In July, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added the monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus plexippus, to its Red List of Threatened Species, a recognition that the insect’s ongoing decline could lead to extinction. Though monarch numbers increased 35% from December 2020 to December 2021, their numbers overall have been in steep decline for the last three decades. As the IUCN listing indicates, now is a crucial time to reassess monarch conservation policies across North America.

As a woman born in Mexico and now living and teaching in Canada, I know that nothing is ever simple for anyone who makes their home across borders. I have conducted research throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada, following the struggles of humans and insects migrating across North America. Both have been shaped in harmful ways by the erasure of Indigenous knowledge that supported populations of many species for millennia, and by the globalization policies, border security, and toxic agribusinesses that have transformed the landscapes of North America. Ecological justice for humans, monarchs, and other species will only come when we prioritize community livelihoods and ecological decision-making beyond borders.

Monarch habitat decline began during the 19th century, as settlers transformed the open prairies in what is now the Corn Belt of the U.S. and Canada. Monarch caterpillars eat only one thing: milkweed, which once grew in abundance in those landscapes. But settlers evicted Indigenous people, whose agricultural practices embraced biodiversity, and brought monoculture agriculture, planting single crops over vast areas and uprooting the milkweed.

In the modern era, one of the main culprits of the monarch’s decline was the agrochemical giant Monsanto, now part of the German corporation Bayer. The company’s Roundup herbicide decimated the butterfly by killing monarchs’ host plant. Its pesticides damaged caterpillar growth.

Monsanto was also a major producer of genetically modified (GM) corn seed, which has not only had devastating effects on monarchs, but also on Mexican rural livelihoods. Strains of corn traditionally grown in Mexico cannot compete genetically or economically with GM corn, which is more resistant to disease. Imports of GM corn from the U.S. made corn farming in Mexico less profitable, thus forcing workers to seek other crops or to migrate north—often risking their lives to cross a border that has become hostile political terrain.

Insect and human migrations are also both affected by the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, updated as the USMCA). Though the agreement opened doors for trade in manufactured goods and produce, it closed them for human migrants and butterflies alike. The U.S.–Mexico border, once an interconnected habitat with lots of monarch food, became industrialized and fragmented, while traditional agricultural and land management practices across the continent declined. Despite these negative effects, NAFTA leaders appropriated the monarch as a symbol of tri-national trade relations.

The construction of the U.S.–Mexico border wall has further exacerbated these effects. Most directly, when the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas objected to a Trump administration attempt to extend its border wall through the conservation area, fringe groups baselessly accused the center of facilitating illegal immigration and human trafficking. The center shut down for several weeks after QAnon threats. It has since reopened, but with heightened security (the New York Times reported that the executive director now wears a sidearm), and it remains embroiled in lawsuits over the plans.

Ironically, conservation efforts can also have negative effects on monarch habitat, because they often disregard traditional agroforestry knowledge. Conservationists sometimes label small Mexican farmers as “loggers,” to cast them as villains stealing from protected forest areas. But the truth is more complicated. These forest farming communities care deeply for the butterfly. Their traditions hold that the monarchs return just in time for the Day of the Dead, carrying the souls of their ancestors. In these areas, the monarch’s winter home, people long practiced sustainable agroforestry. They grew mixed crops including corn at lower altitudes, while collecting other foods and hunting in mountain forests. As monarchs gained conservationists’ attention, however, vast areas were designated as “people-free cores” in an effort to protect the butterflies. These actions harmed human and insect alike by shutting down a system of coexistence—and pushed people to engage in logging, often to create space for avocado fields, which have become a tempting enterprise because of growing demand for the fruits in the U.S. since NAFTA. New conservation demarcations have diminished humans’ relationship to the forest and their ability to protect the butterflies.

It does not have to be this way. Long before Mexico, the U.S., and Canada existed, monarchs made their annual migratory circuit, nourished by ample milkweed with help from Indigenous agroforestry practices. Similarly, our own species has been in motion throughout its history, and this has contributed to our survival.

How do we reimagine North America as an abundant home for all? In the U.S. and Canada, “butterfly amateurs”—lay enthusiasts who create habitats to support monarchs—allowed me into their world. They fill their yards with milkweed and construct elaborate hatcheries in their homes. Some call themselves “crusaders.” Yet these backyard ecosystems are not enough.

Creating islands where monarchs have what they need is only a partial solution. Because a web of economic and political barriers has made it difficult for monarchs and humans, both species will need fundamental, structural change to thrive. The monarch is a metaphor for a right to live across “two homes,” as many migration activists assert. But this shouldn’t just be a metaphor—it should be our reality. If we want to keep monarchs around, we need to redesign North America as a safe place for migrant humans and migrant butterflies alike.

The post Why Migrant Butterflies Are Dying appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What can we say about that in this moment?” Jordan asked National Immigration Forum president and CEO Ali Noorani.

Noorani, who is also the author of the new book Crossing Borders: The Reconciliation of a Nation of Immigrants, began by acknowledging the inspirational global response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. “It’s like nothing I know I have ever seen in my lifetime,” he said. But he added that the warm response to the mass movement of people from and within Ukraine also makes the hypocrisy and racism of the current refugee resettling system—created after World War II—glaringly obvious.

“It’s really clear that the public”—who are helping Ukrainians settle into new homes and communities—“is much better than the governments who are administering refugee resettlement systems,” said Noorani.

This was a reoccurring theme throughout the discussion: that people at a local level are better equipped to think and talk about immigration than their leaders—and the best way to unite people around immigration is to act on a community level.

But on a national scale, Noorani said, we need global leadership to come together to build a new international refugee system that makes it possible for anyone to get to a safe place.

One step toward a new system is depolarizing the immigration narrative. Over the past few years, amid the Syrian refugee crisis, politicians on the right have been wielding fear and insecurity as a weapon to close borders and stigmatize immigrants. In response, Noorani and his colleagues at the National Immigration Forum have been working across the aisle with a few different conservative groups, including white evangelicals, in efforts to find common ground.

They have been trying to “understand how evangelicals are seeing immigrants and immigration, what their fears are, and what their aspirations are,” said Noorani. He and his team worked with one group of evangelical women who were “skeptical of the way the Trump administration was treating immigrants, but they didn’t have another way of thinking about it,” he said. After discussing immigration from both a policy and biblical perspective, the group eventually took a trip to Oaxaca, where the evangelical women met with migrant mothers trying to find protection in the U.S.

Jordan asked if these kinds of interactions give Noorani “reason to believe that it’s possible to have a civil conversation around immigration?”

Yes, said Noorani. “It’s not because all Americans believe that we’re a nation of immigrants.” Rather, “people are seeing that their community is a community of immigrants.” He elaborated on that statement in response to an audience question submitted via YouTube chat about responding to the fear certain Republicans foment about immigrants. Creating conversations that push back happens via people’s “in-groups,” said Noorani—their family and friends, faith groups, local law enforcement officials, and local community and business leaders.

