 with my co-host, Jim Apochella, and our esteemed guest and history researcher and scholar person, Jane Rosenthal, welcome both of you. Morning. Oh, boarders. What are our boarders, Jane? How did boarders come about in the human evolution? Too often through conflict. We forget that war sometimes has positive results by defining and ordering our spatial geopolitical universe. So you think about the borders of the United States, not only through conflict, but specifically through conquest. Boarders are established. And sometimes they're established by courts, not as often, maybe by international courts, maybe by international conferences. Think of the Versailles Conference after World War I. The borders that were established for Germany turned out to be unstable. They made the world more insecure because they became in grievance that played into the rise of national socialism and Hitler's message. So there are all sorts of different ways. And sometimes borders can be up for grabs for a very, very long time. We see this in Azerbaijan and Armenia today. We see this in Gaza and Israel today. And we see it certainly in the conflict between Ireland and Britain over centuries. So there's a variety of ways that usually conflict plays into it because any kind of order imposed is usually an urgent matter due to conflict, due to an untenable situation. And so conferences and courts and rules and laws are there to make the world a more orderly place. So you're saying that in the human condition as it has existed, we need borders. Borders serve useful purposes. But let me ask you this, in a perfect world, do we need borders? I don't know what a perfect world is. You mean abstractly, ideologically, do we need borders? Well, if humanity reaches a level of peace and tranquility and love and caring for your neighbor, do we need borders then? We need open borders that facilitate commerce and peace. We had that briefly through the Globalization Initiative that I think started before Bill Clinton, it was a business initiative and then it was taken up by the federal government. That's now become sort of a bad word because nationalism is ascendant and it's in conflict with openness and open borders. A short story, my wife and I were traveling in France and we were heading east and all of a sudden we saw the street signs were in German and we had no idea that we had actually passed into Germany. There was no mark on the road, there was no guardhouse, there was no indication whatsoever to us that we were now crossing from France to Germany. And I loved that. I thought that was a wonderful thing in years past, all this contention, but now you could drive from one to the other. So I ask you, Jane, how have borders changed in and after World War II that this should happen? I think the experience of the Second World War after the First World War so soon and the Holocaust and the terrible things that went on in East Germany that Timothy Snyder has recorded in his lifelong work in long Ukraine and Poland and Lithuania where he talks about a second Holocaust having happened, those kinds of experiences finally do make the mark on human populations. And also the United States really was the emergent nation after World War II, not World War I, World War II. And so we had a vision of an orderly world, particularly with our allies in Europe because we have more, had more cultural alignment with Europe and feeling for Europe and Europe was totally destroyed. So you have the Marshall Plan to build the cities back up, put things in order. And you have all of the United Nations and the institutions, the world institutions we set up to put a new liberal world order in place. And these established the rules. And then you have, of course, the European Union as a counterweight to any kind of a third world war that might erupt in that same place. Yeah, and Tim, the European Union had had some kind of initiative to allow migrants from the global south from Middle East, North Africa, what have you. And that created a phenomenon of migrants in Europe. Thanks to Angela Merkel, I must say, she was very humanitarian. And maybe that was part of the German pushback on what happened in the war. In any event, the migrants have had an effect on using those open borders and then creating a backlash where maybe it's not so open anymore. Your thoughts? Yeah, my thoughts are, you know, you could think Brexit as immigration and quotas of immigration set by the EU as the genesis of Brexit. You could also, you know, have the dilemma where you have a culture immigrating into a different culture. And unlike the United States where we became quote unquote the melting pot, in these countries are a solid ball. And assimilation doesn't necessarily take place. I'm thinking of France specifically and the influence of North African Muslim culture into a non-Muslim, predominantly Christian Catholic culture and the lack of assimilation of cultures and food and how you look at the world. That's been a real problem for the French government and not unlike the United Kingdom government. And so then you get the resentment that comes from that. Not unlike resentment that comes from the south of the border where you have a different culture that may or may not assimilate into a white culture. And as I've always said, it's the dictator's playbook to use that difference, that cultural difference and