UNITED States President Donald Trump announced last week that he was going ahead with his campaign promise to build a wall along the country’s southern border with Mexico to keep out illegal immigrants. He blames immigrants from all over South and Central America for getting jobs which, he said, should go to Americans.
He is building another kind of wall against refugees from the Middle East and North Africa – an anti-immigration wall of restrictions to keep out terrorists, he said. He issued an executive order suspending for four months the entry of immigrants from seven mainly Muslim countries – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. At the end of the three months, new tough vetting rules will be enforced.
It looks like Trump wants the US to withdraw from the rest of the world where it has long been a dominant influence. Before World War II, international affairs largely evolved around the European powers – Spain and Portugal in the early age of exploration and colonization. Then England and France. Germany rose and fell in World War II. In the post-war era, the US and Soviet Russia became the world’s two superpowers. The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the US as the lone superpower.
It was into this fast-changing world that President Trump was elected to office, but he appears to be out to pull the US from its position of great involvement in international affairs with his concentration on the domestic problems of the US. European leaders are concerned about Trump’s criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which he has called “obsolete.” British Prime Minister Theresa May said she does “not agree” with Trump’s immigration restrictions, while French President Francois Hollande warned against the economic and political consequences of Trump’s protectionist stance.
Berlin Mayor Michael Mueller focused on Trump’s proposed wall along the Mexico border. He recalled how Europe’s “Iron Curtain” – specifically the Berlin Wall – caused so much suffering during the Cold War and how President Ronald Reagan spoke in Berlin in 1987 and challenged Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall!” Today, Mayor Mueller said, he would ask Trump: “Don’t build this wall!”
Trump’s moves have begun to meet some opposition from inside the government. Last Monday, he fired the acting US attorney general after she publicly questioned the constitutionality of his refugee and immigration ban. Protests mounted as some US legal permanent residents were detained at airports around the country.
The anti-immigration and anti-refugee orders are indications of President Trump’s determination to concentrate on solving the nation’s domestic problems and keep out the outside world that he blames for these problems. We may see more of these orders in the coming months and years. They will effectively build a wall that will protect – but at the same time, isolate – the country.
