Something There Is That Loves a Wall

Robert Frost once wrote that “good fences make good neighbors.” When Sarah Palin quoted the line to show that building walls was a good thing, Andrew Sullivan retorted that the narrator in the Frost poem was arguing with his neighbor against the neighbor’s wish to build a wall.

Precisely why Sullivan knew which one of the neighbors was correct, we do not know. The last line in the poem, quoted in my first sentence, is the neighbor’s response—to the effect, that boundaries can contribute to neighborliness. Once you have a wall you can no longer intrude on your neighbor’s property without reason or permission. Isn't that the more civil solution.

Anyway, we know from Israel that walls work. When Israel constructed a wall to separate it from West Bank terrorists, lo and behold, terrorist acts from that region stopped. What is wrong with that?

Now, Hungary is reporting on what happened when it built a wall to keep Middle Eastern refugees out of the country. 

Breitbart reports (via Maggie’s Farm):

Speaking on the second anniversary of the government’s move to seal Hungary’s border with Serbia — which is also an external border for the European Union — Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Chief Security Advisor, György Bakondi, announced that the fences have caused illegal immigration to collapse from 391,000 in 2015, to 18,236 in 2016, to just 1,184 in 2017.

“The system of technical barriers is the key to the success of border security, and without it, it would be impossible to stop the mass arrival of immigrants”, the security chief explained.

Of course, Hungary was responding to Angela Merkel’s foolish open borders policy:

Hungary had to respond rapidly to the migrant influx which burst upon Europe after Germany’s Angela Merkel announced there was “no limit” on the number of asylum seekers her own country would accept, so its frontiers are defended by twin fences peppered with watchtowers and patrolled by thousands of newly recruited border guards rather than a solid wall — which would have taken longer to construct.

Nevertheless, as it has been steadily reinforced illegal migration has slowed to a trickle — drawing the ire of open borders activists like billionaire financier George Soros and globalist officials at the European Union and the United Nations.

Naturally, the United Nations took serious offense to the notion that Hungary might open its borders to whomever wanted to enter the nation:

For example, UN Refugee Agency chief Filippo Grandi visited the border and complained: “When I was standing at the border fence today, I felt the entire system is designed to keep people, many of whom are fleeing war and persecution, out of the country”.

Grandi also called on Hungary to get rid of the border-spanning transit zones it has established, which allow all asylum seekers entering the country to be detained while the validity of their claims are assessed.

One reason for the wall was to stop terrorists:

The Hungarians introduced these zones after it was discovered that many of the Paris 2015 terrorists had passed through their territory — a step-change from other EU member-states, which leave migrants more or less at large, with sometimes deadly consequences, in obedience to EU law.