blame it on immigration, therefore blame it why you said support me because I'm gonna stop that. And every dictator would be dictator enjoys that as the entree point for support and popularity. You know, Jean, it sounds to me like it was natural if not predictable that a wholesale invitation to the Middle East, North Africa, immigrants, migrants who had serious problems in their home countries who were seeking sanctuary for sure. But wasn't it predictable that this would create a problem in Europe when you have millions of people coming across borders that were not being enforced and entering into civil societies that were not the same and not being willing to integrate. And finally, let me say that this is at the end of the day a management problem. It's a management of the border and it's a management of the integration. Your thoughts? Well, people don't usually think of Europe as a very ethnically conscious part of the world but as a continent, different languages are spoken in the matter of a few miles and have been for centuries. There is a language in Switzerland called Roma. You think of Switzerland as being trilingual but it's actually quadrilingual. And Roma is in a little corner of Switzerland that has been a backwater, not culturally or intellectually, but in a sense geographically for hundreds of years. You have the Basque country in Spain which is a separate nation, so to speak. And in every single country you would find these little enclaves. So each enclave is not only culturally distinct and linguistically distinct but is genetically almost distinct because people didn't move that much for centuries and they intermarried in their communities. Peasant marriage was very commonplace right up into, well into the 20th century in Europe. So you have all of these things that make for a very insular type of society. Now you admit individuals not only from a different culture and who are different ethnically speak a different language, a different food and belong to a universal religion which will accommodate you if you agree with them but won't accommodate you much if you don't. That's a recipe for ethnocentrism, conflict and misunderstanding. And when you open the doors to people from Africa from tribal societies as well who are escaping horrible conditions. And then you have the situation with the climate crisis that in essence creates chaos in some of these places and people seek refuge, however they can they are desperate for refuge. And it's tragic that it's predictable especially I think in a very insular continent like Europe. What else might be predictable is something Tim mentioned and that is the move to autocracy if I take a given political population and I threaten them, you know and I'm gonna have certain reactions when I have isolationism and I'm gonna have autocracy that seems to be the case. Is it the case? Your thoughts about that particular predictable phenomenon? There is a definite relationship between the culture clashes, that immigration, rapid, valuable immigration creates in insular societies and nationalism. The rise of nationalism is very related. We see this in our own country. Why did we have the birth or narrative about Barack Obama in the first place? He's from somewhere else, he's not one of us. He's a different color. He must be very, very different from us even though he has ancestors who brought the American Revolution. So you create this narrative and you see him as the other and then you jumpstart a national movement in mainstream politics based on this type of backlash to what we call integration but you might also say immigration. Integration wasn't enough. It was, he had to be seen as something, someone other that came from beyond our borders. I mean, Hawaii wasn't far enough. He had to go back. He had to be seen as somebody from Kenya and he kind of played into that by writing his books, by the way. But he had no idea he was doing. Are we done with that now? Are we done with that whole evolution onto isolationism, nationalism and ultimately autocracy? Or are we just beginning? Oh, we're in the throes of it and it's not going away. It's a real threat. I mean, the visions were there. We're living in an era competing new world orders. We heard the Elder Bush talk about a new world order and boy, that set off a firestorm, didn't it, throughout the world? Well, Vladimir Putin has a view of a new world order based on Russian values and Russian civilization. And certainly the jihadist and Shiite radicals have a vision of a new world order, which is based on a type of medieval Islam, which is foreign to most Muslims today, particularly educated Muslims. And so we have these competing world orders that in essence facilitate conflict and create new allies and alliances. And there's a struggle for different narratives to be adopted by people and to come into our camp and do it our way. There's a huge effort to overthrow the new world order in place after World War II that I spoke about earlier, the so-called enlightened liberal world order. And that's regarded as hegemony and colonialism and such things and supremacy, ethnic supremacy and all of that. And to replace it with other nationalist visions which aren't necessarily any more enlightened or maybe far less than like. Tim, I wanna tell you a short story. You know, our studio a few years ago was pretty much on Fort Street. And