4-26-06, 8:41 am
In 1870, when Victor Hugo, a pacifist writer and social critic, proposed that Europe form a union based on principles of free commerce, peace and universal justice, the idea was dismissed as naive, preposterous and undesirable. A couple of decades after Hugo died, however, traditional European rivalries and chauvinism drove the continent into two world wars with an estimated death toll of 70 million people.
In the aftermath of the carnage, Europeans began to think more radically. What if a democratic union really could be formed to live in peace without borders?
The project began humbly in 1951, when a few nations established the European Coal and Steel Community. From that small success, inspired idealists worked diligently for another half century.
Today, Hugo’s dream is reality. Europe has a common market and currency. Customs and passport checkpoints have been abolished at many internal borders, resulting in a peaceful and democratic free zone for travel, work and investment. There are 20 official European languages, spoken by a total of 460,000,000 souls, roughly the population of North America.
The EU is hardly paradise, but it is a model for how many fiercely nationalistic groups, long accustomed to slaughtering each other over the most trivial of pretexts, can create a new and better world from the ashes of devastation and atrocity.
What prevents the US, Mexico and Canada from embarking on a similar road to borderless unification?
It wouldn’t be easy. First of all, it would cost a fortune. We’d need the equivalent of a Marshall Plan to aid Mexico. But if we’ve got $275 billion (and counting!) to wage war and remake Iraq in our image, why not find the funds for waging peace and providing health, education and social welfare for our fellow inhabitants of North America?
There would be countless other obstacles, not the least of which is winning the trust and partnership of the various native cultures and Indian nations with whom our credibility, as well as Mexico’s, is stretched almost beyond repair. We’d also need to address legitimate security and counter-terrorism concerns. We’d need to respect cultural, historical and religious differences. We might have to give up on the idea of military dominance over the rest of the world. But Europe faced similar challenges and is prevailing.
If, like the critics of Victor Hugo, you think a North America without borders is utopian, consider the perils of the anti-utopia currently under discussion: a 2000-mile wall, an ultra-militarized border zone, ghettoization of the Mexican labor force, and criminalization of their presence north of the border. Such a system is a throwback to an age of runaway slaves, collective punishment and debtors prisons. It is impractical, immoral and unsustainable.
Mexican workers arrive in our country as economic refugees, organically following the job market. They are here because US employers have put up several million Help Wanted signs, and because, for one reason or another, their opportunities have eroded at home.
Denying the facts of job shortage there and job surplus here is a fundamental error. As a nation we have said, “We want you, need you and love you; but we also want to incarcerate or deport you whenever we feel like it.” This schizoid message has millions of workers in the streets protesting: “We clean your toilets, pick your vegetables and serve your hamburgers. This is the thanks we get?”
We need to address immigration and dozens of other problems at their source on both sides of the imaginary lines we draw in the sand. We can’t do it overnight. It may take a decade, and it may take a century. May 1, the National Day of Action for immigrant rights, is a good time to begin the conversation.
Victor Hugo said, “There is nothing like a dream to create the future.” A North America without borders is such a dream. On the other hand, raids, walls and the criminalization of honest labor are vile nightmares.
--David Howard (DavidHoward@aol.com) is co-chair of Citizens for Peaceful Resolutions.
