Professors Denounce Trump Border Enforcement Policies As "Ethically Indefensible"

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

For years, the mantra on the left was “reimagining” everything from policing to free speech to defense. 

Reimagining often was a synonym for defunding or limiting the subject matter. Now, Georgetown Law Professor Sherally Munshi and others are attacking border enforcement as “ethically indefensible.” Munshi calls it “defamiliarizing” the whole concept of borders, which she and others in higher education now find morally reprehensible.

Munshi’s talk, “Unsettling the Border,” is an example of how radical many law faculties have become. She is by no means a standout in such theories. While schools have purged their ranks of conservative, libertarian, and dissenting faculty, there is no limit to faculty writing on the far left.

Munshi insists that “there is nothing natural or inevitable about the United States’ contemporary borders.” 

She mocked the whole notion of “the so-called border crisis.” 

Millions of unvetted people just walking over the border is not a crisis… at least not for the country. It is failure in ourselves; “a crisis of imagination.”  

Accordingly, she is calling for reimagining or defamiliarizing borders:

“Our task, as I put it, is to unsettle the border, to defamiliarize, disenchant, and recontextualize it by critically evaluating the historical processes, the legal developments, the discursive formations that naturalize and legitimate the border.”

It is, of course, racist to want to have secure borders:

“Rather than redress the fact that the international border regime is practically unsustainable [and] ethically indefensible, majorities in the whitest and wealthiest nations are embracing an increasingly authoritarian form of nationalism and exclusion.”

Borders, according to Professor Munshi, are just a construct “within the American imaginary, the southern border divides white from indigenous, purity from heterogeneity, civilization from savagery, settler from Indian.”

Of course, this reimagining of borders will have to extend back a tad further than the American founders. The concept of the nation-state with sovereign borders was recognized in documents like the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. It was credited with maintaining a Westphalian peace with nations able to maintain their own territory and governing systems. That, in turn, allowed nation-states to form international bodies and further stabilize global relations.

I have heard other faculty present papers along these same lines, dismissing the very concept of border enforcement as racist, privileged, or archaic. It is far more rare to hear conservatives on campuses arguing for border enforcement and deportations. It is even less common to find such advocates on both faculties.

In my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss the intolerance in higher education and surveys showing that many departments no longer have a single Republican as faculties replicate their own views and values.

The problem is not that there are radicals teaching at law schools, but that most faculties seem to run only from the left to the far left.

Perhaps it is time to . . . wait for it . . . reimagine or defamiliarize law school faculty appointments.