Paris Must Not Lead To Barricades

After terrorists strike, the first instinct is to raise walls.
But democracies thrive on openness. By Peter Coy

The priority of every person and every
society is to survive. President François
Hollande declared the emergency closing
of France’s borders after terrorists struck
Paris on Nov. 13. The following Monday
he announced to Parliament, meeting in
Versailles, that Europe as a whole must
keep out enemies, or France will take
matters into its own hands. Lives, he
said, were at stake. “If Europe doesn’t
control its external borders, it is the
return of national borders or walls and
barbed wire,” Hollande said. After the
speech he and the lawmakers sternly
sang La Marseillaise.
It’s not just a shaken France that’s
talking about walls and barbed wire.
Hungary just built a wall along its border
with Serbia. India has walled itself of
from Bangladesh. Israel has fenced the
West Bank and Gaza. Morocco built a
sand berm to block attacks by separatists
fromWestern Sahara. And in the U.S.,
Donald Trump leapt to the front of the
race for the Republican presidential nomination
by promising to build “the greatest
wall that you’ve ever seen” on the
long border with Mexico.
A wall going up is prima facie evidence
that something bad is going down.
Terrorism isn’t the only thing, of course:
Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister
Viktor Orban have both mentioned
keeping out rapists and job stealers
as justiications for their barriers. But
terrorism is what has taken wall building
from a fringe concern to the mainstream.
Concrete barriers, metal fences,
barbed wire, searchlights, guard dogs,
and jeep patrols along borders are physical
evidence of the damage that terrorism
has done to the sense that we’re all
in this together.
The tragedy is that walls hurt those
who obey the law more than terrorists,
who usually ind a way to go over, under,
or around them. What’s worse, isolating
entire communities and nations
because potential terrorists live among
them often backires, engendering more
of the hatred that it’s meant to protect
against. That’s what makes terrorism so
diabolical: Like an autoimmune disease,
it provokes civilized societies to behave
in self-defeating ways.
A terrorism-induced backlash against
migration would harm rich and poor
alike. Wealthy, aging nations need young
workers, while immigrants need jobs and
money to send home to their families.
Nations such as Japan that are allergic to
immigration are paying a stif price for
their splendid isolation in terms of low
growth, while immigration-friendly countries
like Germany are reaping rewards.
Even in this chaotic year, the German
Institute for Economic Research in Berlin
calculates that the immigration surge will
account for about 0.2 percentage points
of Germany’s estimated 1.8 percent
output growth, mostly because of the
Keynesian stimulus of higher government
spending.
Europe provides some of the strongest
evidence of the beneits of openness. Percapita
income would now be 50 percent
lower in Ireland and 25 percent lower
in Denmark and the U.K. if they hadn’t
joined the predecessor to the European
Union in 1973, according to a calculation
by Nauro Campos of Brunel University,
Fabrizio Coricelli of the Paris School
of Economics, and Luigi Moretti of the
University of Padova published last year
by the U.K.-based Centre for Economic
Policy Research.
Europe’s Schengen agreement, which
allows passport-free travel between signatory
nations, is at risk of unraveling
under the stress of mass migration (itself
fueled by terror in the Middle East) and
now the Paris attacks. Schengen, concluded
in 1985 and efective since 1995,
is one of the proudest achievements
of modern Europe—more popular and
more widely adopted than the euro.
The ability to drive between countries
without so much as tapping the brakes
has promoted tourism, trade, and the
free movement of labor. Italian companies
do more business with the Swiss,
because their trucks don’t get stopped
at the border. And Chinese tourists are
more likely to visit Germany if they know
they can swing through France and Spain
as well without getting another visa.
When two countries are in Schengen,
trade between them increases an extra
0.1 percent each year, says Dane Davis,
a commodity researcher who co-wrote a
paper on Schengen published last year in
the World Economy, an academic journal.
To young, cosmopolitan Europeans,
the threat to reimpose border controls
inside Europe is as alarming as
it would be to Americans if New York
announced it was going to check documents
at the George Washington Bridge.
Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany,
the Netherlands, Slovakia, Slovenia, and
Sweden have begun some form of emergency
border checks. If Schengen dissolves,
trade and investment ties could
begin to unravel as well, because countries
would begin to lose the sense of
European unity, says Adriano Bosoni, a
Barcelona-based analyst for geopolitical
consulting irm Stratfor. “Once you start
abolishing the founding principles of the
EU, it’s like a domino efect,” he says.
The trick, as always, is to target the bad
guys—terrorists, organized criminals—
without harming innocent people in
the communities that they’ve wormed
their way into. Walls rarely accomplish
both goals. The fence between India
and Bangladesh has stopped trade in
ish but not in contraband Indian-made
cough syrup, consumed as a narcotic,
that “is wreaking havoc with our youth,”
Bangladeshi social activist and business
leader Sabera Ahmed Koli told Al Jazeera.
There’s mounting evidence that
Western banks have overreacted in complying
with anti-money-laundering laws
aimed at cutting of terrorists’ access to
inancing. Through strict implementation
of the new rules, big banks are making
it harder for people to remit money to
family members and “driving people to
go back to informal channels where [the
transactions] are less visible,” says Nestor
Espenilla Jr., deputy governor in charge
of supervision at the central bank of the
Philippines. In Somalia, “the fear is that
without remittances, the terrorist group
Al-Shabaab will take advantage of the
desperation of Somalis,” Representative
Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said earlier this
year. A U.S. Department of Treasury
spokesman says it’s “working hard to
facilitate legitimate inancial lows.”
Terrorists are quick to work their
mind games on immigrants who feel
isolated or abandoned in the wealthy
nations they now call home. It’s worth
remembering that most refugees want
nothing to do with terrorists, who since
2000 have committed 97 percent of
their murders in poor nations such as
Nigeria, Syria, and Afghanistan, according
to the Institute for Economics and
Peace. In the U.S. and in Europe, governments
need to strengthen their ties
to immigrant communities to get early
warning signs of disafection, anger, and
radicalization, says Eli Berman, a specialist
on the economics of terrorism at the
University of California at San Diego. In
other words, break down walls that terrorists
would rather build higher. Says
Berman: “Radicalism is all about creating
distance from mainstream society.”
Hope, not walls, is the best protection
against terrorism, says Jamal Nassar,
a political scientist at California State
University at San Bernardino, who was
born in Jerusalem two years before Israel
was founded in 1948. “You cannot build
a wall around the world. People will ind
a way, tunnel under walls, ly over. They
will ind a way if they are determined to
bring about violence.” Conversely, Nassar
says, “when there is light at the end of
the tunnel, people will move forward and
try to improve their lives.”
That ode to openness is hard to
absorb when the killers are at your door.
The tendency is to withdraw, to defend.
And politicians don’t help matters when
they play to the worst instincts of their
people. Governors of at least 26 U.S.
states have said they oppose eforts to
have refugees from Syria relocated to
their states. In Germany, Chancellor
Angela Merkel is under ire from opposition
politicians for inviting about
1 million asylum seekers into the country
this year. To his credit, Hollande isn’t all
about barriers. He vowed on Nov. 18 to
take in 30,000 immigrants over the next
two years.
The best reason not to wall oneself of
is that most people around the world,
most of the time, are pretty reasonable.
Islamic State is a dramatic exception.
Ultimately, though, its bloody extremism
makes Islamic State its own worst
enemy. Even al-Qaeda doesn’t like it.
Says Berman, the expert on the economics
of terrorism: “The suicidal shooter,
that’s an efective strategy. The suicidal
caliphate, that’s a doomed strategy.”