The immigration fears that Noorani and his colleagues see come up most often revolve around “culture, security, and the economy,” he said. “If we can acknowledge those fears and then create ways so that they’re not just answered, but that people are also invited into opportunities to think and act differently when it comes to immigration, then you start to move the needle,” he said. “Too often in our politics, we don’t acknowledge those fears. We dismiss them outright, and then we keep moving.” Such dismissal or diminishing of fears can make it difficult to create consensus.

Noorani’s new book, out next week, contains stories from around the U.S. and the world, in part because he wants to take the discussion around immigration out of a strictly policy framework. Instead, he hopes to take “the realities that were being lived” in communities and “connect those to the politics and the policies that in so many ways make this debate not just complicated but really, really ugly.”

Nonetheless, a number of audience members in the online chat asked him how to convince Congress to fix the nation’s broken immigration system.

Before 9/11 and “the hardening” of the U.S.-Mexico border, there was a great deal of “circular migration” between the nations, said Noorani. For example, workers would leave Oaxaca, work eight months in construction or agriculture in the U.S., then return home. “Frankly, it worked,” said Noorani. Restrictions at the border today make such movement impossible, leaving undocumented immigrants stranded in the U.S. for years. Returning to a circular system would ease a lot of pressure at the border, said Noorani.

It would also undermine a major business for cartels. “We have outsourced nearly the entirety of our immigration system to the cartels. They are making billions of dollars just on the movement of people,” he said. In response to another audience question about how the U.S. is collaborating with Central American nations on immigration issues, Noorani said that the closing of most official immigration channels has forced desperate people to turn to unofficial channels. “The problem is not the migrant leaving Central America. The problem is really the cartel that has monetized that journey,” said Noorani. What if, instead of paying a cartel $10,000 for a visa, a migrant could pay the U.S. government $10,000 for a visa? “We have to work really hard to reframe the public’s understanding of what the problem is,” said Noorani.

The post To Solve America’s Immigration Woes, We Need to Think, Act, and Work Locally appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

How can we counter the fear-based migration narratives that dominate our political and cultural discourse? What sort of story can answer narratives that—to quote a new report from the Migration Policy Institute, RAND Corporation, the Metropolitan Group, and the National Immigration Forum (where I am president and CEO)—“are driven by insecurity”?

The short answer lies in developing stories that confront fear and insecurity by showing, in detail, how more inclusive immigration policies actually benefit all of us, and make entire nations more secure. But this requires reckoning with the reality that, as the report notes, “negative narratives are particularly sticky, even when they are not firmly rooted in evidence.”

In other words, authoritarians don’t have to worry about the truth; they just need to tap into fear. And migration, already mysterious and foreign to many, is the perfect foil.

In 2015, as Europe scrambled to resettle Syrian refugees, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán created the contemporary blueprint for authoritarians seeking to exploit migration fears. With his political fortunes flagging, Orbán fashioned an anti-immigrant narrative that viscerally othered migrants. Syrian refugees, he wrote, “have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims.”

Less than four years later, Orbán sat beside President Trump in the Oval Office, who praised this aspect of Orbán’s leadership. “You have been great with respect to Christian communities, you have really put a block up,” said Trump. “And we appreciate that very much.” Trump’s own migration narratives similarly exploited religious and racial fears that galvanized his supporters—and were difficult for his opponents to push back against.

The study illustrates why. Researchers found that democratic lawmakers seeking a more constructive approach to migration often spread messages about the benefits of immigrants and immigration. But these top-down, elite-driven narratives “do not always align with people’s lived experiences”—and instead lead to a skepticism that fits neatly into a large segment of the public’s “fundamental mistrust of government.”

The Biden administration’s approach to border security illustrates the challenge.

For much of 2021, Biden officials outlined a series of thoughtful policies designed to address root causes of migration from Central America, add additional processing resources and infrastructure at the southern border, and speak to how Trump’s “cruel” border security measures would be reversed.

The administration’s narrative focused on policy shifts where the federal government played the hero—doing the right thing, treating migrants the right way. Policy wonks and immigrant rights advocates across the country rejoiced.

But there were few stories about how these policy changes would benefit the American public. The idea that these new policies would make America more secure was buried deep. In fact, the administration rarely used the word “security” when talking about the border.

Opponents of immigration stepped into the vacuum. They harnessed Americans’ perception of a lack of control and economic, cultural, and physical insecurities, along with their skepticism of the federal government’s effectiveness, to plant seeds of doubt about the Biden administration’s approach.

The more virulent among these immigration opponents went a step further. Tucker Carlson claimed Biden’s policy was designed to “change the racial mix of the country”; then he invoked “the great replacement,” a white nationalist, anti-immigrant conspiracy theory.

Carlson, Orbán, and opponents of immigration around the world understand the power fear has to shape narratives. In the stories they construct, there is never enough enforcement to “control” immigration. Their story convinces the public of just one conclusion: that immigration of any kind must be ended.

How are proponents of immigration to respond?

I understand the desire by many advocates to avoid talking about security, which might be seen as endorsing a frame set by opponents of immigration. But Americans across the political spectrum want a border that is both humane and secure. Speaking to the former while ignoring the latter is a losing proposition.

There is a clear border security narrative that balances compassion with security. One that acknowledges and addresses fears, but still advances values.

It goes something like this:

There are few opportunities for legal immigration to the U.S., so cartels have filled the void as de facto immigration agents. They charge migrants fleeing violence and poverty up to $14,000 each to bring them to the U.S.-Mexico border, leading them to believe they are eligible for asylum. In many cases, this is untrue, and migrants end up in the camps Americans see on the news. Alongside humans, the cartels traffic thousands of pounds and millions of dollars’ worth of dangerous drugs that contribute to our growing opioid crisis. These two lines of business allow cartels to pocket billions of dollars.

The culprit is the cartel, not the migrant. The migrant is making a perfectly rational decision to find a better life. The chaos and dysfunction of our immigration system allows cartels to sell a path to immigration.

The solution lies in the creation of legal immigration pathways and an asylum system that treats people humanely. Migrants would much rather pay for a path to enter the U.S. legally than put their lives in the hands of cartels. Creating such a path would take a lucrative line of business away from organized crime and focus our border security resources on the actual threat to public safety: drugs.

The narrative addresses questions of security with a confidence and clarity that connects to people’s real concerns. The villainous cartel is a clear antagonist; the protagonist is the compassionate American who also wants a secure border. It acknowledges the fears and aspirations of native-born populations while also creating a sense of common purpose.

Such narratives also carve out space for nations to respond to major catastrophes that drive mass migration, as well as routine migration connected to poverty and climate change. The story that must be told is how immigration policy, smartly designed, can reinforce both compassion and security.

Without such narratives, the world will remain ensnared in a migration finger trap. Autocrats demonize migration and consolidate their power on its back. Activists respond with calls to welcome all who seek protection. In the dissonance and conflict, there is no unifying story about immigration. Only division.

It is time for a new story.

