Law professor Ilya Somin makes a very poor analogy between Trump’s Mexican tariffs and the Berlin Wall in this article entitled and subtitled, “Trump’s Plan to Force Mexico to Lock In its Own People: The President’s effort to coerce Mexico into blocking the emigration of its own people undermines the distinction between keeping people out and locking them in. It thereby makes US immigration policy analogous to the Berlin Wall.”
What’s wrong with this? Let me count the ways (and I’ll probably miss a few). Firstly, Mexicans can go to other countries that will let them in, and that’s most of the countries (or perhaps all of the countries) in the world—including the US, but more about that later. The only country involved here is the US, which like any other country has a right to (a) ban or restrict any immigrants it wants, and (b) put tariffs on any goods it wants for any reason it wants.
On the other hand, the East German government (via, among other mechanisms, the Berlin Wall) kept its own people in and did not just restrict them from going to a single country. They were not allowed to go to huge chunks of the rest of the world—the West, freedom. Nothing even remotely like would be happening in Mexico if tariffs were to be implemented.
But there’s another huge error. Trump is not proposing to actually keep Mexicans out of this country. The idea is to keep those who have tried to enter illegally out. We even accept some of those who enter illegally, if they are determined to have a bona fide claim of asylum. These are the sort of restrictions any country has a right to impose, and most do impose, and if another country (in this case, Mexico) is facilitating the flouting of these rules we (or any other country) have a right to use lawful means to economically pressure them to stop.
You may agree or disagree with Trump’s tariff proposal (there’s plenty of room for disagreement), but there is zero analogy to the Berlin Wall—which by the way (historical note coming) only applied to keep the people of East Germany and out of the city of West Berlin, not the entire country of West Germany. Of course, the East German people were also kept out of West Germany and the entire West, but the Berlin Wall was not the main mechanism for that. The Berlin Wall was built because of the fact that Berlin, the former capital of a unified Germany which started WWII, was located in the heart of East Germany and even towards the eastern part of that heart, geographically speaking. Therefore West Berlin constituted a tiny piece of enticing freedom wholly embedded within the unfree East Germany.
Author Ilya Somin probably chose “Berlin Wall” as an analogy because it raises an emotional response; just about everyone knows something about the Berlin Wall and that is that it was a bad thing. But for the sake of accuracy, he should have at least written about the Inner German border which was the actual Cold War border between the countries of East and West Germany. It was a dangerous line to cross, and could (and did) get people shot:
[The Inner German border] was formally established on 1 July 1945 as the boundary between the Western and Soviet occupation zones of former Nazi Germany. On the eastern side, it was made one of the world’s most heavily fortified frontiers, defined by a continuous line of high metal fences and walls, barbed wire, alarms, anti-vehicle ditches, watchtowers, automatic booby traps, and minefields. It was patrolled by 50,000 armed East German guards who faced tens of thousands of West German, British, and US guards and soldiers. In the hinterlands behind the border were more than a million North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and Warsaw Pact troops.
The border was a physical manifestation of Sir Winston Churchill’s metaphorical Iron Curtain that separated the Soviet and Western blocs during the Cold War. It marked the boundary between two ideological systems—democratic capitalism and single-party communism. Built by East Germany in phases from 1952 to the late 1980s, the fortifications were constructed to stop the large-scale emigration of East German citizens to the West, about 1,000 of whom are said to have died trying to cross it during its 45-year existence…
The better-known Berlin Wall was a physically separate, less elaborate, and much shorter border barrier surrounding West Berlin,
Not very much like tariffs. But what the hey, don’t let that stand in the way of an emotional argument.
Somin goes on:
The whole point of the [tariff] plan is precisely to force Mexico to lock in its own people.
This argument can be countered by the ones I’ve already mentioned: the people of Mexico are not locked in, they can go just about anywhere in the world if they’ve got the money and the visas. Some Mexicans can even come here—many, actually, especially to visit. But in addition, many of the “migrants” involved are not Mexicans at all. In other words, they are not Mexico’s “own people”—(a point Somin concedes later in his piece, but which IMHO is somewhat irrelevant to his argument either way, pro or con).
In addition, Mexico is free to comply or not to comply with whatever pressure the US exerts. Is pressuring a country the same as “forcing” it? Of course not. Pressure of the sort Trump proposes—tariffs—are a legal tactic, and if they are implemented then Mexico can make its own decision about what to do.
More:
Defenders of Trump’s action could argue that there is a distinction between locking people in completely and “merely” preventing them from leaving for a specific destination (such as the US). But surely we would still condemn the Berlin Wall if the East German government had said its purpose was to block its citizens from moving to the West, but they were still free to leave for other communist nations.
Another false (and in fact rather ludicrous) analogy. A more appropriate equivalent would be if the US were trying to stop Mexicans from traveling to Western countries as a whole, or European countries as a whole, or even one other other country besides the US, or any place they would actually still be free to travel—or even to emigrate to, if those countries let them. But there is only one country involved here, the US, not the West or any other group or any other particular way of life. And, as I said before, they also would not even be blocked entirely from coming here, only from coming illegally.
Somin goes on:
Blocking the right to emigrate is a violation of international law.
But no one is blocking Mexicans’ right to emigrate, or even suggesting such a thing. They would continue to be free to leave the country.
I will add that the only reason Trump feels the need to do this is that there is not an effective wall in place, and that’s because Congress has blocked it. So the tariffs are a policy he is proposing because of the lack of a wall that works.
Whether Trump’s tariff proposal is a good idea or a bad one is an entirely separate issue, a practical issue the pros and cons of which can be discussed. Such a policy can be objected to and criticized without resorting to preposterous and emotion-laden analogies.
Regarding those tariffs and all the criticism thereof—I’m not saying tariffs are a good idea to actually implement, but I was under the impression that at the moment they are a bargaining chip, an opening bid in a complex negotiation. Isn’t that how these things tend to work? The tariff proposal (or actual tariffs, if they are implemented) may not be successful, but so far isn’t this one of those Art of the Deal things? I thought that was glaringly obvious.
[NOTE: Somin is a libertarian, if I’m not mistaken. He was born in the USSR and came here at the age of five, and teaches law at George Mason University.]
