The trouble with ‘taking back control’

I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country means anything, it surely entails first and foremost a clear understanding of who comes under that country’s protection — and who doesn’t. Otherwise a country is just a patch on a map.

Yet I’ve always found Leavers’ high hopes for reduced immigration heartbreaking. Cutting ties with the EU was never going to limit the migrants apt to put the greatest pressure on British borders this century: immigrants from outside the EU, especially from high-birth-rate countries in Africa and the Middle East — who, absent an unlikely new agreement by the end of the Brexit transition period, will only be more difficult to return to the Continent.

Back in 1984, the editorial board of America’s right-leaning Wall Street Journal argued for a five-word constitutional amendment: ‘There shall be open borders.’ But such outright support for goodie bags brimming with bottled water and ‘Welcome to the USA!’ coffee mugs on the American side of the Rio Grande is rare. Two years ago, even the Journal backtracked on open borders, when the board couldn’t stick the reality of what they’d been inviting: a rowdy caravan of more than 7,000 overwhelmingly unskilled, impoverished Hondurans teeming towards Texas.

Western immigration enforcement is drowning in due process. It’s too costly, too complicated and too hard

The left will often gesture limply towards controlled immigration, while advocating policies that so reward violating immigration statutes, and that so tie the hands of immigration authorities, that the position amounts to open borders in all but name. These days, leftists perceive any enforcement of immigration law as racist.

Alas, among conservatives, we often see a parallel disingenuousness. Centre-right politicians make rhetorical noises about sending illegal immigrants packing, while never addressing the primary pull factors. Frustrated by bureaucratic impotence, civil servant incompetence, endless legal gambits and appeals, they conspicuously fail to put deportations where their mouths are.