The post We’re Telling the Wrong Border Stories appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It wasn’t the Axis’s invasion of their ancestral homeland that concerned these Bedouins, however, but rather their mistreatment by their own government. With the outbreak of the war, they had been thrown into a prison reserved for foreign subjects, and their families were suffering gravely in their absence. Accordingly, they demanded an explanation for why they were being punished as if they were strangers in their own native land.

“We are your subjects,” the Bedouins contended, “and if the government does not want us to be its subjects, we implore you to let us know the name of a state we can join in order to request compensation for our families.” They concluded the petition on a similar note of sarcasm: “We truly believe that we do not belong to the Egyptian government; for, if we did belong to it, adhering to its laws [as we do], it would not subject us to [such] treatment as foreigners.”

Why did the Egyptian government view its own desert-dwelling Bedouin population with such suspicion and contempt? After all, shouldn’t the native inhabitants of Egypt’s desert domains, which comprise roughly 90 percent of the country’s land surface, have counted as being just as Egyptian as inhabitants of Cairo or the Nile Valley?

The answer to these questions lies in the complex history of Egypt’s formation as a modern territorial nation-state.

Nations must never be taken for granted. They do not exist from time immemorial as naturally bounded and cohesive social units, but rather are actively made (and often re-made) to serve particular political projects in particular places at particular times. Even Egypt—ostensibly one of the most ancient political civilizations on the planet—underwent dramatic transformations in the late 19th and 20th centuries before it emerged as a modern nation-state like the one we know today.

One such transformation involved the projection of a unified territorial identity from the center of power (Cairo) into the furthest reaches of the state’s sovereign domains, including the Western Desert. While other nation-states underwent similar transformations, the Egyptian case contained some particular elements that would turn out to be consequential for the country’s region and its history.

My own interest in the territorial dimension of Egyptian nationhood began nearly a decade ago, on a 10-hour bus journey across Egypt’s Western Desert to the remote oasis of Siwa. As I stared out my window at the endless barren expanses, I began to wonder how all of this beautiful wasteland became part of Egypt in the first place. My sense of bewilderment only grew when I arrived in Siwa, which lies only 30 miles from the Libyan border and has an ethnically distinct population that more resembles that of some Libyan regions. (Siwans are of Berber descent and did not speak Arabic for much of their history.) The Egyptian history I had studied as a graduate student, focused as it was on Cairo and the Nile, had little to say about the incorporation or political status of such far-flung places.

So I set out to craft a comprehensive modern history of the vast region I came to call “the Egyptian West.” My foray into the archival sources yielded many surprises. For starters, I learned that Egypt’s western border had gone undefined for most of the country’s history, and that the first modern political map attempting to delineate such a border—an Ottoman map from 1841—went missing for the better part of a century. Although various statesmen periodically noted its absence—Lord Cromer, the British consul-general of Egypt from 1882 to 1907, surmised that the map was “supposed to have been lost in a fire which destroyed a great part of the Egyptian archives”—no one seemed especially vexed by this. In fact, Egypt’s marginal borderlands were typically ignored in the cartography of the period. When they were represented at all, they were left intentionally fuzzy.

The powers in the region—Britain and the Ottoman Empire (still technically sovereign over Egypt)—actually conspired not to define the border, lest it provoke unnecessary legal or diplomatic controversy. This stance became particularly thorny during the first decade of the 20th century, when the Italian government—seeking to lay the groundwork for its colonial occupation of Libya, which would begin in 1911—repeatedly pressured the British to draw a western border.

But the Italians’ protests fell on deaf ears. Citing “the peculiar position in which Egypt stands with regards to Turkey [the Ottoman Empire],” the British agreed with the Ottomans that it was better policy to leave the border ambiguous. A bona fide border between Egypt and (Italian-controlled) Libya would not be defined until well after World War I, in 1925, following a diplomatic treaty that was signed shortly after the elusive 1841 map resurfaced at the eleventh hour. (It had been found deep inside the Ottoman archives, in Istanbul.)

Nations are not made merely by drawing borders around sovereign territory, however; they must also to some degree incorporate and assimilate their heterogeneous populations into a unified political community. In Egypt, this process began in the last quarter of the 19th century, but it had mixed results.

Law was one institution that the government attempted to use as an instrument of assimilation. Beginning in the 1870s, the government passed a series of reforms that aimed to streamline jurisdiction and legal practice across the country, including the deserts and western oases. But it was not long before the government reneged on this project and ceded judicial autonomy to the inhabitants of the country’s vast borderlands.

In the case of the town of Siwa, one official tried to explain the government’s striking about-face by citing the remoteness of the oasis as well as the fundamental distinctiveness of its people. “The town is far from Egypt by a distance of approximately twenty days traveling by camel,” he argued. “It falls in the middle of the desert, and its people have different customs and (linguistic) conventions, and tastes that diverge completely from those of the Egyptians, by virtue of the fact that they are pure [Bedouin] Arabs.” Here is one clear case of the modernizing Egyptian state succumbing to the extreme challenges of standardizing its institutions across the full expanse of its sovereign territory; Siwa was simply too far and too different to be folded into the Egyptian national judiciary at this time.

There would be other such cases. In 1905 and again in 1908, the Egyptian government passed legislation that sought to place its administration of the country’s various Bedouin tribes on firmer footing. The new laws—undertaken in large part to counter the trend of many Egyptians falsely claiming Bedouin descent in order to demand the exemption from military service that the tribes had long enjoyed—strove to “organize [the Bedouin tribes] in an administrative fashion approaching the organization of towns and villages.”

When it came to actually enforcing the new laws, however, the government—again hard-pressed to exert its sovereign control in the sparsely inhabited deserts—was forced to cede considerable power to the local tribal leaders themselves. Despite the veneer of formality added by the legislation, Egypt’s Bedouins were still being treated as a people apart.

So it probably shouldn’t have come as such a surprise when the Western Desert Bedouins found themselves in jail at the start of World War II, and being treated by their government like a dangerous fifth column. The Egyptian government’s internment of its people is best interpreted as a reflection of its own lack of faith in the mechanisms through which its territorial sovereignty had been asserted in the country’s western borderland. Egypt might have clarified the limits of its territorial statehood with the 1925 border treaty with Libya, but it had by no means woven an enduring social fabric for the collective nation within those boundaries.

The Egyptian state’s antagonistic relationship with its own Bedouin population continues to this day. This is clear in the Western Desert, which has emerged as a haven for militant groups reportedly linked to the Islamic State. The Egyptian government’s heavy-handed response has led to some grave mistakes, none more egregious than the security forces’ aerial assault on what turned out to be a caravan of Mexican tourists on a Bedouin-led desert safari, killing 12 and wounding numerous others. The now years-long Egyptian military campaign in the Sinai Peninsula, nominally waged to root out the Islamic State as well as Al-Qaeda, is another sign of enduring conflict in the borderlands.

In these present-day events are echoes of the particular history of the country’s emergence as a modern territorial nation-state. Moments of significant political upheaval, from World War II to the complicated fallout of the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, have always seemed to foster contests over territorial sovereignty in the country’s borderlands. And what we see today is not so different from what the Egyptian government was struggling with over a century ago, when it first sought to consolidate the nation at the margins of its sovereignty. As a result, what it means to be Egyptian in the country’s desert borderlands remains an open question.

