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Border wall: Once-busy spot now quiet
[SANDIEGOUNIONTRIBUNE] Jose Arias Martinez is 83 and has lived in Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad neighborhood for 40 years. He remembers when a patch of American soil a few hundred yards from his house was the busiest and most famous spot on the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal crossings.The good old days... Every day, hundreds of migrants who were heading north for work gathered at dusk and waited for darkness before moving through the brush and up the canyons, into San Diego and points beyond. So many people used it as a staging ground that a marketplace emerged: Vendors in tarp-covered stalls sold food, clothes, shoes — even shots of tequila, said to be good for courage because the journey was risky. Bandits were in the nearby hills. Border Patrol agents were on the canyon rims. I've seen a few shots of tequila make people stupid. I supposed that's sometimes been mistaken for brave. Nobody waits at the dirt field any more. Ask Arias why and he nods at the rust-colored 10-foot-tall metal wall that sits a few paces from his front door. “It ended,” he said, “when they built the fence.” Nope, nope. That'd never work... At first glance, what happened here may seem to some like it belongs in a Donald Trump campaign speech about the need for a border wall. Sure does combine cause and effect. Hordes of people breaking the law, swarming into America under cover of night, overrunning the Border Patrol. Then a fence goes up, and it stops. Imagine that for about fifteen hundred miles. But the border is not a soundbite, and the complete story is far more complicated. The wall has had dire consequences elsewhere. Ahah. The law of Cause and Side Effects. It’s pushed migrants east, into the treacherous desert and mountains. By some estimates, more than 5,000 people have died trying to cross there, a doubling of the fatality rate. So extending the wall would stop them from killing themselves in the desert? It’s separated families who might have stayed together across a more porous border, They don't check your ID on the U.S. side going into Messico, so what's stopping the happy reunification of such families? turned what some characterized as a temporary, circulating labor supply in the U.S. into a more fixed population of underground residents. Those bridges between the two countries remain, with no ID check. And it’s used tax dollars that might have gone to other things — health care, transportation, schools. Who paid for the wall? If it was the feds, it was well within their range of responsibility. If the wall was built by state or local government, then the argument's valid, though there's a counterargument that cutting the flow of illegal immigrants saves having to spend more money for health care, transportation or schools. So whether you think what happened in this one small slice of the border is beneficial probably depends a lot on how you digest the complex, swirling, super-hot stew that is American immigration policy and practice. First you gotta get past the scorching, superheated prose... This is a place that has always meant different things to different people. You might say walls mean different things, depending on which side of them you're on. They're supposed to. Posted by: Fred 2016-05-09 |
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