I was right next to HPU and I ran into this Swedish student at HPU with very international then. And I asked her how she felt about the migrants and all that. And she said she was so ticked off with the government of Sweden. And she so admired Angela Merkel because Angela Merkel was, you know, to use Jean's word enlightened. And she wanted Sweden to be more enlightened. And I took it at that point that there was a moment, even a competition among the Western European countries to allow migrants as a humanitarian enlightened expression. But you know, I suggest to you, the things have changed. That the migration of all these billions of migrants and the reaction politically in various countries has changed the nature of borders since my conversation on Fort Street Mall with the Swedish girl. What do you think? Well, yeah, the whole concept of borders is that has changed. Again, if you're a European, as I said earlier, you're resentful that your nation is subject to EU immigration quotas, if you will. And that plays, you know, I'm thinking of when the Berlin Wall fell down and the resentment of a lot of West Berliners, West Germany to adopt the economic woes of East Germany. Certainly East Germany was nowhere near developed as West Germany was. And as a result, they had to bear the burden of economic prosperity for both East and West Germany. And I think culturally there was a lot of resentment, even though they are all of the same German population, economically there was a distinction that mainly West Germans resented. And so, you know, borders aren't just a dot on a map. A lot of times they're just cultural differences that create a separation, you will. And then there's an immigration of that. And so things changed not just by a map, the changing of a borderline on a map. Another point it changes, I went back thinking about this subject to look at human flow. The I-Way-Way movie, 2017, about migration around the world. And it gives examples in almost a random fashion of various places in the world where people migrated, they were permitted as a matter of kindness. Think of all the millions of people who came through Lesbos in Greece and got into Northern Europe along that track. And think of all the places in the world where they're locked in camps, one reason or another. You thought that displacement camps were a thing that followed World War II and ended somewhere along the line. I-Way-Way makes the point, there are 65 million people in displacement camps, at least in 2017, I imagine more now. But then comes Ukraine. Ukraine with the kindness of the Polish people and other countries in the Baltics and the Balkans who let them in to make homes for them, to feed them and close them and take care of their children, to integrate them in a fashion in their society as a matter of kindness. And I thought to myself, what a wonderful thing that they would take in the Ukrainians that way. And it seemed to be a reversal of the problem with the migrants. Your thoughts, Tim? Well, I think there's a lot of Texans, people along the border, that work very well with people that are immigrating across the border. Hey, before Texas was Texas, it was Mexico. So, you know, again, you have a blend of cultural, again, I call it the melting pot. And you have two distinct cultures, yet a lot of Texans get along very, very well with a Mexican culture. And so why not? Why not have the Polish help out the Ukrainians? You know, they're very similar, but they're different. But why not? You know, as I thought about this topic, I thought about our Native Americans in the plains area, where there were no borders. Your borders were dependent upon migration of the Buffalo and how the culture, the Native American culture didn't understand the concept of property ownership. They didn't understand the dots of a map and why their perplexed white, the white settlers thought it's so necessary to buy up the land and call it their own. They certainly didn't know those kind of borders. Their borders were on wherever the Buffalo was migrating to as they were on nomadic culture. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, another gift that the American development left for the Indians, another gift. So Jean, you know, if you look at Ukraine and Poland and those countries in the Baltics today, it's not the same as it was when the war first started. It's a war of attrition that Vladimir Putin has created. And the attrition is not only in the Ukrainian military forces, it's in the people who help Ukraine. We have seen attrition certainly in the EU and the United States. We have our own problems. But the fact is that people are not so excited now as they were what two years ago to help the Ukrainians and to support them as migrants. Do you agree? You're muted. I was sneezing because I didn't want you to hear me. Yes and no. First of the Ponderland, head of the EU now at Davos just gave a speech. At the same time, the Chinese representative gave a speech a couple of days ago and she gave an impassioned defense apologia for open borders, for enlightenment, for democracy and all of those things being threatened. So at least officially, I don't think the leaders of an open Europe are really ready to give up. And I do think that the countries that are bordering the former Soviet Union that used to rule them like Poland and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, they