What does "close the border" actually mean?

I had this conversation on the Tennessean comments page, wherein Larry Tanner was saying we should "close the border". I asked for clarification, tried to provide some of my own, and everything got honest in a surprising direction. It was refreshing, when most people just spit out talking points and call each other names.

The original topic was Obama's requested appropriations to execute the law relating to the present refugee crisis. Keep in mind, I am not with the below advocating any course of action, nor am I condoning any of Larry's positions. I am simply saying we all need to be clear about what we're suggesting should be done.

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Larry: I wouldn't be against this if a portion, probably a large portion, was used to close the border to illegal immigration. Without the border being closed, this would only be a Band-Aid requiring more billions to care for the next wave of "children" which are sure to come.

Stephen: Define what the border being "closed" would look like. I mean, it's not like these children are crossing undetected or unimpeded. They cross the border and turn themselves in. What do you want, a giant two-thousand mile impenetrable wall?

Larry: Impede them. I know the feds won't do this but the Texans can and are doing this as we type. The gist of the letter was money. Take care of the ones that are here until we can send them back and stop completely any more from getting their grubby little toes in the Rio Grande.

Stephen: How?

Larry: Threaten the Mexicans with sanctions or tell them to stem the tide or we'll come to the south side of the border and do it for them. Might take out a few drug cartels while we're at it. You're the engineer, how would you do it? Excuse the question, I already know your answer.

Stephen: I'm not necessarily disagreeing with that solution. But I do think it's important to say that's what we're talking about, because I don't think many people have thought about it in those terms. We are talking here about invading and occupying a part of Mexico. That's not a trivial thing.

Invading Mexico has consequences. We need UN approval, or we risk a huge amount of goodwill from the international community. And we actually need that goodwill, believe it or not. We burned a huge amount invading Iraq illegally, and I don't think we could get away with that again.

Now, that said, Mexico is in large part a failed state, and I think we need new international legal structures for handling failed states. If we're threatened from Mexican territory, and the Mexican state can't control their territory well enough to eliminate that threat, we should have some legal means of recourse. I wrote about that here.

In a lot of ways, what we're contemplating is worse than the Iraq invasion, because there is no end game! It's not like we'll eventually leave. We're basically permanently annexing a piece of Mexico to create this hypothetical border zone. In so doing, American soldiers WILL die, and the financial costs will be enormous. The political will may simply not be here internally to sustain an occupation.

Now, compare the cost of your proposed invasion and occupation of part of Mexico to the cost of the uncontrolled border. Which costs more? I really don't know, but I'm betting it's not as easy a decision as it looked before we started talking about it in these terms.

Larry: Nothing is easy these days. I read your link and a lot of thought was put into it and I agree with you on a lot of things. I think you put more importance in the UN than most. Too much in fact. It isn't the organization it once was. If we don't address the southern border and secure it we may very well find ourselves in a position the Israelis are in today with Hamas.

Stephen: The UN as an organization isn't so bad, as long as you don't expect it to be more than it is. If the world is going to get together and say "this kind of thing is not okay", the UN is the place those kinds of statements happen. It has no actual power, nor was it ever intended to. So if we were going to occupy part of Mexico, for any reason, the UN would be where the world discussion about whether that was okay or not would take place.

What I'm really interested in is that we don't act unilaterally on something like this, which violates agreements we've made to not do that. We don't need to look like the bad guy any more than absolutely necessary, because that hurts us in the long run. And we need to make sure we don't set precedent that can be used against us. The UN is the forum for that kind of thing.

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Failed States

The modern state is based on territorial integrity. Here's the cartoon version: we divide the world into regions with clear borders, each region with a government. The government of a region are the only ones allowed to use force in that region. If the government of a region uses force on another region, that's called a war.

But what if a government can't control its territory? What if the people of a region use force on another, without the permission of the government? This describes much of the conflict in the world today. Huge swaths of the world are failed states, areas where no government has control.

Think about what that means for a moment. Civilization as we live it is only possible because life is made predictable. The government guarantees my security, unless you do certain pre-defined things. That allows me to gather wealth without worry about it being stolen by someone with more guns than I have. That in turn allows me to have leisure time, lets me invest, get an education, and not spend every waking moment worrying about bandits taking everything I have and killing me. Removal of chaos improves quality of life. Failed states lack that guarantee.

Further, what if a group in a failed state wants to attack another state? Terrorists, militias, drug cartels, such entities threaten other states. But the usual means of handling such situations don't apply. If you don't like what the Taliban is doing (and who does?), negotiating with the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan is pointless. They don't control the relevant territory. Similarly, the Palestinian government may not be able to prevent all Palestinians from attacking Israel, and the Mexican government clearly can not shut down the cartels shipping drugs into the United States.

