One could say about much of the screaming over immigration from both “sides” that it’s “childish”.  Well, WaPo gives reason to retire that term as an insult:

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico: One hard kick launched the soccer ball around the rusted edge of the metal fence, down the sloping grade into a flat expanse of grass. Kids, giggling and jostling, bounded past the end of the fence line. Out of Mexico. Into the United States. No big deal.

It goes on from there into an examination of how cultures have blended along the border to the point where it’s really silly to call it one. The whole thing says a lot, but especially striking is that image of kids crossing into the US to go get a soccer ball: without the State, without politics, there are no borders, there are just vague zones where cultures blend in a gradient, much like the color table in Photoshop or somethin’. This — the “go too far this way and you’re commiting a crime”, the need for permission to travel — is artificial.

Those children don’t care that they’re crossing into another country because the idea itself is learned, particularly from elites. The children didn’t create the warfare-welfare state, the children didn’t bring force into the equation on so much of modern life, the children didn’t create this situation where simply by crossing a line drawn in the sand you’re considered to be undermining a whole society — a gross exaggeration, thanks to the confusion of a people with the government it happens to have.

No. The grownups screwed up this one.

The grownups threw arbitrary limits on immigration. The grownups meddled with the culture of others for power & unearned gain.

The grownups constructed a state system that is threatening to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

For now, we have to figure out how to address the immediate result. We have to figure out how to simultaneously correct the error of forcing people underground while preventing the exploitation of our mess for the purpose of doing us harm. In the long run though, this cannot hold. Call the current debate whatever else you want to — “ignorant”, “small-minded”, “hypocritical” — but leave the kids out of it.