are still very supportive of Ukraine. And I think the further out you get from that, maybe there's a little compassion fatigue and an understanding about how much of our resources can we contribute to this when we've got problems at home with this very large faction of insular nationalistic people. Interesting again, another parallel to just before World War II, insularity was very strong in Europe. It's old, old tradition. Even Switzerland, which had a tradition of being a haven for refugees and take to pride in that. The federal government in 1939, basically closed their borders to Jews who were fleeing from Austria because they wanted to be like the other European nations, very self-protective. And you ask why the EU started after World War II because they knew that that kind of nationalism and insularity only led in one direction and that was back to conflict. We've forgotten that lesson now and we're back where we were then, so to speak in world terms. And that's very frightening. Well, speaking of conflict, I turn to you, Tim. You think of me when you think of conflict, that's great. I guess so. Well, the big conflict, the daily conflict that we read about in the paper every day, and I don't wanna diminish Ukraine, but it's Gaza and Israel. And here we have a border that was a fence, a border that was an electronic fence. And if you ask the Palestinians, they say they were being held prisoner. And if you ask the Israelis, they say they were being protected by this border. It sort of sheds a new light on what a border could be. But what have we learned from the border between Gaza and Israel? What have we learned about the effectiveness of that border, the concept of that border, and about borders in the future? Well, let's go to the Great Wall of China. Walls don't keep people out. People are very ingenious. People think of a way to get in. And I'm thinking of the southern border between the United States and Mexico. Donald Trump's build a wall of campaign was fraught from the day he said it. Bottom line is people will find a way to find employment, to take care of their families, to visit families that are across a border. Other than the Berlin Wall, which was very difficult to breach, people are very ingenious. And so borders are just that, they're permeable. Jean, your thoughts about the offense, the border that the Israelis constructed with Gaza. What does it teach us? I read, it reminds me of Robert Frost Cohen, something there is that doesn't love a wall. And by the end of that poem, we saw that walls keep people out, but they also keep people in. When you have a wall, you exacerbate the differences between the people on either side of that wall and make accommodation between those two cultures more difficult. Was it Robert Frost who also said, good fences build good neighbors? Absolutely, it is because of ambiguity. He starts out something there is that doesn't love and then good fences make good neighbors in the sense that it establishes border. Borders establish border. Walls are a little different from borders. They're borders on steroids. And they say, keep out. Don't change anything about what's on this side. Well, then it doesn't sound like the border is a really good idea. And if we're planning the day after here, shouldn't we consider knocking that fence down and finding a way to make good neighbors without good fence? Well, you have to look at the specific situation what's going on there. It's a little premature to talk about knocking down walls in Israel and the West Bank. The walls are now really in people's minds and people's actions more than anything else. And following from that, you have a war going on. I mean, it really is a war. It's not just in Gaza and Israel. It's the northern border. It's the West Bank. And in the middle of a war, do you tear down a wall? Do you scale a wall? How about after the war? You scale a wall. After the wall? After the war? Oh, they're fighting over that right now. Netanyahu is saying, no, no, we're not gonna have a Palestinian state. Lincoln is saying, oh, yes, yes, that's related to any kind of ceasefire. You can't have it both ways, Israel. So we're fighting that one too. If we have a separate state for the Palestinians, do we need to have a wall? You know, if we ever got to the point where we could have separate state for the Palestinians, I don't think there would be a wall. I mean, that's preliminary to the separate state. I don't know if I sent it to you guys, but there's a couple of really interesting videos on YouTube. I, a woman who is a Palestinian Arab, I mean, an Arab Israeli, and her name is Khalifa, A-H-A-L-I-F-A. You can find it on YouTube. And she speaks about that. She speaks about the notion that there's actually plenty of room in Israel and that you could have a completely integrated country if people would only agree not to engage in conflict. Now, let me go to the last topic in our discussion here, Tim. And you alluded to it a little while ago. We all have, and it's the southern border of the United States. You know, I mean, if you look at one side of the news spectrum, you see people attacking Joe Biden for allowing what they consider chaos on the southern border where people come in and huge numbers every day and flood into the country, taking sanctuary but finding a free transit to anywhere they wanna