Umm, are you actually accusing Bush of being against globalization? Thats certainly a new one to me.

It will be easy to gain control of the border. The newer UAV's are highly effective, you might want to check out this site for the more interesting stuff http://www.livingroom.org.au/uavblog/

The National Guard troops are just there to escort captured immigrants back for processing, the border patrol agents stay out in the field and do the actual arrests. Given that you could not enter US space for more than 30 seconds before being tracked, and the trip (on foot) takes several days, the border could be made reasonably secure with just the budget and troops allocated.

Actually, I think quite an effective case can be made that Bush has been a counterforce to globalization, a term he allegedly felt smacked of Clintonian wishy-washiness anyway (I think this was suggested in ‘Bush at War’, but I could be wrong).

Rhetorically, Bush has shifted the global conversation from one in which borders were seen as increasingly less important as economies grew (Daalder’s point, I presume, being that economic/global realities mean we should be negotiating international trade/immigration agreements rather than moving to control borders nationally), to one in which national distinctions (and therefore borders) unrelated to economics are of central relevance to almost every international topic of the day.

Whether or not Bush intended to become this force when he built his base of support on American nationalism is debatable, but there it is. That the American business community (note: not unions, but the heads of US corporations themselves) would ask the government to prevent CNOOC’s takeover bid of Mobil, that the UAE port deal was politically impossible on all sides, and that immigration is now the central republican issue suggests that while international trade may exist, the term ‘globalization’ as it was used in the 90’s is less relevant than it was before Bush came on the scene.

Daalder is correct to suggest that global problems ought to be addressed globally and cooperatively, but not all problems are global, and in fact any cultural question is specifically not global. I can think of almost nowhere, certainly not Africa, not Europe, not Eastern Europe, not Latin America, not the Middle East, not India or China, that is not at this moment wrestling with a question of establishing a cultural identity that is politically separate from global economic identity as a means of social organization.

Daalder’s comment, I think, misses the point that the current debate about the border is an attempt by certain segments of America to assert a certain kind of ‘American’ political identity that has nothing to do with trade policy or pollution. Many European economists and political thinkers similarly missed how politically unbankable the seeming interconnectedness of “new” Europe was just prior to WWI.

I think that steering the discussion towards more favorable terrain involves recognizing the specifically national terms of this issue. Controlling the borders may be a fool’s errand, but so is pretending borders don’t represent anything in most people’s minds.

Well thanks, I appreciate it. There's a book by Canadian political essayist John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism, that made many of these points in a much more expanded way. I had thought it articulated much of what is lacking in the political dialogue about the forces that have brought people like Bush to where they are, and why that legacy is likely to exist for a long while after.

Another good article is John Gray's Global Delusion in the April 27th New York Review of Books, which also describes how deeply embedded in western thinking is this notion that all societies will converge harmoniously through a universal economic model of some type.

The thing that amazes me is the how quickly people forget how porous even "closed" borders can be. I spent three years as a US soldier patrolling along the border between East and West Germany, and there were still cases of individuals and whole families coming across. If the Warsaw Pact countries couldn't prevent people from crossing that frontier with a much higher per capita expenditure, why does the Bush administration think it can do better?

It's simple enough to see that this is an expensive sugarcoating. Bush is simply doing what he has always done: act busy so that the investors/voters think he's actually working.