By Jonathan Power*
LUND, Sweden | 3 December 2024 (IDN) — At first, I was a bit surprised to find that the English admonition, “Good fences make for good neighbours” exists in many other languages. I shouldn’t have been taken aback. A moment’s reflection should have told me that fences and walls to divide off peoples have been going on for millennia. There’s nothing in particular new about the fence between the US and Mexico, the Cold War wall between East and West Germany or the one between Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. Look at the Great Wall of China.
The Mexicans have a joke about the planned wall to replace the fence. “It’s not built to keep Mexicans out of the US; it’s built to keep Donald Trump out of Mexico!”
Today the Mexicans have a problem in that migrant “caravans”, made up of thousands of fleeing Central Americans and also people from Venezuela, Ecuador and Columbia, are pouring into the south of Mexico where there is no fence. The Mexicans have reacted much more sensibly and humanely to the caravans, America-bound, than President-elect Donald Trump. They are encouraging the “caravaners” to go no further and find work in Mexico’s underdeveloped southern states. Those applying for asylum have been offered temporary work permits with immediate effect.
Development is the cure for migration
The Mexicans know from their history that development is the cure for migration. Thanks to economic growth the Mexican exodus to America has been reduced to a trickle. Trump doesn’t talk about this. He goes on using the Mexicans as a scapegoat for a phenomenon that no longer exists. In his first election campaign he said, “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Ever since the Kissinger Commission that evaluated Central American needs at the end of the local civil wars in 1984 there has been talk of the need for the US to give significant amounts of aid to get these countries out of the rut of poverty. But not enough has been forthcoming, although when it does arrive it often produces sterling results. I once was taken to a farm project in El Salvador run by the International Fund for Agricultural Development that was doing really well. This kind of aid is what Trump should concentrate on.
According to a well-researched and perceptive book “The Age of Walls” by Tim Marshall, each wall tells a story.
On India’s frontier with Bangladesh is the longest border fence in the world—2,500 miles of it. It was built primarily to stem the exodus of poorer Bangladeshis to better-off India. But now fast developing Bangladesh is richer per head than India and the wall has been becoming over the last years an anachronism, although recent political turbulence in Bangladesh could push India to reinforce it.
India has another fence—the 340-mile-long barrier along the disputed Line of Control inside Kashmir, a region both India and Pakistan say is their territory. “It stands as a fortified monument to the enmity between two nuclear-armed nations”, writes Marshall.
Western Europe, belatedly, has joined the fence builders. The Syrian civil war migrant crisis of 2015 prompted a wave of nationalism, particularly in Eastern Europe. Rather than agree to “burden-sharing”, which if it had been implanted would have given each EU country only a modest number of migrants each, these countries preferred to say “no”, taking in barely a handful. Hungary built fences along its border with Serbia and Croatia. Slovenia erected a fence along its border with Croatia, Macedonia along its Greek border, Austria along its border crossings with Slovenia and Italy, and Poland along its border with Belorussia.
Trump and right wing politicians in Europe
Like Trump, right wing politicians in Europe (including Brexit supporters in the UK) raise the spectre of endless migration. But it’s unlikely there will be more large-scale wars in the Middle East. Even the two remaining, between Israel and Gaza and Israel and Lebanon, have produced few refugees that go abroad. Even if homeless they have simply moved from one part of Gaza to another. Ukrainians fleeing the war have gone mainly to Poland where they have been welcomed, but Poles expect them to go home when the fighting diminishes, which most want to do. The new flare up in Syria could be the beginning of renewed outright civil war but the Russians and the Syrian army, supporting the central government, will probably squash it in a matter of weeks.
The African stream is over-magnified. Observers talk about Africa’s population increase and how this must inevitably lead to more northward migration. But I wrote my first article about this in 1973, and it has been going on ever since in fairly modest numbers, even though the rate of population growth was much, much higher before than it is now. There’s still time to help Africa develop at a faster rate than it’s doing (but some of it is already doing rather well) and turn it into another Mexico where there are jobs and people prefer to stay at home.
As for those migrants who do make it, most Western governments, too belatedly, have realized that their policy of multiculturalism has not worked. It has led to ghettoization. For immigration to have less bad effects it has to be carefully planned integration. The fences of the mind have to come down too.
Fences and walls are not necessary. Mostly they are manifestations of superficial thinking.
*For 17 years, Jonathan Power was a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Copyright©Jonathan Power
Visit www.jonathanpowerjournalist.com
Note: I recently published a novel, “The Human Flow” (Ibidem and Columbia University Press) which is a saga set among the migrants of West Africa en route to Paris and London. Available from good bookshops and on-line book sellers.
Image: The 340-mile-long barrier along the disputed Line of Control inside Kashmir, a region both India and Pakistan say is their territory. Source: Opinion Express