Migration has tied both U.S. and Britain governments in knots

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on January 22, 2019.

My, but we Canadians can be a smug bunch. Looking south at the paralytic mess that passes for politics in Donald Trump’s America, it’s hard to avoid the self-satisfied feeling that we do it all so much better.

And now, even more delightfully, those so inclined can peer across the Atlantic and enjoy the quiet schadenfreude that comes from the fact that Britain, the other democracy we feel closest to, the very font of parliamentary democracy, is screwing things up just as badly.

Both countries have tied their governments in knots, and seem to have forgotten how to untangle them. Both are two years into populist experiments that, to put it mildly, aren’t going as planned. In both, the political establishment is being shaken by a backlash against open borders and mass migration.

In Washington, the federal government is literally shut down as Trump wrangles with Democrats over funding the southern border wall that has become the symbol of his drive to seal the U.S. off from outside threats.

In London, the government is still operating, but barely. After two historic votes this week, Parliament has confirmed only that the Brexit cement has hardened around its feet. It cannot figure out a way to quit the European Union, but neither can it stay without breaking faith with the 17 million voters who cast ballots in 2016 to leave.

There seems to be no way out, short of the much-dreaded option of a “no-deal Brexit” on March 29, the date set by the government of Prime Minister Theresa May for exiting the EU. If nothing is worked out by then and the deadline is not extended, Britain will, in the current term of art, “crash out” of the EU without having put in place any alternate arrangements on how to manage its complex relationship with the rest of Europe.

All sorts of disasters are predicted if that comes to pass: a major short-term hit as trading relationships and supply chains are massively disrupted, and a longer-term decline in Britain’s economy of something like 2 to 3 per cent. Plus an unknown fate for millions of Britons living in Europe and EU citizens in Britain.

If there’s any safe prediction, it’s that Britain and the EU will muddle through somehow and most likely avoid the direst consequences. At the moment, though, all they have is the muddle. It’s far from clear that the EU will even agree to extend the March 29 deadline as long as the British remain unable to agree among themselves on a way forward.

It is, to use a word more often invoked to describe political dysfunction in Washington, gridlock. In both capitals, political establishments cling to power but lack the legitimacy to move things forward. In the words of a long-dead philosopher, the old world is dying while the new struggles to be born. It is, he wrote, “the time of monsters.” And it ain’t pretty.

The issue at the root of both crises is essentially the same as well.

In the United States, Trump has drawn his line in the sand — and it runs right along the border with Mexico. His facts about the need to spend $5 billion on a border wall don’t add up, as has been well-documented; the number of border crossers is actually way down from a few years ago and there has never been a confirmed case of a terrorist coming into the U.S. over the southern border.

But it’s not about “facts.” The wall has become a symbol of the angst felt by many Americans, Trump voters in particular, about immigration and the changing population make-up of the U.S. It’s about putting up a literal barrier to change, demographic and economic.

Likewise in the U.K., much of what animates the Brexit debate involves attitudes toward change. Columnist Jonathan Freedland notes that when May set out to negotiate a Brexit deal with the EU (the one that was resoundingly rejected by the British House of Commons this week), she dug in her heels on abolishing the free movement of people into Britain — “in other words, keeping migrants out.”

If Britain was more flexible on that point, a much different type of Brexit deal might have been possible, one that retained the benefits of a common market. But for May’s Conservatives, choking off the influx of foreigners into Britain was a core concern, perhaps the main issue.

It’s worth remembering, finally, that the British crisis is entirely self-inflicted. The U.K.’s relationship with Europe is a perpetual issue in British politics, in particular among Conservatives. But there was no general clamour for a referendum in 2016; then-PM David Cameron promised it in order to ease tensions inside the Conservative party, not to solve a pressing national issue.

The outcome surprised nearly everyone, much as the election of Donald Trump a few months later came as a shock — by some accounts even to Trump himself. The populists won, but had no idea of how to carry their projects through.

Two years on, they still have no clue. But the real-life consequences of their promises have come home to roost, and the risks of succumbing to the lure of populism are clearer than ever. The only winners are those who despise the western democracies and pray that they fail. And that’s no reason for smugness.

— Toronto Star

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