go, essentially, in the country. And if you look at the other side today, he's trying to do reform here. He's trying to prevent that. But the Republicans aren't giving him what he wants in terms of resources to do it. And I think the public in general, all the viewers of these programs are confused as to exactly what is happening on the southern border and who's responsible for all these people coming in and not being managed. Just thoughts, Tim? Well, my thoughts is in 2024, there's no desire from the GOP to resolve immigration because it's their political wedge to knock Joe Biden out of his seat. They may say they want a resolution and they may say it's a crisis, but I don't think they have the political will to do anything about it. And that's why Mike Johnson is having difficulties because who controls the mega GOP in the house? Donald Trump. Donald Trump isn't interested in resolving this because he knows he's gonna use it for him to become the next president again. And he's gonna use immigration as his main point of that. Remember, every demagogue's dream come true is to install fear in the populace. And that is by saying immigration brings drugs. They bring terrorists. They take away your jobs. They bring more crime. And last but not least, which isn't always been proven, but they're also taking government subsidies. They're taking government benefits which you taxpayers pay for. How dare they? So you use the combination of these things and you install resentment and fear into not only the Republicans, but also the independents and Democrats. And quite frankly, it's a very effective way for a demagogue or a would-be dictator to get their support, get the popularity. That falls on fertile ground of isolationism and nationalism and all that. I don't think they wanna resolve this, quite frankly. No, they wanna weaponize it politically and Trump does. But Gene, we have to find a solution to this problem, this domestic problem, this border problem. And so I just like for a moment now, I'd like to make you president. In fact, I'd like to make you president permanently, but just for this moment, I'd like to make you president. If you're president, what would you do to address this border issue with all the implications and all the effects it has on the country? Well, I think before there can be any policy change, there has to be an adoption of that policy in the hearts and minds of the American people. And the anti-immigrant movement, which precedes MAGA and really undergirds MAGA, has done a very good job of poisoning that well, if I can far or phrase that that is used to dehumanize immigrants. I think back in my life, and lived long enough to say this, when we had a discussion about camps for the Japanese during World War II and after we spoke about it quite a bit. And we were traveling one time in British Columbia in the mountains and we came across an overgrown concentration camp for Japanese. There are many more camps in North America, in Western North America that we put people into in World War II than we admit to. But historians 50 years from now are gonna be talking about the way we treat immigrants today as the major symptom of the troubles that lie in our immediate future. And they will be discussing this as a dreadful time when Americans basic human outreach to other human beings was eradicated by a narrative of difference, dehumanization and this type of rising up of this ethnocentricity, Americanism surrounded by flags, white power, stuff that- Well, wait a minute, wait a minute, Shane. This is the melting pot. This is the land of the Statue of Liberty. Give me your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. This is where everybody has opportunities and even the most modest immigrant has a shot at it. Are you telling me that narrative is not true? That is a national myth and we all need national myths. Every nation is founded on a myth that paints its people as heroes and wonderful human beings. We have that to imbue us as an ideal to strive for like the city on the hill, which we never were and we're still driving to be. And that's a national myth. Over time, over time, don't you think that there will be an assimilation of immigrants? That they will go to school, they'll have good jobs, they'll marry and have good children and all that. And they will fit into the American narrative somehow. Yes, of course. And Margaret Mead used to say, the great anthropologist that we are all third generation Americans. By the third generation, we're all the same, basically in what we subscribe to as a nation with individual differences, of course. But we all have people in our families, if not ourselves, whose ancestors came here in the last generation or two. You look at the children of immigrants are more, quote, American in their behavior than the kids whose ancestors were here in the 18th century, to be honest with you. Oh, yeah. So are you saying that if you were president and I really want that, Madam President, what would you do? Is your answer that there's nothing that you can do? No, I'm saying, first of all, again, the presidency is a bully pulpit and you have the opportunity to be the secular preacher every weekend, speaking to the people about one issue or another. And I remember during the Kennedy administration, the way they mobilized public sentiment was absolutely astonishing. Not every president can