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| The Berlin Wall, a Lesson about the Power of Migration |
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| Written by Simon | |
| Monday, 09 November 2009 | |
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Twenty years ago today
after twenty-eight years of armed resistance to migration the Berlin Wall fell
on November 9, 1989 when East German government official Günter Schabowski
stated, "Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints…
into…West Berlin." What
caused this change in the official East German attitude, what was its result
and what does it teach us about immigration?
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to stop East Germans from leaving for more opportunity and freedom in West Germany. For the next two decades “The Wall” was a symbol of the differences between the Communists in the East and the Democracies in the West. The process of tearing it down began with a speech by US President Reagan at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987 that concluded: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” What followed over the next two years was a historic triumph of freedom over oppression. Communism had begun to falter in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and in 1988 and 1989 new exodus points were opened to East Germans who wanted to flee to the West. In September of 1989 12,000 East German “tourists” were able to enter Austria and make their way to the West. The East Germans moved to close this gap and protests broke out all over East Berlin. Huge crowds of people were shouting, “We want out!” When it became clear that the Soviets were not going to intervene, like they had in Hungary in 1956, the East German authorities had no option but to capitulate. The border was opened. East Germans had found a new way to vote with their feet and Schabowski was just acknowledging this new reality.
Everyone in the West did not welcome the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Margaret Thatcher asked Soviet President Gorbachov to maintain the separation of Germany “We do not want a united Germany. This would lead to a change to postwar borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.” Prime Minister Thatcher was wrong. Freedom in the world increased because of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
There are lessons for today from this migration story. North Korea has built walls to keep its people from leaving and South Korea does not yet welcome refugees from the North. If South Korea were to change it’s policy and welcome North Korean refugees what would happen. I speculate that the scenario would play out very similarly to what happened when East Germans found a way out their country. The only people left in North Korea would be Kim Jong Il and the General in the ill fitting uniform who is always standing next to him.
The right to migrate gives people a powerful weapon against bad governments. A government that does not deliver goods, services and freedoms to it’s people at a level proportionate to its neighbors will be threatened if its aggrieved citizens can vote with their feet and leave. For this to happen people need a place to go to. Senator Scoop Jackson in 1974 fought for and won an amendment to US trade policy that formalized peoples right to leave an oppressive regime. But the job is only half finished. As we can see from the examples above people need three things to make the freedom to migrate a reality. First is the right to emigrate, second is a place to go and third is a way to get there.
The history of the Berlin Wall can also illuminate the issue of Mexican immigration to the United States. Mexicans are fleeing a government that does not deliver opportunities to its citizens as well their neighbor to the north. The United States is building walls to keep Mexicans seeking opportunities out. This is not a stable situation. Pressure to leave Mexico will continue, people will die trying to cross the wall and those that get across will live in the shadows as “illegals” in the US. The lesson from The Berlin Wall is that walls do not relieve migration pressure. Perhaps the US can learn from what happened when the wall was torn down. We could use the 35 billion dollars a year we now spend building walls against this migration to organize it. We could spend the money to welcome these new Americans, to teach them English and give them cultural training. And to give money to the states and communities that are absorbing the very real economic cost of the new immigrants start-up health care and educational costs. The lesson of the Berlin wall is that if this course were followed the US would gain new productive citizens and Mexico’s government would be forced to change its tactics or continue to lose its best and brightest. As Phillipe Legrain wrote in Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them “More than ten times as many migrants have died on the US border with Mexico over the past ten years than were killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall in twenty-eight years.” History does not look favorably on the actions of East Germanys government. The United States needs to adjust its behavior toward migrants to avoid a similar fate. |
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