Speaking at Northeastern University’s commencement, Secretary of State John Kerry took some shots at Donald Trump while telling graduates that they were about to enter a “complex and borderless world.”
“Many of you were in elementary school when you learned the toughest lesson of all on 9/11,” he said. “There are no walls big enough to stop people from anywhere, tens of thousands of miles away, who are determined to take their own lives while they target others.”
“So I think that everything that we’ve lived and learn tells us that we will never come out on top if we accept advice from sound-bite salesmen and carnival barkers who pretend the most powerful country on Earth can remain great by looking inward,” Kerry added. “And hiding behind walls at a time that technology has made that impossible to do and unwise to even attempt.”
Sorry, John, but that’s not the “lesson” we learned from 9/11. The lesson we learned is not to trust the administration of our immigration system to putzes like you. The wife of San Bernardino terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, Tashfeen Malik, never should have been allowed into the U.S. in the first place. Unfortunately, those with Kerry’s mindset were issuing visas.
Kerry also seemed to dismiss the importance of national borders, and said technology has reshaped the world into one that the U.S. must engage at the risk of being left behind. He said Trump and others who want to look inward are making a mistake, even in the face of rising tension and violence in the world.
“For some people, that is all they need simply to climb under the sheets, close their eyes and push the world away,” Kerry said. “And shockingly, we even see this attitude from some who think they ought to be entrusted with the job of managing international affairs.”
“The future demands from us something more than a nostalgia for some rose-tinted version of the past that did not really exist in any case,” he said. “You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.”
I don’t believe Donald Trump has ever said or ever hinted that we should “climb under the sheets, close our eyes, and push the world away.” That’s one gigantic straw man that Kerry has set up. Equating protecting our borders with putting one’s head in the sand is outrageously stupid. Only an open-borders nutcase would make such a statement.
It wouldn’t be that bad if all of our neighbors had developed economies. But who in their right mind would want to live in Guatemala or Nicaragua, border or not? “Borderless” would have to be a two-way street, with people gravitating toward opportunity. The only people who would want to “gravitate” toward Guatemala are drug lords and human traffickers.
Trump is wrong about building a wall. Devoting considerably more resources to border security while working with our southern neighbors to limit the surge of people coming our way by using the carrot and stick of foreign aid (something Obama has failed to do) would be a start to getting the situation under control.
Ultimately, illegal alien immigration is a long-term problem that can only really be solved when the economies of Mexico and Central America are developed enough to convince people that there is opportunity right where they are and that there’s no need to come to America.
But a borderless America would make living here a nightmare.
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