“The first thing that has to be done is secure the border. … East Germany was very, very able to reduce the flow… We have the capacity to, as a great nation, secure the border. If East Germany could do it, we could do it.”
Joe Miller’s answer to a question, at a public forum, about illegal immigration. Miller is running for the Senate from Alaska.
October 18th, 2010 at 7:39PM
He’s just trying to make Alaska safe from Canadians…
October 18th, 2010 at 8:45PM
Yow. Very ignorant thing to say. But then the East Germans always maintained that the reason for the wall, the minefields, the dogs, and the robotic machine guns was to keep the West Germans out. Didn’t think anyone really bought that.
October 19th, 2010 at 8:58AM
Nothing quite like studying history. Mikhail Gorbachev once twitted Ronald Reagan about the border fences near San Diego and El Paso. President Reagan responded with something about keeping people who want in out being different from keeping people who want out in.
October 19th, 2010 at 9:06AM
Exactly, Stephen.
October 19th, 2010 at 10:38AM
I think I want to know more context before I believe Mr. Miller is an admirer of East German border policies. There is also the possibility that he’s suggesting that if even a dysfunctional state like East Germany could find ways to secure its own borders, then certainly our nation should be able to find one, and find better ones than they did.
October 19th, 2010 at 11:31AM
thats just the logic of building a wall… there is not a lot of difference between keeping people in or out. In either case, building a wall denoted the failure of Policy.
In the DDR the communists built the wall after failing to persuade and engage their citizens in the project of creating a socialist state. Between 1945 and 1963 the SED struggled to bully, cajole, and coax people to stay, but to no avail. In the face of the massive brain drain, they threw up their hands and built a wall to keep everyone who was left in. That was the beginning of the end for East Germany.
The construction of the wall across the southwest began under Reagan in the 1980s and continues to this day. The American policy failure is a lot more complex: It is cloaked under the words “failed immigration policy.” But really there are a whole raft of failed foreign, domestic and economic policies in the US, Mexico and Latin America, that are responsible for nearly five decades of south to north migration. Building a wall is not going to solve the underlying policy failures. (Neither will demonizing illegal immigrants.)
If you have to build a border wall, you’ve screwed up someplace else. Better figure out what the underlying problem is before you sink more cash into unproductive concrete.
October 19th, 2010 at 4:18PM
Immigrants follow the money as they supply their labor. No US politician dares choke off demand by enforcing existing laws against employers.