A Failed State

Porous Borders

The United Nations has an appellation for countries that are so broken down that they can no longer maintain law-and-order and their citizens are subject to marauding thugs and gangs. The UN calls them "failed states". Haiti is a failed state. Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Chad are also listed.

Whatever the criteria employed to identify a state as failed, we would argue that inability to control and protect state borders has to be right up there as one of the leading indicators of becoming a failed state. The inability of the US to protect its borders--in particular, to seal its southern border to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants--bespeaks "failed state".

Now, of course, the US has the wealth and technological capability to seal the border, so that only legitimate immigrants and appropriately documented people enter the country from the south. But it lacks the will to do so. This lack of will--this lack of nation-wide conviction that controlling one's borders is a fundamental, essential duty of government--is symptomatic of a serious malaise.

Now, to be sure, we hold the view that the US, along with every other country in the world, has the resources and capability to support a much larger population than it does presently. Controlling the borders is not the same as reducing or stopping immigration--but it means that whatever immigration or guest-worker programme is the declared policy of the day, the federal and governmental authorities can and do apply the policy. The government must keep the laws it makes and ensure that the law is enforced justly and fairly.

At the moment, the US has a stated immigration policy which it is unwilling to apply. The law is a farcical joke, at least on the southern border. The porous line of demarcation between the US and Mexico means that drugs can enter the US without effective interdiction; Mexican criminal gangs operate freely on both sides of the border; and standover and extortion tactics are able to be used effectively against vulnerable human beings who are in the country illegally.

The fact that the US will not control its own borders increasingly makes it a laughing stock. It risks being seen as a vacillating, weak, inept, and internally riven country. Its enemies are emboldened.

President Obama has emphatically insisted upon the power of linkages in global perceptions. He, for example, has propagated the idea that the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay arouses such hostility amongst Muslims that it provokes terrorism against the US. Close Guantanamo, and terrorist acts will subside. Maybe so. However, it is not difficult to make another linkage: the porous southern border is a large flashing sign of US indecision, cowardice, and weakness.

There are intelligence reports that Islamic terrorist sleepers have identified the southern border as the entry point of choice. For them, it is a no-brainer.