House of Eratosthenes

Kofi A. Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, unintentionally explains in this morning’s Wall Street Journal why James T. Kirk was always a better starship captain than Jean-Luc Picard. The subject is immigration, and Jean-Luc Annan is doing a much better job at barking out orders and making new rules and telling everybody what they should be thinking, than at helping to figure out what to do when people don’t particularly feel up to following the rules.

Ever since national frontiers were invented, people have been crossing them–not just to visit foreign countries, but to live and work there. In doing so, they have almost always taken risks, driven by a determination to overcome adversity and to live a better life. Those aspirations have always been the motors of human progress. Historically, migration has improved the well-being, not only of individual migrants, but of humanity as a whole.

And that is still true. In a report that I am presenting tomorrow to the U.N. General Assembly, I summarize research which shows that migration, at least in the best cases, benefits not only the migrants themselves but also the countries that receive them, and even the countries they have left. How so? In receiving countries, incoming migrants do essential jobs which a country’s established residents are reluctant to undertake. They provide many of the personal services on which societies depend. They care for children, the sick and the elderly, bring in the harvest, prepare the food, and clean the homes and offices.
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As long as there are nations, there will be migrants. Much as some might wish it otherwise, migration is a fact of life. So it is not a question of stopping migration, but of managing it better, and with more cooperation and understanding on all sides. Far from being a zero-sum game, migration can be made to yield benefits for all.

As is the case is many of Picard’s windy speeches, I’m having a great deal of trouble figuring out where the Secretary-General is going with this, ironically, because the epistle is not long enough to communicate to me what exactly the point is. Not that the length of said epistle is the issue. I understand what values Annan wants me to have, just as I understood what values Picard wanted me to have. Immigrants good, xenophobes bad. I get it. But with each paragraph serving exactly the same purpose as the paragraph before & the paragraph after, I don’t follow what he’s really trying to say. One quickly gets the impression that the Secretary-General has taken on the business of solving problems, but has found himself much more fascinated with the process of proliferating values throughout the universe, while the problems remain unsolved.

It sounds very much like a speech that would be delivered by Jean-Luc Picard, to some actor in a colorful costume and foam-rubber mask, representing the Grand High Whatzisface who runs an entire planet, who somehow failed to embrace the values of 24th-century France that Picard thought should have been upheld. What’s your stake in this, Jean-Luc? Kirk would have stood up for the minimalist rights of the downtrodden to not be segregated, exploited or tortured. With evil vanquished, the defenseless defended, lizard monsters fended off with styrofoam rocks and the alien women taught how to kiss, he would have warped outta there and allowed the society to continue governing itself. Picard, paying lip-service to the Prime Directive and the universal right of self-governance, went meddling in the domestic rules of the sovereign system; or meddled in something more sacrosanct than the rules, the values upon which the rules were based. That was okay though, because the bald captain was sure his values were the right ones. Just like the Secretary-General in this morning’s column.

I happen to live in the United States, a country regularly held up to derision by the United Nations, some feel derision for derision’s sake alone, over stuff that is inconsequential — or at least, inconsequential compared to the act of, let’s say, the complete and total lack of leadership shown by the U.N. toward the international crisis involving Saddam Hussein’s old regime. Here in the U.S.A. we’re engaged in an intense debate over illegal aliens. Annan, here, is writing about “migration.” Gee, I wonder if he’s trying to make a comment about our domestic issues. Huh.

And just like a speech by Picard about something that would be none of the starship captain’s business, I’m wondering just as much after reading the last word as I am before the first one. Secretary-General Annan will “summarize research” tommorrow morning that says Immigrants Good, Xenophobes Bad — let’s call it “IGXB.” Why was this research done in the first place? I dunno. Does it have to do with the line-cutting problem the USA is suffering? He won’t say.

He does say something about the turnstyle-hoppers in paragraph nine:

Yes, migration can have its downside–though ironically some of the worst effects arise from efforts to control it: It is irregular or undocumented migrants who are most vulnerable to smugglers, traffickers and other forms of exploitation. Yes, there are tensions when established residents and migrants are adjusting to each other, especially when their beliefs, customs or level of education are very different. And yes, poor countries suffer when some of their people whose skills are most needed–for instance health-care workers from southern Africa–are “drained” away by higher salaries and better conditions abroad.

Nothing about what the illegal-aliens do, just how much they suffer. He affords himself a perfect opportunity to address the issue of people who sneak in the back door, then goes out of his way to duck the issue. That’s all you get on this, by the way. Everything else in the column, every word, every syllable, persists in tossing legal and illegal immigrants into the same stewpot and melting them together, conceptually.

His comments here do have a purpose, I think. After all, the world does have some isolationists in it, and some of them live in the United States, nursing their isolationist feelings about American borders. Some of them have sentiments that border on the xenophobic. Their numbers are modest, however, and their political power is insignificant; perhaps it’s best to shelve the Secretary-General’s report, until the xenophobes achieve significance and we start having the debate he appears to be thinking we have now. Where immigration is concerned, much of the angst that is given voice in my country, my own included, has to do with ensuring that when people come here, they do so according to the rules.

What does your research say about that, Secretary-General Annan? There are a lot of other countries, including member nations of the U.N., which have allowed their border-enforcement efforts to deteriorate into nothingness — in some cases, deliberately. Perhaps the United Nations could perform an international service to those sovereign states by looking into the consequences of ineffectual immigration enforcement.

It seems to me a sensible distinction to be upheld, and given greater weight than you’ve given it here. The U.N. fancies itself to be a body having something to do with international law. Doesn’t it make sense, then, for the U.N. to recognize a fundamental difference between following laws, and breaking them?

That would make much greater sense to me, than to pontificate endlessly, Picard-style, about the IGXB values everyone should be having, while maintaining an evasive silence on how exactly to deal with people who lack such values, and people who break the laws created from such values. Make it so?

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