Who belongs where?

We recently attended the wedding of a son of parents with whom we have  been friends since the early 1970s, when I met them in Mexico. All three of us were students living in Mexico City. The parents of the groom are a Filipina mother and a Scottish father. The parents of the bride are a Swiss-German mother and a British father.

The cultural resonances of the ceremony were varied. The groom wore a kilt in his family tartan. Many of the male guests likewise wore kilts or tartan trousers. The bride arrived accompanied by a piper in full Scottish attire, although I discovered later that he is Irish, and thus shares Celtic traditions across borders. A Filipina cousin of the groom had brought from the Philippines 13 gold “aris” coins, in the Philippines traditionally presented to the bride by her new husband. Then came a piece of Swiss-German tradition: the presentation of two piglets to the couple as a symbol of good fortune. Next came a chimney sweep, considered to be a symbol of good luck in Britain and other European countries. The ceremony ended with a Celtic blessing delivered by the groom’s father in the broadest Scots he could manage.

I thought about this wedding as I read reports of Mr Trump’s speech to the United Nations. It seems that he espouses an idea, which also motivates politicians in some European countries, that a country’s culture is defined by its rightful inhabitants and that patriots must defend this culture against dilution by people from other national cultures. The definition of the rightful inhabitant and the patriot is left usefully vague.

In recent months, the Trump administration has taken a number of steps to reduce the legal protections of those who enter or attempt to enter the USA, whether as undocumented individuals, refugees fleeing economic hardship or violence, or asylum seekers escaping from direct threats to their lives. When Mr Trump threatened Mexico with ruinous trade tariffs if the Mexican government did not take steps that he considers adequate  to prevent such people from entering the USA. Mexico was forced to do as Mr Trump demanded, and further agreed that it could be considered a safe country in which to apply for asylum or another protected refugee status. This is a rather empty promise, since Mexico lacks a developed asylum infrastructure. An application for asylum in Mexico is now considered a reason to deny asylum in the USA. The USA likewise pressured Guatemala to agree to a similar arrangement. Those seeking entry into the USA now have to wait in Mexico until they are assigned a date for their case to be heard in the USA according to a system managed by the US authorities. Those caught on the US side of the border without authorisation are returned to Mexico.

The result of this is that, on the Mexican side of the border, there are now ever larger encampments of people from Central America, but also from South America, Cuba and some African countries. These people have no means of sustaining themselves and are easy prey for people traffickers, kidnappers (if they have relatives already in the USA as demonstrated by the call history on their phones) and other criminals. The Mexican government has attempted to prevent those heading towards the USA from entering Mexico from Guatemala, a difficult task for a country with limited law enforcement facilities, attempting to close a border in some very remote regions difficult of access. Mexico also tries to intercept undocumented travellers heading north throughout its territory. Those of us who live in Europe saw how difficult it was for much wealthier European countries to control large numbers of refugees fleeing the Syrian and other conflicts. Imagine a country that cannot yet provide adequate housing, health care and security for its own population, having to bear the costs of doing the nasty work of a bigger, wealthier, domineering country to the north.

All of this has some very unfair and undesirable consequences for Mexico. In essence, it converts the entire apparatus of the Mexican state into border guards working at the bidding of the USA at Mexico’s expense. The Mexicans may not have paid to build Mr Trump’s wall but they are certainly paying to police his southern border. In particular, a newly-formed National Guard (created by bringing the federal police under the command of the Mexican army), intended to combat organized crime and its related violence, is now burdened with a large additional task. This makes the reduction of crime and violence in Mexico a much more difficult challenge. Mr Trump’s policy passes the financial and human costs of controlling the border to a Mexican state that lacks the economic and human resources to do so effectively and humanely.

Among the more serious undesirable consequences is the incentivisation of people trafficking, kidnapping and other horrific crimes. Desperate people accumulated in the border regions, with no legal sources of income and without access to health care, education for their children, and so on,  and, in many cases, unable to return to home countries that they fled to escape danger, are easy prey to crooks. Moreover, in so far as US policy is intended to prevent criminals entering the USA, it is myopic in the extreme. Well-funded narco-criminals are not living in tent cities on the border waiting for US authorities to give them a hearing. They have other means of crossing the border and transporting their merchandise across it. While the focus of the US Customs and Border Protection is occupied with great numbers of desperate, vulnerable people, of whom very few will be criminals, the powerful and sophisticated narco-criminals can operate while the attention of the US is directed at others. Indeed, since the drug cartels have very diversified “businesses”, Mr Trump has provided them with a large captive market for their people trafficking and extorsion enterprises.

Which brings us back to the question of who deservres to be in the USA – who are Mr Trump’s patriots to be? By and large, the modern descendants of North America’s indigenous people (or rather, the earliest arrivals, since they came from Asia) live as federally defined tribes, most in reservations under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I suspect they are not frequently in Mr Trump’s thoughts. Then, about 150 years ago, quite a number of Mexican citizens found themselves on the US side of a new border. They antedated more “Anglo-Saxon” residents of states such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. How should people fleeing persecution, violence, exploitation and other dangers be defined and accommodated? Of course, the USA has to control its borders, but blanket exclusion at the expense of a poorer neighbour is not likely to be a wise or sustainable solution. It is certainly not humane.

For more than two decades I had an office in New York where people of many backgrounds worked. I recall that in the 1980s one colleague was a young blonde, fair-skinned woman, a daughter of a prominent lawyer, and a graduate of a good university. During one visit my colleagues consulted me about the completion of a declaration of the backgrounds of our staff so that the city or state (I forget which) of New York could assess diversity in the workplace. Our young colleague was able to document descent from a native American tribe, so we were able to declare her as a native American employee. Identity and patriotism do not always come in the nice neat packages that Mr Trump wants us to envision.