Good Fences Make Good Neighbors ?

Monday 7th November 2005, by Sean Chadwell

An analysis of the recent proposal, by Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, to build an 1800-mile triple fence along the border with Mexico.
It’ll be cheap to build an 1800-mile fence between the United States and Mexico, says Representative Duncan Hunter of California. Here’s a snippet from an interview with NBC’s Rita Cosby:

COSBY: That was what I was going ask you. Is that what you’re asking for, the whole stretch, all 2,000 miles?
HUNTER: Yes, we propose to extend that fence all the way the 1,800 miles from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. It could be done quickly. You can start the sections in different places. For example, you could start a section — what we ought to do with the murder and the killing and the violence in Nuevo Laredo is to immediately build a triple fence on the American side of the border and cut that route off to the drug industry, which is using Nuevo Laredo as a jump-off point.
In case you missed it: "What we ought to do with the murder and the killing and the violence in Nuevo Laredo is to immediately build a triple fence on the American side of the border . . ."

Ignore the split infinitive. The redundancy here (not murder and killing! Surely!) is the least imaginative, but, let’s face it, the most scary way of describing the on-going fighting in Nuevo Laredo. I don’t claim it isn’t scary; I used to spend a lot of time in Nuevo Laredo—as I live quite close—and I admit it’s kind of crazy right now, kind of like the poorer, ignored sections of a lot of larger American cities themselves embroiled in drug-related violence.

More importantly, his conflation of drug-related violence with illegal crossings is typical of our collective wish to simplify the issue. This is not "what we ought to do with" the problems in Nuevo Laredo. What I suspect Hunter means is this is "what we ought to do about our fear" of those problems.

I want to expand on both points:

Right: the drug-cartel violence is scary in Nuevo Laredo at the moment. But that drug violence has much more to do with I-35’s role as a major NAFTA corridor than the fact that the border is unusually porous here. Were the drug trade as lucrative everywhere we lack triple fences, we would see lots more drug violence along most of the border. So what’s unique about Nuevo Laredo/Laredo? It is the busiest land port in the country, at present. Despite the real poverty of South Texas and Northern Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, millions of dollars in freely traded commodities are moving through here daily. Daily, trains laden with Chevrolets built in Saltillo plow noisily north. Daily, tankers of high-fructose corn syrup head south. This is a trade route quickly on its way to becoming a legend. CAFTA and FTAA only mean more traffic north—to all kinds of traders, including drug cartels. What happens when you make the trade route even more difficult to access? Supply? Demand? Don’t the risks—and violence—inherent in the drug trade become more lucrative? What we ought to do "with" the violence in Nuevo Laredo is confront our complicity in that violence, to begin to address the phenomenal demand for drugs in the United States, to admit, first, that we have a problem. Having accomplished that, we need to admit that "free trade" is burdened by real complexities, that at least part of the economic windfall resulting from free trade comes from our reluctance to deal with the problems fomented by free trade, such as intense fighting in Northern Mexico about access to vitally important trade routes.

More importantly, drug violence and illegal immigration are not the same thing. It is easy but sloppy to believe this, and it makes us feel justified perhaps, in keeping "them" out. Most Americans—however they feel about illegal immigration—understand that the Mexicans and Central Americans who struggle to make it into the United States are here to work. What most of us are unwilling to acknowledge, however, even as we complain bitterly about the cost of social services for immigrants, is that such immigrants make our lives less expensive. Finally, what few of us are willing to admit—perhaps the cost is simply too great—is that many of the Mexicans now working illegally in the United States were driven here by the trade liberalization (in the form of NAFTA) that meant they could no longer compete with heavily-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. But we don’t count labor as a freely-tradeable commodity. So we need a fence for that one.

Trade liberalization, American-style, does not necessarily cause these problems, and I’m not deeply opposed to free trade. But inherent in the U.S. approach is a penchant for simplicity: free trade makes everything better for everyone. Were we willing to learn from NAFTA before we tried to bully our way into CAFTA and FTAA, we might recognize that such liberalization is bound to have big consequences in labor markets (I’m speaking not as an economist, but as a regular guy); that trade liberalization leads to new, profoundly important trade routes; that trade routes are obviously prone to being used for the movement of goods we don’t necessarily want to flow freely.

If nothing else, it ought to make lots more people angry that Representative Hunter speaks as though we were stupid enough to be persuaded that a fence is going to address drug violence or trade and that either of those things has anything to do with trekking your way from El Salvador in an odds-against-you attempt to achieve the American Dream.

Hunter should be ashamed of himself, then, not for wanting to build a fence. It’s among the oldest of human impulses, after all, and he’s just looking to protect his country. He should be ashamed for being unwilling to understand or (having understood), to express the complexities of the commodities and the peoples crossing the border. In the end,


[ . . .] I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

(From Robert Frost’s "Mending Wall")

source: http://www.selvesandothers.org/article12094.html
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City agrees to oppose Minutemen 16 hours after critic's biting words
By Sarah Coppola
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, December 17, 2005

