Can we stop illegals?

NEW YORK, APRIL 8

THE parallels are remarkable, Berlin-Mexico. They are nevertheless worth reciting in order to refamiliarize ourselves with what nations and human beings tend to do when pressed beyond what they believe is their capacity to absorb.

In the late 1950s, the awful consequences of life under East German/ Soviet rule caused people to vote with their feet--to move from East Germany into West Germany. The movement, in the early stages of it, was thought tolerable. But by the end of the decade it had become intolerable. West Germany had difficulties in assimilating East Germans in the numbers in which they arrived.

The problem, by the winter of 1960, had become insupportable. East German leader Walter Ulbricht reported to the Kremlin that at the rate doctors and engineers were leaving East Germany, in ten years if you needed a doctor you'd find none such left, let alone an engineer to build a bridge. We are going to close down Berlin, Ulbricht told Khrushchev, and the mighty Soviet army has to stand by us or the whole Soviet East European establishment is going to break down.

What happened was the Berlin Wall. If the border between Mexico and the U.S. were designed like the border between East and West Berlin, an effort could feasibly be made to block the apex into which the human traffic consolidated.

The idea of a 2,000-mile wall is not abandoned, because no escape from the current intolerable situation is officially abandoned. How long would it take? If we hired Israeli wall makers to go to work, or show us how to do it? Ex-Soviet wall builders could surely be found who are as young as 65 years old, and they certainly are looking for work.

The concept of a wall is disagreeable, but critical questions are now crystallizing. Can the U.S. govern its own borders? That is a very serious question because the answer to it is thought obvious: Yes--all nations control their own borders! But the question properly put becomes: Are we prepared to go to the lengths necessary to control our borders? To say yes is glibness--and glibness of a kind we ...