Walls
for release 12-26-05
Washington D.C.
The concept of national borders is an absurdity in today's world. With the click of a mouse I can conduct business in Russia or Canada or Singapore or Mexico. I can order goods or have products delivered practically anywhere in the world without ever leaving this chair. I can transfer currency or securities or ideas half-way around the globe in a blink.
So national borders are as quaint and dated as the pony express and cargo ships with sails and armies that march in ranks with red suits and bayonettes led by bagpipers. Physical borders are a relic of the seventeenth century.
As I write I am looking out the window into the back yard. There is a fence around it. That's a border, I suppose. Next door there is a Latin American family. They are wonderful, warm, hardworking people from El Salvador. The improvements they have made to their property have increased the value of ours. They are good neighbors.
Their kids shoot hoops on the new driveway that they built. Occasionally a ball will come over the fence into our back yard. At first the kids would come and ring our doorbell and ask if they could retrieve their ball. After about the third time I told them, "feel free to go get your ball anytime, you don't need to ask my permission, mi casa es su casa, etc." They mowed my lawn one day without me even asking.
Yes, we live in a new world, but it's not because of 9/11, it's because of modern transportation and communication and technology. Borders are obsolete. Wherever you build a wall, a tunnel will soon follow. Look at Berlin.
The subject of illegal immigration promises to emerge as the dominant issue in the coming year. I'm sure that political blood will be spilled in the impending battle. Already our Congress is talking about the nonsensical idea of putting up a wall between the US and Mexico. Oh, fine. This conjures up pictures of Vicente Fox standing in Nuevo Laredo making a speech before the world's news cameras and saying, "Mr. Bush, tear down this wall."
There are several viewpoints on the subject of illegal immigration. There is the Repub/capitalist slant. Employers love the nearly unlimited cheap labor. Illegals are dream employees. Not only will they work for slave wages but by virtue of their illegality they are reluctant to organize or demand benefits.
The Dem/populist point of view: Illegal immigrants are a drain on our social services and steal our jobs. This is a viewpoint that is common among wage earners who are low on the economic totem pole, because they are competing for the same jobs and the same social services.
The xenophobic point of view: They don't speak our language, they broke the law to get here in the first place and they want to marry our daughters.
There are several solutions. There is the razor wire solution, where we construct and maintain an expensive barrier on our land borders, effectively making America a prison. This is a stupid and pointless solution. It's no surprise that the monkeys in Congress are considering it. We can't even build unbreachable levees to protect a few square miles in New Orleans from a little water with a girl's name and we are thinking about building a 4000 mile wall that is supposed to keep construction workers and domestic laborers, who are useful to the economy, out of our country (and oh yeah, terrorists). I'm sure that Halliburton has a plan on the drawing boards already. It would be a juicy contract.
When the Chinese built the Great Wall it was for the purpose of keeping out the invading Manchus. I think we should hire Donald Trump to build The Greater Wall on our southern border. I mean a magnificent wall to dwarf the one in China with neon lights running through the razor wire, one that the astronauts could see from outer space, the eight wonder of the world. We could import Mexican workers to help build it and it could one day be a tourist attraction. (Footnote: The Great Wall of China took generations to build at great expense in life and treasure and in the end the Manchus ruled China. See how well that worked?}
We currently have slightly more than 34 million immigrants living in the US. That's the highest number in American history. And a million more come each year, more than half of them are illegals. That's twelve percent of our population.
The Poet's Eye sees a better solution: Make Mexico the 51st state. Better still, let's forget the whole idea of borders.
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”
---Robert Frost
