The claim is a lie that borders cannot be effectively closed
This article appeared on 11/6/2015 in the Preussische Allgemeine Zeitung
Only a nation in the process of liquidating itself doesn’t protect its territory from invaders. The rest of the world respects secure borders with painstaking precision. Depending on the danger situation with greatest effort, too.
It is Wednesday, October 21st. For the former Austrian federal army major, Rudolf Moser, it is becoming by his own profession”the blackest day” of his life. The former company leader is there when at 11:30 several thousand migrants overrun the Austrian border near the area of Spielfeld. Moser speaks of “young, well-trained men” and even guesses that the greater portion are militarily trained and tested for battle. After this, he describes the situation in a perplexed way: “I had to look on as the occupants took over Austrian territory in a threatening, arrogant and also aggressive way as though it were natural to do so, simply throw away trash in an uncivilized manner, and uninhibitedly relieve themselves .
“Who is protecting the German territory?” one might add. Who will finally step up and protect the country at its outermost borders? It is part of the abtrusities of the asylum catastrophe that responsible politicians deny with the greatest boldness that which is really a matter of course: Borders can always and at anytime be closed. The screeching idiocy is when Angela Merkel declares before the EU parliament that isolation and cordoning off in the age of the Internet are simply an illusion. As long as no human being can turn into digital bits and bytes in order to appear out of the PC by magical means at the destination, a solid, monitored fence is effective as ever. And when Siegmar Gabriel also gives acknowledgment to the best that isolation produces nothing, one would ask whether he leaves the doors wide open all the time at his home in Goslar.
Securing its own borders counts among the elementary duties of a state. If it doesn’t do so, then it quasi gives itself up. It puts everything that makes it up in danger. For a professor of constitutional law, this comprises three elements: constitutive people, state authority, and national territory. A national territory without clear and functioning borders is unthinkable. They define the area where the state authority will be exercised. This again begins to fail when a government allows foreigners “without limit” into the country. Law and order then can hardly be carried out. In Germany, the asylum catastrophe is now underway with not only 750,000 registered applicants for asylum according to estimates by the German Bureau for Migration and Refugees but also around 300,000 undocumented migrants. Nobody knows what intentions they have or how many IS terrorists are among them.
The constitutive people falls into existential distress when a country becomes overrun by immigrants. “We are 80 million,” Angela Merkel recently wholeheartedly announced. But, in contrast, how many are there of those wishing to travel to Germany? In light of the 23 million Syrians, for example, it can be said of the 31 million Afghans and 182 million Pakistanis: “We are only 80 million.” The fundamental application is this: identity, culture, loyalty to homeland and intellectual rooting disappear when foreigners come in such magnitudes.
It is for all of these reasons that each country protects its borders. Depending on the condition of danger and threat situation, it does this more or less expensively. The Airbus corporation has just equipped the 9,000 km long border of Saudi Arabia with its “Airbus Defence and Space” division. Radars, sensors, cameras and drones isolate the land from unsettled neighbors like Iraq. So that it can protect its population from suicide attackers and other attackers, Israel has equipped its almost 750 km long border with the Palestinian West Jordanland among others with an eight meter high wall of steel reinforced concrete. In other places, ditches, motion sensors and metal fences hold back invaders. The US cordons off its border with neighboring Mexico over 3000 km with five rows of firmly stretch barbed wire and seven meter high fence elements made of arm-thick steel tubes. Drug smugglers and illegal immigrants are held back.
Such fence monstrosities aren’t pretty – and they claim lives. Illegal border-crossers between Mexico and the US die of thirst in the Imperial Valley desert or they drown in the ocean when they try to bypass the border. Fences and walls also save lives. Those who know that a border is completely insurmountable will avoid risking their health to get to the other side. If they are to keep a country or even a continent from sinking into chaos, then they are a necessary evil.
By the way, they can also wind up the smaller, the more unattractive the travel destination is made to those flooding in.
Frank Horns
Original Excerpt on PI-German / Translation: Anders Denken