General Discussion

pampango

(24,692 posts) Sat Jun 22, 2013, 01:21 PM Jun 2013

America's Berlin Wall, a fence built along the border with Mexico will be a permanent embarrassment

to the United States.

Through two presidential elections and up to this moment, t has been an article of faith among much of the Republican base that the U.S.'s border with Mexico must be made impossible to cross illegallysealed and secured.

If you were to lift the Texas end of that border, like a string, and move it northward toward the Great Lakes, the length of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, as noted on the nearby map, is about the distance from San Diego to Chicago. That "border" would cross California, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois—most of the American continent. How would we secure all of that?

The border-security fence in the Senate bill would be America's Berlin Wall—a historic embarrassment. Once built, it will never come down. Long after more feasible solutions have resolved the immigration problem, Congress will lose interest in funding so much complex technology. It will sit in the desert sun and rot, the way France's Maginot Line rotted into the 1960s.

But once built, it is going to become part of the Republican Party's permanent political legacy—monument to negation. This hasn't been a great year for the Democrats, but with this wall, they just might get lucky.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323893504578555302371380058.html

The one good thing about this huge waste of public funds is that it will be a physical reminder of republican xenophobia and its politics of fear and emotion which will stand for decades as a "monument to negation". Even the WSJ recognizes that.

And it will be a "historic embarrassment" only to people who actually remember history and use it as a guide to policy-making, in other words, not to republicans who prefer fear and emotion, not history or facts, as guides for making policy.