The concept of failed states is one of the great geopolitical problems of this century. Their very existence challenges all the rules we've put in place to deal with states. But how do you change it? If other armed groups can challenge the local government, how can this be resolved? Someone has to end up the biggest fish the pond again. Either the borders are redrawn, or one side defeats the other and takes the whole state. The former is usually the kind of civil war that ends up in tens of thousands of deaths, and the latter rarely ends in functioning democracy. Dictatorship may be stable in the short term, but in the long term you can't deprive a populace of what they want forever. Trying leads right back to violence. So unless your state lucks out and gets a particularly enlightened dictator who can successfully transition to democracy, you end up with a succession of dictators and civil wars. (See the above map.)

Surely there must be a better option.

For a region to be successful, security of the people in that region must be guaranteed in a predictable fashion. That guarantee can only be made by a stable power with definite rules, and sufficient force to take on all potential adversaries. In short, an area needs rules and force. Either can be developed internally or externally. Failed states, by definition, can not control their territory with internal force.

What about external force? Well, if an external force enters your country and starts enforcing its own rules, we typically call that an invasion and colonization by an empire. Frowned upon these days. But what if an external force enters a country and starts enforcing local rules? What if you've got (at least by historical standards) a quasi-benevolent empire? That would be state-building. We've seen this happen in a number of cases, with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it's a dismal failure, but it can work.

So take the Marshall Plan to rebuild Germany after the second World War, probably our most successful endeavor. I suggest the world should use that example as a base for a long-term project to restore civilization to these chaos regions, one small sliver at a time. It may take centuries, but it may be the only way to build up a failed state into a successful one that can stand on its own. Someone comes in, kicks out all the armed gangs from one city or small region, and secures the area long enough for economy and infrastructure to be put in place.

So how would this happen? If there's enough government to ask, we can go by invitation. ("Hey, we'd like to come spend a hundred billion dollars fixing your country for the next three generations. Good by you?") But if there's no government to negotiate with, it has to be by external consensus. The UN would have to agree that a region would benefit from (mostly) peaceful intervention, and there would need to be evidence that the local populace would respond positively. Only then would intervention be considered.

But who provides the force? There are two prongs to this, after all. You send in construction workers and educators and bureaucrats and whoever else it takes to train a populace to modernize. But you also have to send military force, because security was the original concern. That force could operate under the UN, but they don't have much of an army. The actual force is most likely provided by nearby neighbors able to spare the materiel. This runs into problems with areas the size of Africa, where it would take literally centuries to work from the outside in. But this is envisioned as a very long-term project.

So either we go in by invitation, or the UN gets together, declares some area to not be part of a functioning state, and takes over administration, security, education, etc. How do we get out? There has to be an exit strategy, a definite series of steps towards internal democratization, with more and more being taken over by locals over the years. There have to be definite metrics and milestones, constant improvement every year, or people will stop believing in the goals. It will start to look like an unending occupation.

Now, there are a lot of failed states. How do we pick one? The one with the richest neighbor? The one with the most destabilizing impact on the world? North Korea is an obvious choice by those criteria, being close to South Korea, China, and Japan. But good luck with that! Haiti is another obvious choice, being practically on the USA's doorstep. Or perhaps the US and Europe should go for broke and fix Somalia, which has been near the top of the list since anyone started keeping track.

Okay, so this is crazy. I know it. But think about it this way: we spent over a trillion dollars destroying Iraq, and half that destroying Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, including thousands of our own. And what have we bought with all that blood and treasure? Nothing. We are no safer. The people of Iraq and Afghanistan are no safer (excepting Kurdistan, they're almost certainly better off). We could have taken that money and multiplied the GDP of Haiti by a factor of ten, and that's just by throwing money at the problem. Education and infrastructure would give vastly better returns than that. That's ten million people whose lives would be permanently improved, instead of millions ruined.

Here's my point: if we're going to spend that much on another country, let's get something for it. Let's be a force for good in the world. Let's build things, instead of destroying them.

Of course, I'm not saying we should spend that much on another country. I'd sooner see us spend it here. That will be my next series of posts.

Moving Borders

Much of modern geopolitics is based on the idea of territorial integrity. A state has these borders, and they are not to be changed. When we invaded Iraq, our stated goal was to ensure a unified country was left behind. When countries try to change the borders of other countries, the international community freaks out, and often lots of people die.

Territorial integrity, like most political concepts, is a nice fiction. There are still border changes. There always have been, and always will be. We're naive to think that the arbitrary lines we've drawn on the map this century will last the rest of time, as if they're different from the arbitrary lines of the past.

Let's look at Iraq for an example. Why is Iraq falling apart right now? Because fundamentally, Iraq has no reason to exist as a single country. There are three major groups, all with their own interests and territory, and none of whom really have a desire to be unified with each other. (Overly broad general statements, obviously.) Iraq came into existence because foreign powers drew the borders, and it's stayed in existence by brute force of the central government. With that force gone, there's nothing holding that country together. The same phenomenon is pulling Syria apart.