The post The Bedouin People Who Blur the Boundaries of Egyptian Identity appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The heart of the problem is that Brits have been told, before the June 2016 referendum and after, that Brexit is about exiting the European Union. That’s true, but it leaves out the bigger, more difficult part of the story. Brexit is also about setting up a border with the EU.

The brutal truth is that erecting a real border between the U.K. and the EU is nearly impossible. This truth explains why the United Kingdom keeps losing at Brexit and why it never will find an effective approach for leaving the EU.

For nearly two years now, the U.K. government has pursued Brexit negotiations under a fundamentally false premise: that everything is on the table and every element of departing the EU can be worked out. Clinging to the meaningless mantra that “Brexit means Brexit,” Prime Minister Theresa May has approached EU negotiators as if on equal footing, suggesting that the U.K. will leave the EU and both parties must simply reach an agreement on how to accomplish the separation.

Big issues like the rights of EU member states’ citizens in the U.K., the U.K. contribution to the EU’s current budget, the continued jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in the U.K. during the transition period, and the structure of the negotiations themselves—with the U.K. pressing to talk about a new trade deal before the “exit” terms were established—all have been treated as open matters to be settled.

During the process to date, the U.K. has behaved as if it had leverage. Last year, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson smartly told EU leaders that they could “go whistle” (i.e., get lost) if they expected the U.K. to pay a large divorce bill.

But time has revealed that these tactics and maneuvers rise out of a kind of delusion. The U.K. has caved on all major issues so far, and the EU has gotten everything it wants. EU citizens in the U.K. will have rights, the U.K. will pay a hefty sum to the EU, and the CJEU will maintain jurisdiction in the transition period. And the U.K. has conceded that the terms of the divorce, including a payment, must be settled before the elements of a new relationship are explored.

As negotiations veer further afield from what the U.K. wants, chaos within the government and legislative branches has increased in volume and intensity. Deep rifts are splitting the Tory party. Government officials seem to take opposing stances every other day. The Labour Party appears fractured and confused. And no one knows what Prime Minister May really wants.

This has happened because of a failure to recognize the magnitude of establishing a border. That failure goes back to the Brexit campaigners who, ahead of the referendum in which voters chose to leave, decided not to reckon with reality.

Put simply, the political and economic difficulties for the U.K. of constructing a border with the EU are almost insurmountable. As such, the situation is akin to someone making preparations to embark on a train trip whose destination remains unknown. Should you pack for hot or cold weather? For the mountains or the beach? Under such circumstances, the ability to strategize, plan, and set priorities is greatly diminished.

What makes it nearly impossible to create a new border for purposes of trade and regulation? Let’s start by recalling what the EU is fundamentally about. The EU is first and foremost a common market: a free trade area (for goods, workers, services, and capital) with a common external tariff (CET). The free-trade area means that everything within the EU can circulate freely across the member states. This has been accomplished by the removal of internal tariff barriers and a massive effort at regulatory harmonization in countless policy areas. The CET regime means that everything coming into the EU is subject to the same tariff restrictions no matter which member state imports it.

The U.K. has been part of this regulatory and economic body for more than four decades, joining after realizing it did not want to be left out. Leaving now is hard to fathom and will be harder to do, for both political and economic reasons.

The political challenges relate primarily to Northern Ireland and Scotland. The Irish question is the most pressing at the moment, due to the question of where the border, including the CET boundary, should be. A border between Northern Ireland and Ireland is unacceptable to the Irish, Northern Irish (including Sinn Fein), and the U.K. itself.

But it would also be madness to put the border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., given that the former is part of the latter. For one thing, it would mean that the U.K. is not fully out of the EU, since Northern Ireland would remain inside the EU. For another, it would separate Northern Ireland—in tariff but also, critically, regulatory terms—from the rest of the U.K., which remains unacceptable to Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, on whose support May depends. The logistics associated with managing that border would present another extraordinarily complicated challenge. There is, in effect, no place to put the Irish border.

The Scottish situation has unique dynamics but is fundamentally similar. The Scots, while part of the U.K., cannot imagine being outside of the EU. Yet severing Scotland from the U.K. is not something that a majority of Scots, or Brits, want to do.

On the economic side, the harsh reality is that the U.K. cannot afford to erect a new border anywhere when it comes to the EU. It is too dependent on the EU market to turn away from it. To avoid harrowing effects on its economy, the U.K. will need to stay aligned with the EU’s regulatory frameworks (currently amounting to around 50 percent of all national legislation in any one member state) and retain an essentially tariff-free relationship. And, for all this to be possible, the U.K. will have to accept, in effect, a CET or otherwise pay the EU a heavy fee for not following it.

Alternative scenarios are hard to contemplate. The only thing the U.K. must decide is whether it wishes to retain some control over EU law (by staying within the EU) or not. Since Brexit means leaving the EU, the U.K. looks as if it is headed for an unenviable arrangement wherein it will be intimately connected to the EU but will have no control over its trajectory.

As it turned out, on May 8 the House of Lords voted on precisely this question. It was framed as a vote on whether to follow “The Norway Model,” which involves acceptance of all EU laws, paying a hefty fee for access to its market to the tune of billions of euros every year, and accepting judiciary oversight to ensure compliance. Norway follows this framework as part of the arrangement known as the European Economic Area (EAA), to which Iceland and Liechtenstein also belong. Of course, it also means that Norway has zero control over the direction of the EU regulatory regime with which it must comply.

The House of Lords’ “yes” vote forced a forthcoming vote in the House of Commons on the Norway Model. A similar vote in the lower house would set Parliament on a collision course with May’s government. All this is a far cry from a clean break with the EU. It is the opposite, and is, in fact worse than being an EU member: continued participation, meaning no border—this time with loss of control.

It is time for reality to sink in and for the U.K. government and British people to accept the truth: A clean, pure Brexit is simply a mirage. The U.K. will remain deeply connected to the EU and should therefore remain a member of that organization if it wishes to retain some control over the relationship. Hubris, the vestiges of imperial superiority, and false promises brought the Brexit idea about and have muddied the path forward. Honesty and decisiveness can clarify the next steps.

The post “Brexit Means Brexit” Is a Meaningless Mantra appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Similarly, the World Cup fuses sport and national identity on a quadrennial basis. In both cases, media coverage transforms feats of physical prowess into stories of national triumph or defeat, and in the process recasts athletes, many of whom the larger public has never cared about previously, into national heroes and sometimes even villains.

Lost in the drama and pageantry is the question of why sports should be framed in terms of political geography at all. How is it that we have learned to see the world as a collection of countries?

A nation is a group of culturally similar people who believe they belong together and deserve to govern themselves. This way of thinking about the world, or imagining the world, begins by kindergarten, when children are taught to read basic maps and globes depicting the world as organized into a jumble of colorful, interlocking shapes demarcated by clear borders, invariably accentuated as black lines. We are taught that these borders delineate distinct peoples, societies, and environments, and dutifully memorize their locations, names, and physical features—and of course their flags—by coloring maps with crayons. Teachers emphasize knowing our own place within this political jigsaw puzzle, and, over time, we come to identify ourselves as belonging to a nation.

