Americanaffairsjournal.org Website Review

Before “Build the wall!” there was “Tear down this wall!” In his famous 1987 speech, Ronald Reagan demanded that the “scar” of the Berlin Wall be removed and insisted that the offending restriction of movement it represented amounted to nothing less than a “question of freedom for all mankind.” He went on to say that those who “refuse to join the community of freedom” would “become obsolete” as a result of the irresistible force of the global market. And so they did. In celebration, Leonard Bernstein directed a performance of “Ode to Joy” and Roger Waters performed “The Wall.” Barriers to labor and capital came down all over the No issue loomed larger in Donald Trump’s winning the Republican nomination in 2016 than his strident opposition to illegal immigration and, more broadly, America’s immigration policies. Trump’s stand on immigration remains the chief inspiration of his political base… The U.S.-Mexico border is a brutal, two-thousand-mile stretch, forbidding in its arid climate and its varied but austere landscape. It demarcates two disparate economies and ways of life, and it is the site of immense trade and exchange between them. Following Donald Trump’s call for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, intense controversies have flared… Over the last half-century, business interests and philosophical libertarians have formed a powerful alliance. Business leaders frequently claim to be libertarians and draw on the rhetoric of the free market to criticize government regulation. In turn, libertarians frequently defend businesses against what both groups see as an overbearing regulatory state. The connection is best represented by the Koch brothers, who call themselves libertarians and fund libertarian scholars through their foundation, and at the same time operate one of the largest businesses in the United States. Silicon Valley tech titans also frequently claim to be libertarians, and argue that their internet companies advance liberty by enabling people to communicate freely and form organizations while…