| Like intellectual property and some other issues, I have often felt that the appearance in public discourse of arguments for two very opposite, extreme positions is a signal that something is really wrong with the current situation. That is, I suspect the reason we're having this argument is that border enforcement is getting too extreme, with too many burdens and moral problems that people are compelled to start asking whether borders are even necessary at all. Even small cities have borders in a sense, but those borders only are visible or enforced in ways that are usually invisible to the average citizen in the US. I've worried as I've become older that the younger generation will have not known what it was like to live in a US society where border enforcement and airport security was close to nonexistent. When there was no Department of Homeland security, and, as Samantha Bee has recently pointed out, no ICE. Now, in retrospect, would I want to return to a society with no airline security? Probably not, but I do think the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction, and I worry younger generations will just take for granted that the increasing authoritarianism in the world is the only way to live. Ironically, international travel is one of the best ways to realize that many cherished assumptions that your society has about the right way to do things may be false. Reality permits far more flexibility than societies generally allow, and when it doesn't, societies tend to ignore it anyway. |
In my opinion, these are two very different things and if you don't treat them as such, you will inevitably end up in a scenario with extremist opposition.