
The Times isn’t alone in equating civilization with dismantled borders. “With Paris in lockdown and France closing its borders, we can see all too clearly that what is at stake here is the very essence of our way of life in Europe,” Davis Lewin, deputy director of the Henry Jackson Society, a conservative think-tank, told the Daily Telegraph last week.
To be fair, Davis was probably pointing to the new defenses as an indication of the danger posed by the Islamic State to the West’s way of life. But the idea that national borders are somehow intolerant throwbacks to an uglier epoch has clearly taken root and spread. There’s a weird suggested hint here that Parisian life — tolerant coexistence, music and arts, cafes and conviviality — will disappear if the nation’s borders are firmly reinstated.
The truth, however, is almost the exact opposite. It is clear and effective national borders that will preserve those blessings. National borders are, in some ways, an expression of tolerant and inclusive civilization. It is not a coincidence that the Enlightenment coincided closely with the development of nation states. National borders are a prerequisite of democracy, which has let the West develop and thrive. It is democracy, within borders and because of borders, that has allowed self-government, tolerance and the great benisons of the civilization that the jihadis want to destroy.
When a nation holds elections, it is only citizens of that nation who are supposed to vote. That’s what democracy is. A nation cannot but be defined by its borders. Citizens are those with whom the nation holds a bond of trust and mutual allegiance. Citizens should be, and traditionally have been, able to choose whatever criteria they like for letting people in. The principle does not depend on them making wise choices, and sometimes they have not.
But there is nothing either unwise or unconscionable about insisting we keep our borders strong. And insisting, too, that a country’s citizens have the right to decide when these lines may be crossed.
