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BY JED JALECO DEL ROSARIO
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Sunday, March 12, 2017
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NOT TOO long ago, Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent an interesting message to US President Donald Trump. The letter praised Trump for some of his statements, stating that the new US president “truthfully described the US political system and electoral structure as corrupt and anti-public” as well as the US’ role in causing “insecurity, war, division, killing and the displacement of nations.”
However, aside from touching on US foreign policy for the past few – well – decades, the letter also touched on Trump’s recent immigration policies. Ahmadinejad wrote, “In other words, the contemporary US belongs to all nations, including the natives of the land,” and that “No one may consider themselves the owner and view others as guests or immigrants.”
Now, Ahmadinejad’s statements regarding US foreign and immigration policies are worth noting because they reflect how many non-Americans view the United States: We don’t want the Americans invading other countries, nor do we want them poking their noses where they don’t belong. At the same time, however, non-Americans also expect the US to open their borders and to exercise a lax immigration policy.
Ahmadinejad’s letter reflects this expectation. He also fails to detect an important flaw in his argument, which is that if the US is corrupt then why immigrate to it? Why insist on becoming part of a corrupt nation?
The reason is obvious, of course. The US and many other Western countries offer access to wealth, opportunities and technology, which is why those who wish to immigrate to the US want to use the self-serving argument that “the contemporary US belongs to all nations.”
What Ahmadinejad doesn’t understand, however, is that the logic behind US imperialism and its open-door, proposition-nation immigration policy are tied together. They are one and the same.
Because if the “the contemporary US belongs to all nations,” then the United States is also a part of all nations, which means that it can intervene in the affairs of all nations. After all, if you are a part of my nation then, in the spirit of reciprocity, it follows that I am a part of yours, which means that we can intervene in each others’ affairs.
To restate this in another way, a United States that acts as a miniature United Nations can accept all the immigrants from every nation in the world, but it can also invade or interfere in the policies of those very same nations whenever it feels like it.
And this is why one cannot separate the US’ foreign policy with its open-door immigration policy because both come from the same universalist assumption: The US is the World, and the World is the US. Trump and other American nationalists want to end that, which is why if you support US non-intervention then you should support Trump’s ban on immigration as well.
So the point here is simple: The world can either have a non-intervensionist, close-border policy US, or it can have an interventionist, multicultural, open-border US, but it can’t have both./PN
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