The Great Wall of America: The new border fence

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: The Great Wall of America
By David Von Drehle

....A Barrier in the Eye of the Beholder

So the new border fence must be a failure, right? If a billion-dollar barrier can't stop children and seniors in broad daylight, what's the point?

That would be one way to tell this story--but the truth is more complicated. At the Berlin Wall, guards fired live ammunition, and still an estimated 5,000 people managed to cross. And why shouldn't the fence be a complicated subject? Everything else about immigration and border security is complicated. The border has become the rice, or maybe the potatoes, of American politics; it goes with just about everything on the menu. It's an economic issue: Are illegal immigrants taking jobs from American citizens and driving down wages? It's a health-care issue: Do uninsured aliens in emergency rooms push up the cost of premiums for the insured? It's an education issue: Are local school districts across the country overtaxed by the needs of immigrant children? It's a crime issue: Are U.S. cities plagued by Central American gangs? And it's a national-security issue: Could bomb-toting terrorists cross into the U.S. undetected?

Presidential candidates in both parties have learned this year to be wary of a subject that shows up in so many guises on so many different plates. What tastes like common sense to one voter--cracking down on illegal crossings--smacks of xenophobia to the next, and the same rumble of helicopters and border-patrol Jeeps in the Southwestern desert sounds to some people like America standing up for itself but to others like Emma Lazarus, poet of the Statue of Liberty, rolling over in her grave.

Passions don't shake out neatly along party lines. Republican John McCain wove frantically through last winter's debates trying to avoid the scarlet A-for-amnesty. His sin was promoting a "pathway to citizenship" for undocumented workers. Democrat Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, tripped on a debate question about driver's licenses for illegal aliens. Senator Barack Obama has stepped carefully with the issue, voting for the fence and for more agents on the border while saying that this covers "only one side of the equation."

In this cloud of intangibles, the fence is something solid. After years of talking about it, Congress last year put $1.2 billion into the project, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) promptly started hiring posthole diggers. DHS aims to complete more than 650 miles (roughly 1,000 km) of barrier by the end of the year, built in sections by National Guard units and private contractors. That represents only about one-third of the U.S.-Mexico border; on the other hand, the fence clearly delineates, for the first time, a frontier that was previously just a four-strand cattle fence at best.....

***

Finding a Way--at All Costs

....The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian at Stanford. As long as that remains true, the border fence will be under extreme pressure. People will climb over it; they'll tunnel under it; they'll hack through it; they'll float around it....

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1816488,00.html

[Demeter]

1. The Fence is a Manifestation of Cognitive Dissonance

Proving that some people in power cannot actually hear what they are saying, nor understand what they are thinking, and there are enough mentally impaired and/or morally bankrupt voters and supporters to encourage them in their floundering.

[tom_paine]

2. That wall is, in the long-term, more to keep us IN.

Right now, the flow is in the oppsite direction.

There will come a day, perhaps within 25 years, perhaps a lot less, when the flow will switch directions.

THAT is what the wall is for, ultimately.

[a la izquierda]

3. hey, i'm heading in the opposite direction.

self-imposed exile/research trip. i can't get a student visa though, since i will not be affiliated with a Mexican university. i just constantly have to make border runs until they deny me entry.