The Austin City Council meeting began Thursday morning with a stinging remark and ended 16 hours later with calmer words, all centered on one subject: the Minutemen.
Council Member Raul Alvarez had sponsored a resolution to oppose the Minutemen, a group that is trying to stop illegal immigrants at the Texas-Mexico border. The resolution, like all city resolutions, is largely symbolic, with no regulatory oomph.
But Liberty Hill resident Jim Dillon, a carpenter who considers himself a Minuteman member and said he plans to run for governor, wasn't fond of the idea. He interrupted Mayor Will Wynn twice as Wynn tried to read the consent agenda, a housekeeping activity at the beginning of council meetings.
Then Dillon signed up to speak on an unrelated item, and proceeded to blast the resolution and rail against new roads that he claimed are bringing illegal immigrants through Texas. Dillon capped his remarks with the comment that Alvarez "should go back to Mexico where he came from," and Wynn ordered Dillon to leave.
The council didn't take up the resolution again until 1:30 a.m. Friday — its final item. By then, the nine people who had signed up to speak against it and 26 in favor had left.
The council passed the resolution 7-0, with Wynn saying he supported President Bush's stance that "dramatic immigration reform" is needed that would still allow for trade across the border.
Alvarez offered this to his earlier critic: "I think the first speaker today who made a comment that I should go back to Mexico shows there is a problem with folks who are not trained enforcing the laws of the United States," he said. "There is a risk they may engage in use of force or threat of force.
"We respect the rights of these groups to express free speech but not to the extent that they violate the rights of our community," he said.
As for his family, Alvarez said, "We were here when the state was created. . . . It was sort of a case of, we didn't cross the river, the river crossed us."

scoppola@statesman.com; 912-2939
Jeremy Schwartz also contributed to this report
source: http://www.statesman.com/news/content/metro/stories/12/17minutemen.html
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Group opposing illegal immigration gains national foothold
By ARTHUR H. ROTSTEIN
Associated Press Writer
TUCSON, Ariz. — The Minuteman Project started earlier this year amid fears that racist extremists would confront and possibly injure illegal immigrants crossing into Arizona.
But there were no significant confrontations — no fights, and rarely any excitement — when hundreds of people traveled to the Arizona desert during April to watch for border crossers and report them to immigration agents.
Since then the movement has taken hold, with Minuteman-inspired organizations springing up in several states, including Texas, and even critics acknowledge the participants are more than just a band of misfits, bigots and extremists.
Attention surrounding immigration problems helped attract "a fairly broad cross-section of middle Americans," said Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, which monitors hate groups. "This is partly driven by politicians falling all over each other over an issue that they feel had some real resonance."
Potok said that, according to his group's research, "there are real strains of racism and anti-Semitism in this movement.
"Nevertheless," he said, "the movement has attracted people who are not Klansmen or neo-Nazis."
The Minuteman Project was the brainchild of Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant from Orange County, Calif., and an unsuccessful congressional candidate there, who recruited participants through the Internet. He tied his efforts to an existing group, Civil Homeland Defense, which was already patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border.
The idea, according to project organizers, was partly to draw attention to problems on the Arizona-Mexico border, the most porous stretch of the 2,000-mile southern border.
The group said about 900 people showed up for the April monitoring project.
School teachers and retired veterans, businessmen and former corporate executives, some of them armed, parked their pickup trucks and even RVs along a dusty, rutted border road near Naco, Ariz., sitting in lawn chairs with binoculars to look for anyone trying to slip illegally into the country.
Organizers said the volunteers' calls helped lead authorities to about 330 illegal immigrants; critics say the group was little more than a nuisance.
In October, still more volunteers repeated the exercise in other states on the Mexican and Canadian borders.
Chris Simcox, one of the movement's co-founders, said three dozen new chapters had formed by mid-November, "with another 100 waiting in the wings, for us to come up with a national strategy."
"It has moved into politics on the local, state and federal level, what we hope is in every district in this country," Simcox said. "We mean business."
Organizing requests have come from all 50 states, said Minuteman spokeswoman Connie Hair. Some groups focus on internal vigilance, such as an operation that uses volunteers with cameras to document people hiring illegal immigrants.
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates limits on immigration, said the Minuteman Project reflects a visceral reaction to the "national intrusion" by illegal immigrants.
"There's a genuineness to this that has won over the hearts and minds of the American public," Stein said.
Celestino Fernandez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona, said it is the latest iteration of this country's history of reaction and resistance to waves of immigration — first to an influx of Chinese immigrants and later to people from southern and eastern Europe.
"They're reasonable people, yes, they're good people, but they're also reacting against demographic changes, just like every prior generation has reacted against demographic changes of people whom they perceive as different," he said.
The Minutemen see Latinos everywhere — "more in their states, whether it's the South or the Midwest or East or New York City," Fernandez said. "There are more Mexicans in the country. They keep reading about the border and it's like a sieve — people coming across, and aren't they going to control it, and the government's not doing anything."
Tim Donnelly of Twin Peaks, Calif., who spent five nights on watch along the Arizona border in early April and now heads the California chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, said that support for the Minuteman organizations is growing among political groups, citing in particular Republican women's organizations.
"They're so angry at the president and his shenanigans (in endorsing a guest-worker program) that they're celebrating people like myself and Chris Simcox and Jim Gilchrist," Donnelly said. "They see our movement as perhaps their only and last bastion of hope."
"Illegal immigration doesn't cause every problem," Donnelly added, "but it exacerbates many other issues."
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On the Net:
Minuteman Project: http://www.minutemanhq.com/project/
Federation for American Immigration Reform: http://www.fairus.org/
Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.splcenter.org/index.jsp
National Immigration Forum: http://www.immigrationforum.org/
source: wacotrib.com