'Mr. Bush! Tear Down This Wall!'

The 'disgraceful and degrading' wall being built along the U.S.-Mexico border is not only expensive and illegal; it won't stop the flow of migrant workers. But according to this op-ed article from Mexico's La Jornada, the illegality of the wall and the damage it will do is unlikely to deter President George W. Bush.

By Jorge Carrillo Olea

December 24, 2005

Original Article (Spanish)

In front of the Berlin Wall in the closing days of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan cried out imperatively and to famous effect "Mister Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!,"  impressing the phrase in history and defining himself as a great defender of freedom. Today another Republican and his successor, orders and negotiates with Congress for the erection of a wall across our entire northern border.

Historically, many walls have arisen, and with similar results. That is, the opposite of those that the wall-builders intended. From the Chinese Wall, Hadrian's Wall, the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the 38th Parallel between two Koreas, the division between West Bank and Israel, and more. These walls or ramparts have served to encourage intense and bloody friction between neighboring countries. Their erection and operation are costly, both in political and economic terms, and are very inefficient, although part of their toll is paid in the blood and pain of those that try to cross over them. They are, thus, historically unbeneficial, disgraceful and degrading.

The United States has accustomed the world to its contradictions and paradoxes: it violates rights, assassinates, and infringes on the lands of others, today in Afghanistan and Iraq, always speaking in name of freedom and democracy, and on its own land it operates just the other way around; try for example, Guantánamo, the recently discovered CIA concentration camps, the racism, and now this barbaric measure that threatens lives and attacks the universal right to free movement and the right to work. And to think that our government, in its first attept to address the whole enchilada of the issue of migration, and in this very year, sympathetically embraced the project of "Building a North American Community," which is premised on the free movement of nationals from the three countries [Mexico, Canada and the U.S.] throughout all of their territories. [Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America Home Page]

But this new wall will not have results distinct from its predecessors throughout the ages. Migrants will continue to infringe upon it, by flying over it or tunneling beneath it. As though by magic, an unstoppable wave of men, women and children will overcome the fence and the hunters of migrants, their armies and patrols and their radars and helicopters.

Even without the wall, with only the partial fence in Tijuana, approximately 500 Mexicans die every year attempting to cross the border, either by desert or river. Many more than the number of Americans who died during the same period in the Iraq War. Of our dead, only social organizations and certain media keep track; on the other side [in the United States], this is perceived as of secondary importance, never mind the mass deaths of people confined within vehicles used for smuggling.

For want of a stronger reaction from our own government, several NGOs that specialize in the subject and other governments have raised their voices to condemn the project. Let us hope that some, and not a few, Democratic lawmakers decide not to do it [build the wall], and that the powerful Hispanic community comes out against it. But the first shamefaced step has already been taken, already forms part of history and today's bilateral relations, and will be a heavy burden for those who follow [President] Fox and his clumsy chancellors. The President has no concept of when to use a diplomatic protest or to raise an issue at an international forum, and prefers to engage in diatribes against the United States from a small town in the Guanajuato Mountains. The chancellor, equally ignorant of diplomatic practice, prefers to call the decision of the United States' Government "idiotic and underhanded" during a cell phone interview. This is the level of our government officials.

One should not consign the plan to the realm of legal impossibility. Bush's fundamentalism, his cruelty and his criminality have arisen and will continue to arise, as they did when Bush was governor of Texas, when he denied pardons to every capital punishment case that came across his desk. But now he has no reason to disguise himself, no reason to temper or control himself. This is the true, naked Bush. He is perhaps the cruelest president after those than ordered the bombing of Japan or of Vietnam, which we now know was launched because of an incident involving a ship [the U.S.S. Maddox] that never took place. [Gulf of Tonkin Incident]

But nothing conquers reason, and in this case the reasons are double: the inequality of work opportunities and the demand [for workers] that the United States must take great care to reduce. According to reliable data, 500,000 Hispanics enter the United States illegally every year in search of work. Some do so temporarily, returning several times in their working lives; others come to remain without a time limit, more or less protected by family or social connections. In this way, despite the violation of international civil rights by the United States, and with or without the wall, the flow of immigrants will continue, although, yes, at a more and more onerous human cost.