The staging of the Olympics and the World Cup and the teaching of geography in the intimate confines of an elementary school classroom seem worlds apart, yet both are simultaneously cause and effect to how we think of the world as a world of borders, a globe comprised of clearly partitioned, sovereign political territories. The process of nationalization, however, is much more complicated than simply putting crayons in the hands of five-year-olds. It extends beyond education to encompass most aspects of daily life, from the media and popular culture to professional and political organizations.

Today’s most pressing debates are rooted in and around notions of borders. Some focus on overturning accepted borders, such as the attempts of ISIS to establish a new caliphate across Syria and Iraq, the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to secure control over the South China Sea, or the disputes between Russia and Ukraine over eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Other debates have little to do with the location of the borders, but rather involve how borders should function and be marked or policed. President Trump’s call to build a new southern border wall funded by Mexico is a prominent example. Another is the struggle among members of the European Union to maintain open borders while simultaneously strengthening border controls along their southern and eastern peripheries—demonstrating the poignancy and power of borders in contemporary politics. For better or worse, our disparate views on belonging, migration, trade, political populism, sectarian strife, natural resource extraction, environmental sustainability, climate change, and even, of course, global sports, are filtered through the spatial paradigm of a bordered world.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, though. It is also one that is incomplete, inconsistent, and might ultimately prove to be transitory.

Scholars trace the origins of our modern notions of borders to Western Europe. As that region transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period, Europe was structured around a political system of mutual obligations and privileges between lords, vassals, and peasants, later known as feudalism. Lacking the ability to govern their kingdoms directly, kings granted nobles the right to administer certain areas, or fiefs, on the king’s behalf in exchange for allegiance and military service. The king retained nominal authority over the kingdom through this system of vassalage, but nobles soon gained considerable autonomy over their fiefs, including the rights of taxation and hereditary title.

Nobles repeated the basic arrangement with lesser nobles and further partitioned their estates into ever smaller fiefs, eventually creating a confused patchwork of overlapping loyalties and decentralized governance scattered across an assortment of principalities, duchies, counties, etc. In some cases, nobles held fiefs in different kingdoms and therefore nominally owed allegiance to multiple kings. The situation was further complicated by what we would today call non-governmental organizations, such as the Catholic Church, military or monastic orders, occupational guilds, and city-states. Within this feudal system, clear territorial borders were unnecessary, as long as lords and vassals honored their mutual obligations.

This decentralized system began to break down by around the 15th century for complex reasons, including the rise of capitalism and wage labor, advances in military technologies, and the growth of an urban-based merchant class. The incessant religious wars that marked the Reformation brought developments to a head, culminating in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

These treaties helped usher in the notion of territorially sovereign states, which became the foundation for the contemporary international system. Basically, these monarchs mutually recognized each other as possessing the right to exercise absolute authority over their territories free from outside interference. In theory at least, each monarch possessed absolute sovereignty over his or her territory and all the people within it.

During this transition, monarchs also began to acquire the tools to more directly exercise sovereignty, most notably standing militaries, professional bureaucracies, and systematic taxation. The grounding of state sovereignty in territory also created a need to precisely determine the territorial extent of the state. The blurry borders of the Middle Ages were incompatible with these new notions of territorial sovereignty. Aided by advances in surveying, navigation, and cartography, governments carefully mapped and marked their respective territories. Borders as we conceive of them today came into being.

The final shift occurred when royal sovereignty was replaced by popular sovereignty. The rise of nationalism as a mass social movement in the decades following the French Revolution led to the corollary idea that the political borders of the state should conform to the cultural borders of the nation. The idea of a nation-state—in which the French state should include all French people, while the German state should include all Germans—was born.

The idea of grouping culturally similar peoples within their own states makes sense in theory, but has proven impossible to put into practice without widespread forced migration and horrendous violence, as demonstrated by two World Wars, among other tragedies.

Those western notions of the nation-state, territory, and borders—and their underlying assumptions—would eventually be exported around the world by force through colonialism to form the foundation of the modern nation-state system. Still, this nation-state system contains a fundamental contradiction: The idea of territorial sovereignty exercised by states can’t always be reconciled with the right of national self-determination and sovereignty.

This leads to confusion and conflation between the terms state and nation. For example, the Charter of the United Nations simultaneously affirms its commitment to the territorial integrity of states and the right of national self-determination. The actual name of the United Nations is misleading since only states, not nations, can be members. The United Nations is actually an organization of disunited states.

Some saw the end of the Cold War, the advent of the internet, and the growth of multinational corporations, organizations, and treaties, among other developments, as heralding an embryonic borderless world. Globalization became a buzzword. Yet because of our continued proclivity to think of most issues, from politics and economics to identity and culture, in state-centric terms, the framework of territorially sovereign nation-states marked by clearly defined, linear borders continues to exert a powerful hold over our understanding of the world and our place in it.

During this year’s winter Olympics, television commentators debated whether America’s historically low medal count in PyeongChang should be a cause of national concern. Brazil’s 7-1 World Cup loss to Germany in 2014 provoked discussion of a national identity crisis. The fact that these issues were raised in earnest demonstrates the continued power of borders to frame how we think about the world, including in such apparently trivial matters as sports.

We may live in a world of unprecedented connectivity marked by dramatically increasing flows of people, goods, technologies, and information, as well as issues like climate change, sectarian strife, demographic transitions, and economic dislocation that seem to beg for global responses, yet the world will remain a very bordered one for the foreseeable future.

The post How National Boundaries Distort Our Understanding of the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It seems that talking about borders and walls in these times is much more common than talking about bridges, alliances or free trade among the nations of the world.

However, for the city of Tijuana, talking about connections and intersections, and how to make the most of them, has been an everyday pastime since the city was founded barely 127 years ago.

That’s because our young city collides with the city of San Diego to the north, the municipality of Tecate to the east, Rosarito Beaches to the South and the Pacific Ocean to the west. Since the beginning of our history, we have been linked more to the economic activity of Southern California than to central Mexico, or the capital, Mexico City, some 1,400 miles away.

Tijuana’s economic and cultural inter-connection with Southern California is key to our mission at El Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), where I work. The interconnection influences the way we program exhibitions, musical concerts and performing arts events that draw cultural enthusiasts from both sides of the border. Through our artistic offerings, we have helped build and expand a bilingual, transnational cultural community. In 2016, 1,946,000 people visited CECUT for one event or another, of which approximately 15 percent were from Southern California.

One of the strategies we use most to attract visitors from both sides of la frontera is to make our content available both in English and Spanish, mainly through social networks and the internet. We also form alliances with tour operators who run tours from the various museums of San Diego.

And we also work very closely with museums and galleries in San Diego, such as Mingei International, and the San Diego Contemporary Art Museum at La Jolla.