do this, but you have opportunity. Teddy Roosevelt did the same thing during his administration. You have the opportunity to create a movement, whether it's for fitness or for service or to preserve the environment in our beautiful country. You have that opportunity as a president, especially with all the tools of communication we have today. So number one, be the great educator, okay? Secondly, apply the amount of personnel you need to make the system work and listen to those who object. Try to find some kind of round on which you both can stand in order to implement it, at least something. And thirdly, warn people about avoiding the process of first creating, having a wall and then incarcerating people, which we were starting to do during the Trump administration, separating families, incarcerating people, giving children away, literally, to other families which some of those children are not reunited yet. This is the basic ground on which dictators stand by treating people as unhuman, as animals, as caging them. And when we're in our greatest state of fear, as we were during the Second World War again, we do this to people. We put them in camps. We separate them. Well, we're almost out of time, so I wanna go to closing remarks. Tim, you know, you're first, and you know that this show, which we call Keeping America Company, is built from the song that Coca-Cola had back in the 80s. And that song, if any of you wanna sing it, it's okay, you can sing it. I didn't like it the first time. Something about, you know- The melody, that's it. About global civility. About getting along together, about a bunch of people from various cultures and races standing on a hilltop and singing the song of togetherness. And I wonder what your thoughts are, what summarization you wanna make today. And for that purpose, I think you ought to consider yourself a vice president. Yeah, but vice presidents really don't get to do a whole lot, so never mind. I have to keep knocking on Gene's door all the time, just as mother may I. Okay, hey, I'm sorry to say this, and I hate to take a negative downturn here, the Debbie Downer cynical viewpoint, but our immigration problems are one, one-tenth of what they're going to be thanks to global warming. You are gonna see great patterns of migration way from areas that are no longer hospitable. And I'm not talking just from Africa to Europe. I'm talking about from the South States into the other States in the United States that have a more temperate climate. Watch out Hawaii, okay? Watch out Seattle, watch out for the West Coast because you're gonna see a lot of Texans moving in. The bottom line is it's a zero-sum game, so it's the myth that there's not enough resources to handle a migration pattern. And who's gonna take the short end of the stick? And a good demagogue, a great wannabe dictator, will amplify those fears. And I'm afraid the Coca-Cola singing on the hilltop isn't gonna make the day here. It's only gonna get worse. And what we need as a leader, as Gene suggested, is to sit down on the other side and say, how are we gonna handle immigration to that which we all can live by? And if you don't do that, Gene's correct. We are just gonna see issues of greater conflict and alienation amongst different cultures that are trying to become into the United States, which it was a myth, but it was a melting pot of sorts. Oh, wow, applause to you for those remarks. That's fantastic. By the way, we can handle the Texans here, but I think we're gonna throw the line at Greg Abbott. I agree. Gene, what are your summary final points here today? I think immigration is going to be the biggest issue in our presidential election campaign. I think it tracks with what we've seen in history when a populist feels that things are going downhill. And they're frightened and they want a strong man. I think there are so many dedicated people that have been working with immigrants for years. And we still have a system which is relatively enlightened when people come into the country according to the rules in place and they're able to be processed, they do become new citizens. We have certain segments that we accept more than others. Recugies from Afghanistan, for example. They have been embraced by individuals who are in Afghanistan, who have lobbied for them, who have advocated for them. People from Cuba, Marco Rubio has been a long-term advocate for immigrants from Cuba while he's let the Salvadorans just fester as dreamers and never be normalized, treated them differently. So having advocates in the United States for a particular ethnicity does help. It's also true that we're not putting enough personnel and funding into the problem. No matter how much we put in, it may not be enough. But we do need an organized integrated system of immigration. There's bad talk about what's been happening under the Biden presidency. It's actually been much more orderly than it was under Trump. And so we have to just work with what we've got as much as we've got and hope for more people like a police chief in Switzerland when they try to close the border to Jews fleeing from Austria, just to individually save as many people as he could before he lost his job. A question of morality, a question of humanitarian kindness and caring for human beings. Thank you so much, Dean Rosenfeld, Tim Appichella for a very interesting job. Aloha. Okay.