The "Quito Declaration" Has Implications For US

An important conference happed earlier this week in Quito, Ecuador (the home turf of Rafael Correa, a stalwart of the "Bolivarian" movement headed by Hugo Chavez.) It was not covered by the MSM. It should have been. It was important.

The event was the Ninth Annual South American Conference on Migration. At the end of the proceedings, the delegates approved the Quito Declaration.

In principle, the Declaration provides for a single integrated citizenship for all those living in the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR.) The stated intent is that the provisions of the Declaration will extend to all of Latin America.

A Bolivian delegate stated that the Declaration was essential "to face the nations of the north." The US is one of those nations. Perhaps the most important if one is a Latin American seeking a better future.

Certainly, this is the view of Central American governments from Mexico on south. The demands that the US liberalize its immigration policies--not requests, not suggestions, not diplomatic hints: demands--have been coming from that direction for a long time now. From the perspective of these governments, the US is the safety valve on the local pressure cookers.

As violent crime flourishes beyond all past experience throughout Central America, driven in large part by the expansion of the Mexican narco-trafficking cartels into new geographic areas and new forms of criminal enterprise, the need for a safety valve has been seen as growing by the day. Delegations of Central American legislators have joined with their countries' diplomats in seeking fast action on the immigration reform effort by either or both Congress and President Obama.

The Quito Declaration will be an important part of the immigration reform effort as the unnamed Bolivian delegate made plain. The view from down South is simply that open borders are a good idea--for the US. It is a clear fact that Mexico and other Central and South American countries deal with illegal aliens far more expeditiously (and harshly) than does the US. Even the Quito Declaration is unlikely to change this in practice no matter how lofty the sentiments expressed in the document might read.

Governments sitting on pressure cookers look to their own protection first, foremost, and always. Inevitably, the result will be actions which protect to the maximum extent possible the local status quo, economically, socially, and, most importantly, politically. This is why the notion of open borders as the ultimate goal of immigration reform in the US is so attractive. And, why they will not exist in the near future anywhere in Central and South America, the Quito Declaration to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Quito Declaration will be brought to the Third Global Forum On Migration in Athens. It has already been endorsed by the International Organization For Migration's Deputy Director General, Laura Thompson. The International Organization For Migration (IOM) has been around since 1951 and has been the leading international outfit promoting freedom of migration.

The IOM has done a lot of good for migrants over the years. It does, however, have one important drawback. The IOM has never met an immigration control or limitation statute which it likes.

A fundamental, arguably, the fundamental requirement of national sovereignty is control of borders. This brings with it the right and authority to control who crosses the borders and for what reason and with what degree of legality. Unless a state can control both its borders and the nature of citizenship, it has no meaningful degree of sovereignty.

In a real but usually overlooked sense, the conquest of the native Americans by the interloping Europeans was a record of what happens when a nation has no concept of statehood--statehood with definable and enforced borders. Regardless of any other achievement, the inhabitants of what is now the United States had no concept of land belonging to one particular nation. No concept of borders. No concept that borders defined the sweep of authority, the sweep of right belonging to a people.

The Native Americans lacked the experience based moxie to demand that the passengers of the Mayflower show their visas, take out citizenship papers and become landed immigrants. The Europeans already knew that borders mattered. They knew the relation between sovereignty and borders. That was why they fought so many wars--seeking to redraw the map, redefine the borders.

The notion of open borders or even that of easy routes to citizenship for those who have violated borders is antithetical to the sovereign existence of a state. It condemns the nation-state to retreat to the status of nation alone, or, to put it bluntly, a tribe.

The same speciously attractive notion overturns the long standing political compact between a citizenry and a government, which holds that government is responsible for protecting the lives, property, and, by extension in recent decades, the future economic and social security of the citizen. By easing paths to citizenship for those who have entered the US illegally, or by failure to adequately protect the borders against illegal incursion, the Federal government fails in one of its primary duties.

To the governments of Central or South America with the pressure cooker boiling beneath them, the duty of the US government to its citizens is of no import whatsoever. Their primary duties are to themselves and, perhaps secondarily, their citizens. Thus the Quito Declaration is far more likely to be honored in the breech in the land(s) of its birth than to be a weapon ultimately directed against the United States.

It is of little or no importance to the governments of Latin America or the idealists of globalization including the IOM that the US or Western Europe for that matter cannot absorb all those who might wish to find an allegedly better future here. The days of seemingly unlimited employment in the ever-expanding economies of the North--including the US--are over. Dead.

Killed by the combination of global population growth, exportation of jobs overseas, technological transformation, and, most recently, the lingering effects of the Great Recession. Even employers in the American service and construction sectors will have to acknowledge this new reality and seek employees from sources other than illegal immigrants.

This means the governments sitting on the assorted pressure cookers of Latin America will have to look to themselves--and foreign investment--to address the underlying problems which produce the heat under the pot. They will have to address the inherent inequalities of economy, society, and polity rather than hope to force the US into adopting an open border policy under whatsoever guise.

The new realities of life also dictate that the "progressives" of the American chattering, academic, and political elite will have to abandon their notions regarding the need for open borders--or anything approximating that idea. If nothing else, these worthies would be well advised to consider the recent arrest of an illegal immigrant from Jordan who was beavering away in the effort to blow up a sixty story building in Dallas.

Borders are real. They exist for real purposes. They define a nation and the state that nation created to advance and defend its collective interests. They are not mere lines on a map or in the sand of the Southwest. Borders are us, We the People. They are the perimeter by which We the People, our hopes and fears, loves and hates are defined.

That is why they must be defended--even against the Quito Declaration.