You could say that Tijuana’s cultural affinity for Southern California dates back to before 1776. The first settlers of this area, the indigenous Kumiai, an offshoot of the Yumanos of North America, inhabited the hydrological basin of what is today the Tijuana River and its surroundings. In the late 18th century, Spanish missionaries established Jesuit, Franciscan and, later, Dominican settlements along the peninsula of Baja California, and in what decades later would become the U.S. state of California.

From these beginnings, Tijuana-San Diego arose as a single region, split apart politically only after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the Mexican-American War. Yet the intrinsic, dynamic connection between the two cities remains, as can be seen in the overlap of key industries such as tourism, aerospace, the medical sector and electronics manufacturing. Not to mention the 150 million annual crossings that make the Tijuana-San Ysidro border the world’s most heavily trafficked. The region consists of a total population of about 6.5 million, making it the largest binational metropolitan area on the U.S.-Mexico border, now called Cali-Baja.

A good part of this cross-border traffic is cultural—by musicians, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers, some of whom are currently shooting the series “Fear the Walking Dead” in Baja California.

El Centro Cultural Tijuana exists within this cosmopolitan and binational context. It was founded on October 20, 1982 by the Mexican federal government, in an area of ​​3.5 hectares, as part of the National Fund for Social Activities (Fonapas) project, which sought to strengthen our national identity along our northern border and promote cultural tourism from the United States. Cultural centers were planned in other northern border cities, such as Ciudad Juárez and Tamaulipas, but only Tijuana’s was finished.

CECUT consolidates the broadest and most diverse cultural offerings in the northwest region, and its infrastructure is the most substantial of any project of the Ministry of Culture outside of Mexico City. Its facilities include the 300-seat circular IMAX Dome, which screens documentaries and educational films; and the Museum of the Californias, which was inaugurated in 2000 after a major renovation of the central building, and houses the most complete display anywhere of the peninsular history of Baja California, from its first settlers and the missionary era through World War II.

The IMAX dome at El Centro Cultural Tijuana. Courtesy of El Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Our 1,000-seat performance hall regularly programs musicians and other performing artists with cross-border appeal: Diego Ramón Jiménez Salazar, aka “El Cigala”; Concha Buika; Fito Páez; Julieta Venegas; the Orchestra of Baja California; the Mainly Mozart Orchestra; the Amalia Hernández Folkloric Ballet; and a wide variety of theater. In recent years we’ve hosted an exhibition of “Frida Kahlo’s Photos” and a show of European painting, in coordination with major Mexico City museums, such as the Soumaya, the Franz Mayer and the San Carlos. In this way, Tijuana brings works that normally stay in the capital city hundreds of miles closer to border art lovers.

We have shown the work of 20th-century masters like the Mexicans Rodolfo Morales and Dr. Atl, and the Colombian Fernando Botero (known for his gargantuan human figures). We’ve also featured contemporary artists such as Alejandro Santiago and Damián Flores, whose work, which draws heavily on U.S. pop culture iconography, has been exhibited at the University of Southern California and is popular with U.S. audiences and critics.

Another part of our facility, the 270-seat Cineteca Tijuana, was inaugurated in 2011 with the aim of being a meeting place for film directors, screenwriters, videographers, actors and public and private institutions of the cinematographic industry. It specializes in Mexican and Latin American cinema, as well as films for children and young people. It was christened Sala Carlos Monsiváis, in honor of the Mexican man of letters, whose witty writings and colorful personality for decades have been a guidepost to many U.S. students, academics, journalists and tourists seeking a richer, more profound understanding of contemporary Mexican culture and thought.

Approximately 70% of CECUT activities are free of charge, and the museum and exhibitions are also free on Sundays.

The image of Tijuana has perhaps been unfairly hit by safety concerns related to drug trafficking at various times in the past. But CECUT has become a point of dignity and pride for the city. It is not only a cultural center, but also a meeting point for the border citizens of Tijuana and Southern California. Our aim at CECUT is to be a cultural beacon of understanding, dialogue and knowledge that will guide the Cali-Baja binational region to create bridges between the two nations, in times when the tides that steer the world increasingly appear murky, obscure and aimless.

The post A Mexican Cultural Center That Builds Bridges, Not Walls, With the U.S. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Economics has since gone well beyond Ricardo’s analysis. But it remains instructive when it comes to agricultural products. And that brings me to strawberries.

Everyone loves strawberries. They are sweet, they go well on ice cream and sponge cake, and, when covered in chocolate, they are a perennial favorite on Valentine’s Day. There is even a website called strawberries-for-strawberry-lovers.com. The red fruit, a commercial hybrid of the genus frageria, is primarily produced for U.S. markets in two states, California and Florida.

In my part of the country, the Southern California coast, the strawberry fields seem to stretch forever, running inland from the ocean onto the Oxnard Plain. As an economist, I look at the fields and think, “There is Ricardo’s comparative advantage.” Southern California has a mild climate, moist sea breezes, and fertile soil: perfect for strawberry production.

The climate that makes Ventura County, California ideal strawberry territory does not end at the Mexican border (and that won’t change even with a big beautiful wall). On the Baja California Coast near San Quintín, you also find strawberries. With the expansion of cultivation in Baja, Guanajuato, and Michoacán, states, Mexican production and Mexican exports have been increasing in recent years. One reason is the climate allows for Mexican produce, like its Californian counterpart, to mature through the winter.

The consequence of being blessed with good soil and weather for strawberries is that both countries are major exporters of the crop. According to the California Strawberry Export Report, farmers in the Golden State exported about $400 million of fresh and frozen strawberries in 2016. Mexico exported approximately the same amount as California.

Here’s where things get interesting. Mexican exports tend to be to the United States; the United States exports to Canada and other countries. Why does the United States both export and import strawberries? One reason is the different harvesting season in Mexico, and the perishability of fresh berries.

But there’s another defining quality of strawberries: they are hard to harvest. Any hiker who has come across the wild version knows you have to stoop down and remove each fruit one by one. Machines, now used to pick some other crops, would damage the delicate berry and fail to separate ripe from budding fruits. So it is up to people, typically immigrants, to pick strawberries.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a good strawberry picker in Southern California can earn $150 per day during the harvest season. That translates to $18.75 per hour, well above California’s current $10 per hour minimum wage. According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, between 25 and 30 percent of all non-strawberry pickers in the same region earn less than $12.50 per hour. So why are these less well-paid folks not clamoring for jobs in the strawberry fields?

They have good reasons. First, strawberry picking is seasonal labor and must be pieced together with other fieldwork, sometimes involving travel to nearby counties. Second, and more important, it is back-breaking work. So the higher wages earned by today’s strawberry pickers are not nearly high enough to attract other low-income earners.

Down in Baja, strawberry harvest workers—no surprise—make much less than they do in Southern California. Even after a successful labor action last year, strawberry pickers’ wages are a little less than 200 pesos, or about $11 USD, per day.

