Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall

Shining City on a Hill

SHINING CITY ON A HILL In his farewell address to the nation in 1989, President Ronald Reagan mused, as he had many times before in his political life, about a shining city on a hill. He spoke of the United States as a “tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.” His idyllic America was a beacon of freedom and opportunity for the world, with doors wide open “to anyone with the will and heart to get here.” Reagan’s “city on a hill” was not a notion of his own making , but an elaborated reference to previous leaders who had similarly expressed the promise of the United States. The “city on a hill” had been invoked by John F. Kennedy, and long before that, by Puritan John Winthrop, who had envisioned a model society, “watched by the world.” But originally, Reagan’s words were written in the Gospel of the Christian Bible, as part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world. A city that sits on a hill cannot be hidden.” Though referencing the Bible, Reagan’s notion of the city was not in its essence a religious commentary, at least not the Christian religion. The preeminent prophet of profit, capitalism, and the infallibility of the free market, Reagan was picturing what he believed to be the achievable American ideal, a place of mini- 2 4 0 mal government restriction and interference that he thought constituted the essence of an economically thriving, free society. And, as a shining city on a hill, America would attract and welcome all those who saw her from a distance. Throughout his political life, Reagan’s approach to immigration was, simply stated, “Yes!” Despite the idyllic prose of his musings, Reagan’s support of immigration and immigrants was a practical one. He recognized that much of the low-skill, grueling labor that formed the foundation of the nation’s food industry was done by immigrants. He knew that throughout America’s history, immigrants had made and kept the nation competitive (people like Andrew Carnegie, Levi Strauss, and Albert Einstein who advanced science, industry, and the arts). And he knew that one of the greatest strengths of the nation, one pointed to by scores of economists, was its ability to constantly attract people from other countries for all levels of employment. Reagan was so convinced that immigrants made the country stronger that he advocated for an open border policy with Mexico to increase trade and the availability of labor. He also signed into law a piece of legislation that many Republicans today pointedly ignore when they are extolling the virtues of their patron saint of modern conservatism. In 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Control and Reform Act, which granted amnesty to three million immigrants working in the United States without visas. That piece of legislation led to a few years of reduced undocumented immigration , but the bill could never be a true success, in part because the provision that Reagan professed to be its keystone—sanctions against employers who hired undocumented workers—was blocked by resistance from within his own party. A vocal group of Republicans called it intrusive government interference in business . (Ironically, this same vocal faction now argues for a wall that will strangle market forces on the border.) Of course, the entrenched absurdity of immigration policy did s h i n i n G C i t y o n a h i l l | 2 4 1 not begin under Reagan; it began with the very notion of building a “shining city on a hill.” Where there is opportunity, people will come. It is a basic law of nature, much older than human history. As wild creatures have always migrated to find food and territory, humans have always moved to find a better way of life and firmer footing on the quest for survival. This is our nature. If a society holds itself up as a beacon for those in search of opportunity, it will both benefit from their arrival, and by necessity, need to deal with the associated complications. The United States began to experience this tension from its earliest days, but in the nineteenth century, as trade with other nations spread word of opportunity, people began to arrive at every border and coastline...