Death knell of open-border policy

WESTERN COUNTRIES ALL RETHINK OPEN BORDER POLICY

CORONAVIRUS FINAL STRAW

The push back against the policy of open borders is now winning the debate. In the United States Democrats no longer openly endorse the policy of open borders, because it is a losing issue. Trump and those that believe in controlling the U.S. borders have won that debate. While privately the democrats continue to hope to implement open borders, it will not be part of their public platform. 

The implementation of Brexit or the secession of the United Kingdom from the European community is only the first of what could be a cascade. There are movements in all the EU countries to curtail immigration. While Austria, Italy and Greece were threatened for controlling immigration in the past, the EU has now supported Greece and others in their strong stand in stopping immigration from the middle east.

The policy of the EU to have open borders between the member countries was not a bad idea, but its flaw was that anyone who entered any country illegally was then allowed to move unhindered to any other EU country. This put a severe strain on their social safety net and introduced a cultural assault on all of Europe. If everyone in the world could just enter and sign up for benefits it would lead to collapse of the whole area. 

The EU started out as the European Common market, but soon progressed into the European Union with ruling from Brussels, Belgium. Their hope was to eliminate nations and borders and nationalism and replace it with one big government.  While they will continue to attempt to hold it together, it will continue to loose members and power.

In the United States, if control of the southern border is lost, we could expect 50 million more migrants from failed states to our south. While some believe this is a good thing, the majority have rejected this idea.

The western countries over the course of decades have developed a social system of high quality healthcare and sanitation. Many diseases were mostly eliminated from the population. There has been a step backwards with the rise of international travel and uncontrolled immigration. We have seen the reemergence of diseases of the past and the addition of cases of Leprosy, dengue fever, Ebola and other rare disease never seen before. We have also seen the sanitation of our large cities deteriorate to the point were they are vulnerable to outbreaks of typhoid fever, Cholera and other serious disease. Standards in some big cites are now similar to third world countries. Political correctness inhibits attempt to address these issues. Much of it is rooted in the open borders ideology.

With the Coronavirus pandemic, this will bring into review all these open travel policies around the world. In the past, epidemics often were isolated in countries and continents. Now travelers can be in China one day and be in 5 other countries in a matter of days. It sets up a serious risk of more and deadlier pandemics, whether accidental or intentional. The risk of terrorists now seeing the panic and damage done by fear is now a real possibility. If someone is willing to strap a bomb onto their body to kill themselves and dozens of other people, does anyone doubt that they will be willing to infect themselves with a deadly communicable disease and travel as far and have as many contacts as possible. 

While anyone who sought to restrict travel from countries with low standards of identification and large numbers of suspected terrorists has been vilified as racist, xenophobic, or worse, these policies will not be accepted as prudent. You can now add low standards of disease control.

There will need to be better screening and possibly a limit on the extent of travel in a short time. Possibly restricting  travel to no more than 1 country within a week or some other restriction. You can bet the world is going to change in many ways in the near future.