So if labor is cheaper in Mexico, why doesn’t more of the strawberry business move south across the border? Soil and climate quality in California are a factor. And the labor price differential isn’t yet so much as to force the move south. Strawberry farms here can still find people to work in the fields. But there is an issue: The people willing to pick strawberries in Ventura County for $18.75 per hour are not Americans. They are Mexicans willing to brave the hazards of slipping across the border and living in the United States undocumented.

But the United States is changing. And so the delicate balance that allows both Southern Californian and Mexican strawberry operations to prosper is under pressure. The issue? The Trump Administration has vowed to deport undocumented residents. And where more effectively to deploy the limited resources of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) than where there is a concentration of the undocumented: in the strawberry fields?

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s change in policy, it’s inarguable that it will impact both California and the U.S. economy.

The immediate impact of deportations will be a shortage of labor. This is what was experienced in Georgia when an employer verification law went into effect in 2012. According to separate analyses by Forbes and NPR, farmers left up to 30 percent of peaches and blueberries unpicked in the orchards; farmers also engaged in a failed attempt to enlist prison labor to replace what was estimated to be up to 11,000 fewer agricultural workers. So, California and the United States will have fewer strawberries picked and the berries in the market will command higher prices.

But this is just the initial impact. In the longer run, farmers will either pay pickers more, perhaps much more, or they will plant something else, specifically crops like wheat and corn that can be harvested by machines, And these mean even fewer strawberries and even higher prices.

But that is not the end of the story. The same people who have been picking strawberries up and down the California Coast will still be picking our strawberries. They just will be doing it south of the border.

Let’s summarize the costs and benefits. The shift of the strawberry business further south should be a real boon to Mexican agriculture, food processing, and trucking. For the agricultural sector here in the United States, profits will be lower as land ideally suited for strawberries will be used to grow feed corn. There also will be less demand for goods and services in the U.S. communities now serving the undocumented, and the juicy red fruit will take more of our personal budgets at the checkout stand.

Finally, there is the unintended consequence of a larger trade deficit. President Trump campaigned on closing the deficit with Mexico. The deportation policy moves in the other direction as more profits from the strawberry trade accrue to Mexican land barons rather than California farmers.

So by itself, it is a policy of “choose your poison.” You can engage in mass deportations with consequent lower income for American farmers and their Mexican farm workers, and increase the trade deficit. Or you can forego mass deportations, thereby increasing the income of American farmers and their Mexican farm workers, and keep the trade deficit with Mexico no greater than it is today. But you can’t do both.

If you’re willing to think beyond deportations, you’ll find other options. One option would be to normalize the status of undocumented farm workers, perhaps via a new version of the bracero program of 1942 to 1964 that permitted U.S. farmers to recruit temporary agricultural help from Mexico. If lessons from that program’s history were kept in mind, a new guest-worker regime could correct the flaws of the previous program. It also would have the side benefits of reducing illegal border crossings—U.S. farms would not be providing jobs to newly arrived undocumented immigrants—and this would allow undocumented immigrants already here to come out of the shadows.

Or there might be something akin to the 1981 Voluntary Export Restraint (VER) program between the United States and Japan that established a quota on Japanese exports of cars to the United States. A VER for strawberries from Mexico would take care of the trade deficit consequence of deportations, through limits on Mexican strawberry imports. But these limits on imports of Mexican strawberries would exacerbate the shortage of strawberries in our supermarkets and would make St. Valentine’s Day even more expensive.

And this is just strawberries. In 2015 Mexico exported almost $22 billion of agricultural produce to the United States. Strawberries are just the tip of the iceberg.

The post If You Want Strawberry Fields Forever, You Need Migrant Labor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My acting friend, Ryan, has a British agent and a German agent because he pursues his career in both countries. That’s a typical conversation with his British agent. If he’s not “in the country,” he laments, they don’t put him up for jobs. Here’s one with his German agent:

“Ryan we have an audition for you in Cologne tomorrow afternoon.”
“That’s fine. I’m in London so I’ll get the 7:45.”
“Fine.”

The British play a leading role in the European Union, but despite joining it nearly 40 years ago, we never imagine ourselves as really part of it. We’re more like the kid with the sick-note on the sidelines, making snide comments when someone misses a sitter or falls over.

Last month, I travelled with my opera-singer partner from an audition that she had in Paris on one day, to an audition in Stuttgart the next. I experienced a deep thrill as, minutes after our train departed Strasbourg, we crossed from France into Germany. We crossed the border. One moment we were in France, and the next, a completely different country.

That fluid border has become part of the essence of what it means to be European.

We Brits are not used to crossing borders on land. We’re used to the process requiring a much greater effort and ceremony. Going to Europe—whether transported by some mechanical means under, on, or over the sea (which is otherwise impassable to all but the most audacious human swimmers)—that’s going abroad. You can walk to Wales. You can’t walk to Belgium. That’s what “abroad” means.

Mainland Europeans, meanwhile, have imagined away their borders.

This border between France and Germany was for me a mysterious, intangible but intensely powerful zone: nonexistent in real life, yet relatively massive as a black squiggle on a Google map. It bewitched me as I tried to pinpoint it, to experience “the going over,” to feel that infinitesimal moment of liminality. Although the ticket inspector naturally switched from French into German, and (as per European Union regulations) exchanged her neck-ring of garlic for a giant pretzel headpiece, in all other respects she carried on as if nothing had happened.

The crossing received not a flicker of interest from the morning commuters. To me it was monumental. “But the Maginot Line …” I kept murmuring to myself and my half-asleep companion, groggily studying Mozart. I didn’t even know whether the Maginot Line had even ever been there …

Britain is not in Europe because it is not in mainland Europe. The mentality of the British is frequently described as an “island mentality.” I am ashamedly prone to it myself.

As a stage director, I read a lot of actors’ and singers’ CVs. On my latest project, as I attempted to whittle down the audition schedule, I caught myself looking suspiciously at details of experience in European theaters I hadn’t heard of. I caught myself asking, “What have you done in the U.K.? What are all these foreign companies?”

I am ashamed of my prejudice, because I see myself as an example of a rare thing: a European Brit. In fact, I am currently living in Italy. I am house-sitting for my sister’s (Italian-Australian) in-laws. I am here because I love Italy and want to improve my Italian. I want to make contacts and to work in theaters across Europe.

My interest in Europe comes, I believe, from my late mother, an art critic and book editor who spoke Italian, French, and German. It’s rare for a Brit to speak anything other than English.

Always impressed by my mum, I have spurred myself to study those languages too. I drew stares of astonished horror on London’s “tube” (subway) when I directed a lost French woman in French at Christmas. That my French was wildly ungrammatical didn’t matter—no one apart from my interlocutor knew. To the Londoners (who as a rule conceal their emotions at all costs), I was gifted with terrible powers. An enthusiastic attempt at Italian in a similar situation caused people to move down the car.

Our suspicion of languages other than English is another symptom of our islander mentality. There’s little attempt to shake it. Although the sea’s relevance as a physical barrier between “us” and “them” has dwindled, it retains a powerful grip on our psyche. The leader of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party (UKIP) complained that hearing foreign languages around him on the train was “deeply disturbing.” His interviewer questioned him about that, because the leader of UKIP is in fact married to a German, and his own children speak German. (Only in Britain could this be seen as a massive victory for the Left.)

