1. The president’s rationale, if you can call it that, for refusing to sign a bipartisan government funding bill that does not include money for a border wall is a familiar one. It goes like this: “A nation without borders is no nation at all.”
2. Donald Trump does not mean we do not have borders. The president means, I think, that our borders are so inadequately controlled that we may as well not have borders.
3. And because controlling the border is in the national interest, not controlling borders, using draconian means, is actually undermining the national interest.
4. Or something like that. I’m not sure. And I’m not sure Trump understands what he’s saying beyond sloganeering (which is probably enough for him). He likely thinks that the national interest is a racially white interest.
5. What I do know is I haven’t seen a counterpoint to the claim that borders make a country, and that compromise of a country’s borders is a comprise of a country’s national interest.
6. The first step in establishing that counterargument might be in looking to established law. In the years after WWII, it was clear that our racist posture with respect to immigration contributed to mass murder by the Germans. We refused to admit enough Jewish refugees.
7. As a result, millions died. So Congress passed a law reflecting our newfound leadership in the global community. It turned America into the world’s safe haven.
8. Here is what the federal statute says: “Any alien who is physically present in the U.S. or who arrives in the U.S. (whether or not at a designated port of arrival ...), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum.”
9. So the intent of Congress is clear, and because it is, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow the Trump administration to block immigrants who enter the country illegally from seeking asylum.
10. The U.S. DMS had previously issued a new rule saying that if you didn’t come through an “official port of entry” you couldn’t apply for asylum. A lower court said no, the statute is clear. In refusing to hear the case, SCOTUS allowed that lower court’s ruling to stand.
11. Another step is challenging Trump’s stated belief that borders make a country. That principle does not appear to apply to Ukraine. Russia invaded its Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Russian forces remains there today.
12. When asked in July if Trump would raise the violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty with Vladimir Putin, he said, well, Crimea is Russian. They all speak Russian.
13. Getting most of the attention last summer was the fact that Trump was mimicking the Kremlin’s official line. Getting less attention was the statement’s subtext: language, and by extension culture, are what make a country, not borders.
14. I don’t think the president believes this. If Trump believed that language and culture, not borders, make a country, his admin might not be committing human rights violations on our southern border. My point is to suggest that his nationalist rhetoric is empty.
15. The conventional criteria for the creation of a nation-state is whether it has an established institutions. (I’m borrowing from Manlio Graziano’s “What Is a Border?”) If you have a constitution, a set of laws, an army, a congress, a government and a border, you have a state.
16. By this definition, America would be America whether our border is closed, open or regulated (as it is now). Borders aren’t definitive. They’re one of many traits.
17. But that, too, misses something larger. Institutions typically don’t come first in nation-state creation, Graziano writes. A state “begins with a struggle of various interests to define the common so-called national interest, around which institutions are then built.”
18. I’m not a scholar of international affairs, but it seems to me that America figured this out a while ago when the founders agreed to sign the Declaration of Independence.
19. For more than two centuries, our national interests have been rooted in the bedrock principles of equality and the natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We’d still be a country even if the southern border were in Trenton, N.J.
20. After the government reopens (whenever that is), the president will likely trot out his vision of the national interest again, which is that without borders, a nation isn’t a nation. That’s bosh.
21. America isn’t American because of its borders. America is America because of its people.
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