Most border changes come about due to war. And war, we would all agree, is an expensive and risky proposition, best avoided. There may be circumstances where war is the best available option, but when it comes to the kinds of wars that lead to border changes, that's not generally the case. We should try to find a better general solution.

(I should say at this point that I am not, with this writing, advocating any particular instance of border change. I am interested in systems that work, and in keeping people alive, not in achieving any particular political end. This should not be interpreted as commentary on any particular revolution, war, or secession movement, past or present. If I choose to comment on those things, I will do so in an unmistakeable manner.)

There's a correlation between war and border change, but which causes which? Does the war cause the border change? Does the desire for border change cause the war? Or is there some third factor that causes both? Clearly, war is a consequence, not the root cause. In many cases, people resort to violence when all peaceful means of achieving their desires have been cut off. (This is one of the reasons why democracy is more stable than totalitarianism; you can't deny people what they want forever.) To avoid violence, therefore, we need some means for people to have what they want. It must be possible for the will of the people to be recognized and executed, even if that means redrawing the map.

Now, redrawing national borders shouldn't be taken on lightly. We can't be talking about a unilateral, simple majority, one-time vote. If secession is too easy, the world becomes unstable instantly. But the barrier also can't be insurmountable, or the pressure buildup leads to the same instability. Wherever we draw the line, it needs to be fixed, so people on both sides know what to expect, and can't complain about the rules being rigged.

Since self-determination is the principle people are typically fighting over, obviously we need to hold a poll. Suppose a part of a state wants to secede. We poll everyone inside the region in question, to find out what they want. But they're not the only interested party; we should also poll the rest of the country. (For multi-sided issues like Iraq, or areas that want to leave one country and join another, we'd need to expand this. Things can get exponentially complex. Right now we'll just address the simplest case.) We have to be sure that the poll is valid, that votes are counted accurately and cast without coercion. Uninvolved international observers are required. There would also have to be some agreement on who gets to vote, age limits, sex, citizenship, that sort of thing. There's going to have to be some serious negotiation going on before the actual vote is held.

But what are the people actually voting on? Obviously if we're talking about redrawing national borders there are an infinitude of possible outcomes, and while only some finite set of them are of interest, it could still be a very long list. There's going to have to be a lot of discussion beforehand about what possibilities are of interest, and the list will have to include the status quo ante.

That means plurality voting won't work; it's fundamentally broken for more than two ballot options. We need either some sort of ranked-choice system, or approval voting. I prefer approval voting for American elections, but in a case like this a Condorcet system might be more appropriate. However, approval voting has one significant advantage over ranked systems: approval can clearly show when no option is acceptable to a majority of the voters. That's useful information in a situation like this.

So we can hold a vote, and gather the opinions of all relevant people in a detailed and accurate fashion. What now? Obviously you can't just treat them as one big vote; the whole point of this is to give the majority in a region a way to win out over the rest of their country without violence. So we need a system for combining the two sets of preferences into a single outcome, in such a way that the votes in the seceding region are equal to the votes outside that region.

The simplest idea is to weight the regions by population. If the main body of the country has ten times the population of the area that wants to secede, give the area that wants to secede ten times the weight. Then combine all the votes into a single count. Unfortunately, the simple idea leads to some absurdities. By this standard, if a region of one person wanted to secede, it would take a unanimous vote of the rest of the country to stop them! Clearly that's not stable. So we reduce the weight by some negotiable factor. This way the people doing the leaving get more weight, but the people being left still count for something. It tends to force people to find an acceptable middle ground.

(This gets more complicated still if the area that wants to secede isn't clearly defined, and that's one of the issues being voted on! Presumably you'd have to evaluate each choice of borders with different weights, depending on who would be on which side of the line. To fully develop this set of rules for every possible circumstance is clearly impossible.)

And this is all theory. It's nice to have a mechanism that could be implemented. Making people accept it, that's a whole different problem. You can hold all the polls you want, but some people don't really care about the outcome of polls. But not everywhere is like that! If such a system were in place, how many secession movements would we see try it in more peaceful areas? How much better would it be for the central governments in those countries? After all, a successful and popular movement that's suppressed by the government makes that government less legitimate. And an unpopular movement that's clearly identified as just being a few troublemakers also helps. There's no downside.

Unless, of course, you're just particularly attached to keeping the map from changing for the rest of time. I, for one, am not.

Guyana as a US state?

Guyana is a small country in the northern part of South America. It was a Dutch colony, then an English one. They became independent in 1966. Its 760,000 people speak English.

And some of them want to join the United States.

According to that group, half the population of Guyana has left in the last few decades. And half of those emigres came to the United States, and most of the remaining population is trying to get here! Relations between the countries are close.

It's an interesting concept.