Memory Lapse

The Clinton administration's refugee policy is a victory for welfare statism--and for Castro.

Virginia Postrel from the November 1994 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

We must launch a military attack on Haiti, reason the Clintonites, to stop immigration. We must halt the "invasion" of refugees in fishing boats.

This is madness. And stupidity. And, most of all, amnesia. The administration and its allies, left and right, believe that the best way to overthrow dictatorships is to bottle up their people and starve them with trade embargoes. If the people suffer enough, it is presumed, they will rebel.

The forgotten history of Sigrid's country suggests otherwise. Embargoes didn't bring down Erich Honecker or the Berlin Wall. Mass migration did.

In the summer of 1989, East Germans began to sneak West, first by the hundreds via Hungary, where they could legally go on vacation, then by the tens of thousands. By August, West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, and East Berlin were packed with refugees. By September, more than 13,000 East Germans were leaving through Hungary; by early October, 17,000 were on "freedom trains" from Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Had Bill Clinton been chancellor of West Germany, he no doubt would have panicked. Fortunately, he was not.

The refugees continued to leave, and they continued to be accepted in the West. By early November, the hemorrhaging was too great. The Wall came down, followed, within a month, by the Communist government itself.

That is how you destroy tyranny. You deprive it of the people on whose labors it feeds--and from whose existence and implied support it derives its legitimacy. You do not allow them to be owned by their rulers, and you do not lock them behind barbed wire.

You let them not only dream of water skiing in Florida. You let them do it.