Migration

Walls don't work

   People have been on the move for millennia as they search for better lives, but the countries that try to shut them out only suffer a decline and fall.
   Romans built two walls across Britain to keep out Scots. The Biblical story of the Exodus describes how Jews left Egypt, wandering for years and being welcomed as a new labor source in some areas, while those in Jericho, for example, tried to wall them out.
   China in the early 15th Century was one of the most technologically advanced cultures in the world, sending a Great Treasure Fleet literally around the world and landing in America in 1421, some 70 years before Columbus. However, the Ming Dynasty decided to isolate the country and closed off all contact with others. Result: A gradual decline that lasted for hundreds of years, until the Communist rulers in the 20th Century adopted and adapted some aspects of Western capitalism and reopened its borders to trade.
   Currently, many people are fleeing the Middle East for safety and opportunity in Europe, but are met with razor wire fences in Hungary and Austria. Others get as far as the French coast, but are stopped as they try to get through the tunnel to England. England doesn't want them, and France can't or won't send them back.
   In America today, there are demands that a wall be built on the southern border to keep out Latinos. There has even been a proposal to erect a wall along the U.S. northern border, to bar undesirables coming in from Canada.
   It's little different from 19th Century prejudices against immigrants from Ireland. Or blocking Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust. Or the government roundup of Japanese families on the West Coast in the early 1940s, putting them in internment camps even though many of the families had been here for generations. Or corporate hiring prejudices against opportunity seekers from Italy. 
   Migration is part of the human experience. So also is resistance by the established population.
   "America for the Americans," is the chant. But we are all immigrants, or we are descended from immigrants, whether one or many generations ago. Unless you are Mohawk, Arapaho, Cherokee, Iroquois or a member of any of the many other tribes, and even they are descendants of those who crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska many centuries ago.
   Fences don't work. People will go around them, under them, over them or through them. Somehow, those seeking refuge and opportunity will find a way.
   Closing the doors to newcomers and isolating the country, as was attempted in the past in America and in other countries and is now being considered again, can only lead to economic and political decline. And worse, to a fall.