Dr. Tom Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control, appeared before Congress to answer questions about his agency's muddled response to the Ebola crisis. Explaining the reasoning behind why our government refuses to restrict travel from the West African countries where the plague is raging, Freiden said, "It's simply not feasible to build a wall – virtual or real – around a community, city or country."
If the line sounds familiar, that's because it is. Whether we're dealing with a massive influx of illegal immigrants or the giant sucking sound of our wealth-producing industries rushing to Third World sinkholes, it's the same response from the open-borders crowd running the show in Washington: It's inevitable, you can't build a wall around a nation.
This is utter nonsense. Tell the Berliners it's impossible to build a wall around their city. They know better, from experience. Their wall eventually came down thanks to another, virtual wall – the Cold War doctrine of containment.
From the earliest days of our nation's history, the United States has always defined who and what is allowed in. Rather than remain part of the world-straddling borderless British Empire, our founders chose independence and sovereignty. In its first act, before the Constitution was even written, Congress enacted a tariff, placing a toll on goods entering the Confederation from overseas. The differentiation between Us and Them was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, which mandated unrestricted commerce among the several states while explicitly giving Congress the authority to regulate commerce with foreign nations. Behind a wall of tariffs designed to keep imported goods out, America grew into the world's greatest industrial power with a strong middle class. Restrictions on immigration in the early 20th century limiting the influx of cheap labor coincided with rising wages for working Americans.
Every nation, and indeed every town, city and community, has a wall around it – it's called a border. Those inside the wall have certain privileges and obligations those outside do not. And so it has been since time immemorial. Long before nations, humans based their survival, society and identity on membership in tribes and clans. The ability to build and bind to a team larger than one's blood family is a defining characteristic of our species. "Good fences make good neighbors" is more than a poetic trope – it's a psychological and biological reality.
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But human nature and history are inconsequential to the utopian social engineer. In pursuit of the globalist ideal, we are now to submerge our distinct national identity in the world stew-pot. In accordance with this faith, anyone on earth has a claim on the territory and riches of our nation. They have as much right to live in your town as your own children. Even slavers, whose unspeakable practices are forbidden in this country, have access to sell their goods in our markets; that is no longer a privilege enjoyed by the citizens of these United States and those we deem share our values.
Of course, those who preach this dogma of a world without walls live behind all manner of walls themselves, both real and virtual, as Anne Coulter has pointed out. They sleep in gated communities and doorman buildings, work in sinecures reserved for sponsored insiders, often hereditary, and play in private clubs with cliff-high membership dues and velvet ropes that keep out all but the elite of the elite. For those of us who embrace the idea of a nation made up of shared culture and values, we're told: sorry, no borders allowed. Walls and fences for them, open borders for the rest of us.
The globalist project is presented as the crowning achievement of human development, but it's really nothing new. Just as the team-binding faculty is an inherent part of human nature, so, too, it seems, is the universalist impulse. From the Tower of Babel to the Third International and the Islamic Caliphate, human history is littered with efforts to build an all-encompassing world order that will usher in an epoch of world peace and harmony.
We all know how those endeavors worked out. Utopian globalism is destined for the same fate. The only question is: Will it take the United States of America with it?