{"id":35478,"date":"2016-08-10T02:00:41","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T06:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35478"},"modified":"2016-08-08T09:25:06","modified_gmt":"2016-08-08T13:25:06","slug":"populists-and-open-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/08\/10\/populists-and-open-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"Populists and open borders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <em>City Journal<\/em>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/html\/imagine-theres-no-border-14608.html\" target=\"_blank\">Victor Davis Hanson<\/a> says the rise of Trump and other populist politicians is being powered by lower- and middle-class rejection of the elite preference for open borders:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Driving the growing populist outrage in Europe and North America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age \u2014 and, as with other such ideas, it has shaped the language we use. The descriptive term \u201cillegal alien\u201d has given way to the nebulous \u201cunlawful immigrant.\u201d This, in turn, has given way to \u201cundocumented immigrant,\u201d \u201cimmigrant,\u201d or the entirely neutral \u201cmigrant\u201d \u2014 a noun that obscures whether the individual in question is entering or leaving. Such linguistic gymnastics are unfortunately necessary. Since an enforceable southern border no longer exists, there can be no immigration law to break in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Today\u2019s open-borders agenda has its roots not only in economic factors \u2014 the need for low-wage workers who will do the work that native-born Americans or Europeans supposedly will not \u2014 but also in several decades of intellectual ferment, in which Western academics have created a trendy field of \u201cborders discourse.\u201d What we might call post-borderism argues that boundaries even between distinct nations are mere artificial constructs, methods of marginalization designed by those in power, mostly to stigmatize and oppress the \u201cother\u201d \u2014 usually the poorer and less Western \u2014 who arbitrarily ended up on the wrong side of the divide. \u201cWhere borders are drawn, power is exercised,\u201d as one European scholar put it. This view assumes that where borders are not drawn, power is not exercised \u2014 as if a million Middle Eastern immigrants pouring into Germany do not wield considerable power by their sheer numbers and adroit manipulation of Western notions of victimization and grievance politics. Indeed, Western leftists seek political empowerment by encouraging the arrival of millions of impoverished migrants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In City Journal, Victor Davis Hanson says the rise of Trump and other populist politicians is being powered by lower- and middle-class rejection of the elite preference for open borders: Driving the growing populist outrage in Europe and North America is the ongoing elite push for a borderless world. Among elites, borderlessness has taken its [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,370,53,13],"tags":[316,554,516],"class_list":["post-35478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-middle-east","category-politics","category-usa","tag-borders","tag-immigration","tag-mexico"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9ee","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35478"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35479,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35478\/revisions\/35479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}