As they say, “exposure is everything,” and I credit my mum with seeding my interest in cultures beyond the coast of Blighty. We spent the occasional summer in Italy. Dad’s shoeboxes of photographs contain classics such as myself, my sister, and brother grimacing in Rome’s August heat, in front of St. Peter’s Cathedral. Here’s Lewis on the verge of sunstroke outside the Medici Palace. Here’s Eleanor sulking sweatily on the Uffizi floor. I grew up with pasta (normally with pesto) as my staple food, while my British friends were on oven chips and burgers. Among the more traditional roast beefs and treacle puddings, my grandmother still makes me sweet and sour pork with spaghetti (pineapples and all) whenever I visit Liverpool. I see this as a continued nod to my mother’s Europeanism. Sweet and sour is, of course, emphatically not Italian: I can only assume it’s the thing Grandma thinks goes best with spaghetti. The gesture is in the spaghetti. It is a dish that I have grown to love, although I have only ever encountered it in Grandma’s house.

My mother’s European son, I find myself now living in Italy—until I return to London for that summer opera. I love Italy, Italians, the food, the culture … I love fumbling through the pronouns and drawing beaming smiles of approval at my catastrophic and often offensive errors. I love the absence of McDonald’s and the rest of them. A recent return to London—for those auditions—had me grumpy, cramped, and resentful at the nonstop circuit of chain stores and soulless restaurants. I heard myself declaiming sentences such as, “It’s not how it’s done in Italy …”

Here in Pisa, I have been sent to see Guido on Via San Francesco for my vegetables. He picks them for you: You do not touch Guido’s vegetables. This can be difficult when it comes to nonnative products such as avocados. Guido doles them out too hard. “Italians do not understand the avocado,” laments my friend Giorgio. “It is grown here, but it is not native.” What a wonderful foible.

I may lapse into some of the anti-European prejudices intrinsic to my island. But I’m not proud of that. Should my country vote to leave the European Union, I still hope to remain an active part of it. An Italian friend based in London has offered to help me find a flat in Berlin. Perhaps I will take her up on that.

The post The British Are Anchored by an Islander Mentality appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Take the California-Oregon border. When you drive over the Siskiyou Pass on Interstate 5 and cross from Oregon into California, you will not be greeted by any welcoming party, grand gate, or museum that extols the glories of the Golden State.

No, the first sign of California civilization is the giant All Star Liquors store, in the tiny community of Hilt. And if you prefer a different coastal entrance into California from Oregon along the 101, you’ll get the very same greeting: All Star Liquors’ other outlet, in Smith River, near an Indian casino.

The store’s slogan? “The Party Starts Here.” Except, at California’s borders, the party starts slowly.

Over the past year, I’ve made a point of exploring California’s four land borders—with Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and Mexico. And what I’ve seen, again and again, would deflate the pride of the proudest Californian. Along these divides, ours is consistently the shabbier side of the border.

The juxtaposition is most jarring along our southern border with Mexico. Tijuana, once dismissed as a big slum, has become one of the great urban success stories in North America. At the main border crossing, Tijuana is dynamic and fast-paced, while, on the California side, the San Ysidro section of San Diego is shabby, with a particularly dismal McDonald’s.

Farther east along the border, the story is similar. California offers small and poor Calexico, population 39,000, immediately across from Mexicali, which has a population approaching 700,000. Peter Laufer, author of books about California’s northern and southern borders, wrote in Calexico: True Lives of the Borderlands: “Cosmopolitan sophistication is across the border in Mexicali, a 24-hours-a-day cornucopia of dining and nightclubs, theater, and concerts. It is the state capital of Baja California and home to the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California.”

But it’s not just on measures of dynamism that we’re on the wrong side of the border. Our neighboring states also offer border regions far more welcoming than ours.

Along the Arizona border, Lake Havasu City, with the London Bridge, outshines the settlements on the California side of the Colorado River, all the way down to dusty Blythe. Farther south, Yuma, Arizona, population 91,000, sits across from not very much at all.

Along the far northern coast, Brookings, Oregon, is a more prosperous place than the beautiful, but poor, Crescent City, California. And inland, Ashland, Oregon, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, is far lovelier than Siskiyou County, which shows up in California newspapers mostly for fires and as unofficial headquarters of a secession movement.

The Nevada side of the California border is also far more built up, with casinos and the lights of Vegas at the Interstate 15 crossing juxtaposed against California scrub and desert. Up in Tahoe, the streets on the California side of the lake are noticeably less maintained than the Nevada thoroughfares. And no place on the lake gleams like Nevada’s Incline Village, a haven for Californians trying to avoid high Golden State taxes.

On the Mexico border, the lack of any welcome to California is in large part a function of the United States government, and the way it’s held hostage by our current political obsession with border security. Walking from California into Mexico is a pleasure—it takes less than five minutes. But I routinely encounter hours-long waits to walk back, because of federal border enforcement. On a recent trip, facing big delays crossing back from Tijuana, I paid $6 to enterprising Mexicans to ride in a van seven miles east to the less crowded Otay Mesa crossing. There it took me 40 minutes to get through border control, and then was picked up by the same van at a California-side sandwich shop and driven to San Ysidro so I could get the trolley back to downtown San Diego.

California has a reputation for regulation and big government, but at our borders, we’re the side that seems ungoverned. Needles, California, which borders Arizona (and is near Nevada), is one of the bleakest and most desolate places I’ve encountered in the state. Trains rumble through at all hours, and trash litters the streets. The first business I encountered on crossing into town from Arizona was a dark medical marijuana dispensary.

That’s typical. On the borders, California businesses often profit from our permissiveness. That’s why liquor stores greet people who come across our Oregon border.

The Golden State has long been distinguished by some of the nation’s lowest taxes on beer, wine, and distilled spirits—a legacy of the liquor lobby’s might that dates back to the famous powerbroker Artie Samish, the self-proclaimed “Secret Boss of California” in the early 20th century. Voters tell pollsters they’d be happy to raise liquor taxes, but the alcohol industry’s spending and the state’s two-thirds requirement for revenue increases have frustrated those efforts.

The locations of All Star Liquors on the California side of the border capitalize on these facts. Online, the store boasts “savings of up to 70 percent or more over Oregon, Washington, and Idaho pricing.” The stores also have what customers assured me (I’m a teetotaler) is an incredibly large selection, and excellent customer service. When I dropped by, All Star Liquors staffers were loading up two customers’ vehicles, neither of which had California license plates, as part of the store’s “Road Trip Service” that allows people to order online and have the entire order ready for pickup.

The store’s website promises: “You don’t need to drive any farther into California to find the best prices, best selection, and the friendliest staff this side of the Mississippi!”

That’s not exactly an endorsement of the Golden State. But it’s hardly surprising. Californians treat our borders like backwaters, even though millions of people enter California this way. We could do better by our border communities, and by our state, if we thought of them as front doors.

The post Welcome to California (Not!) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.