A 670-mile-long shrine to American insecurity

[struggle4progress]

Gregory Rodriguez
Building a border wall to keep migrants out is an odd act for a nation so proud of its power.
April 7, 2008

Last February, I found myself in the difficult position of explaining American insecurity to a group of Mexican undergraduates at a college in Matamoros, Mexico, just south of the border at Brownsville, Texas. I was taking questions after delivering a lecture on the long-term prospects of Mexican immigrants being accepted into U.S. society. A neatly dressed young man in the back stood up to ask a pointed question. "How," he said politely in Spanish, "could such a rich and powerful country be so self-centered as to build a wall on its border to keep people out?" ...

Last week, the Bush administration's Department of Homeland Security announced that it would use its waiver authority to bypass more than 30 laws and regulations to finish building 670 miles of fence along our southern border by the end of the year. And if all that goes according to plan, I won't be the only American having to explain what this new border wall says about us as a people and a country. For the last 120 years, Americans have been able to point to the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of our collective pride in our immigrant origins. But future generations are more likely to point to the wall on our southern border as an altogether different symbol.

The most vocal supporters of the border wall like to portray the United States as a hapless victim of illegal immigrants. They act as if these people show up out of nowhere, as if they are not part of a long-established pattern. There's little recognition that the U.S. is just as responsible for creating the flows northward as is our eternally mismanaged southern neighbor.

We forget that as early as the late 19th century, we looked to Mexicans to build the railroads throughout the Southwest; that, in 1917, when Congress closed the door to European migration, it quietly made plans for Mexicans to fill our labor needs; that, beginning in World War II, we imported hundreds of thousands of Mexican guest workers who familiarized themselves with life in the U.S. and shared their experiences and networks with their families and friends back home ...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez7apr07,0,4367182.column

[havocmom]

1. It has to be just another way to funnel money to some pig neocon supporter

So sad ANYBODY thinks it will solve any problems. I keep thinking about the 'drug tunnels discovered in the 80s and 90s, and wondering how many more never got discovered.

A fence? Hell, the Berlin Wall was a series of fences with lots of machine guns aimed at them, and people still got through THAT.

What the fuck is wrong with people? No ability to apply simple logic.

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. Fixed fortifications...

“Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity.” - GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON