Fencing Out and Pissing Off the Neighbors
While the government of Mexico has been officially silent on "Tex" Sensenbrenner's and Tom "Nuke Mecca" Tancredo's House Bill to build a fence along the border with Mexico as part of the Great War on Immigrants, the Mexican press has not. Here's part of an editorial from La Jornada.
In front of the Berlin Wall in the closing days of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan cried out imperatively and to famous effect "Mister Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!," impressing the phrase in history and defining himself as a great defender of freedom. Today another Republican and his successor, orders and negotiates with Congress for the erection of a wall across our entire northern border
Historically, many walls have arisen, and with similar results. That is, the opposite of those that the wall-builders intended. From the Chinese Wall, Hadrian's Wall, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the 38th Parallel between two Koreas, the division between West Bank and Israel, and more. These walls or ramparts have served to encourage intense and bloody friction between neighboring countries. Their erection and operation are costly, both in political and economic terms, and are very inefficient, although part of their toll is paid in the blood and pain of those that try to cross over them. They are, thus, historically unbeneficial, disgraceful and degrading.
The United States has accustomed the world to its contradictions and paradoxes: it violates rights, assassinates, and infringes on the lands of others, today in Afghanistan and Iraq, always speaking in name of freedom and democracy, and on its own land it operates just the other way around; try for example, Guantánamo, the recently discovered CIA concentration camps, the racism, and now this barbaric measure that threatens lives and attacks the universal right to free movement and the right to work. And to think that our government, in its first attept to address the whole enchilada of the issue of migration, and in this very year, sympathetically embraced the project of "Building a North American Community," which is premised on the free movement of nationals from the three countries [Mexico, Canada and the U.S.] throughout all of their territories. [Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America
...Even without the wall, with only the partial fence in Tijuana, approximately 500 Mexicans die every year attempting to cross the border, either by desert or river. Many more than the number of Americans who died during the same period in the Iraq War. Of our dead, only social organizations and certain media keep track; on the other side [in the United States], this is perceived as of secondary importance, never mind the mass deaths of people confined within vehicles used for smuggling. [Emphasis added]
The editorialist is right. In the long run walls, whether the purpose is to wall in or to wall out, simply don't work. In today's world isolation simply isn't feasible. Until the US actively pursues the concept of free trade that is not based solely on the interests of multinational corporations' bottome line, there will be immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Further, those walls will harden the myopic vision of their being only two kinds of people: us and them. It's a vision the US needs to unlearn. It's also a lesson the Israelis also need to unlearn, just as the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Romans had to.
In front of the Berlin Wall in the closing days of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan cried out imperatively and to famous effect "Mister Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!," impressing the phrase in history and defining himself as a great defender of freedom. Today another Republican and his successor, orders and negotiates with Congress for the erection of a wall across our entire northern border
Historically, many walls have arisen, and with similar results. That is, the opposite of those that the wall-builders intended. From the Chinese Wall, Hadrian's Wall, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the 38th Parallel between two Koreas, the division between West Bank and Israel, and more. These walls or ramparts have served to encourage intense and bloody friction between neighboring countries. Their erection and operation are costly, both in political and economic terms, and are very inefficient, although part of their toll is paid in the blood and pain of those that try to cross over them. They are, thus, historically unbeneficial, disgraceful and degrading.
The United States has accustomed the world to its contradictions and paradoxes: it violates rights, assassinates, and infringes on the lands of others, today in Afghanistan and Iraq, always speaking in name of freedom and democracy, and on its own land it operates just the other way around; try for example, Guantánamo, the recently discovered CIA concentration camps, the racism, and now this barbaric measure that threatens lives and attacks the universal right to free movement and the right to work. And to think that our government, in its first attept to address the whole enchilada of the issue of migration, and in this very year, sympathetically embraced the project of "Building a North American Community," which is premised on the free movement of nationals from the three countries [Mexico, Canada and the U.S.] throughout all of their territories. [Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America
...Even without the wall, with only the partial fence in Tijuana, approximately 500 Mexicans die every year attempting to cross the border, either by desert or river. Many more than the number of Americans who died during the same period in the Iraq War. Of our dead, only social organizations and certain media keep track; on the other side [in the United States], this is perceived as of secondary importance, never mind the mass deaths of people confined within vehicles used for smuggling. [Emphasis added]
The editorialist is right. In the long run walls, whether the purpose is to wall in or to wall out, simply don't work. In today's world isolation simply isn't feasible. Until the US actively pursues the concept of free trade that is not based solely on the interests of multinational corporations' bottome line, there will be immigrants, both legal and illegal.
Further, those walls will harden the myopic vision of their being only two kinds of people: us and them. It's a vision the US needs to unlearn. It's also a lesson the Israelis also need to unlearn, just as the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Romans had to.
posted by Diane at 11:07 AM
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