The "great wall of America" masks boiling points on both sides
Sunday, September 19, 2010 at 12:03AM 
LA Times column via WPR's Media Roundup.
Whenever I feel the urge to criticize Israel's security fence, I usually put down my brick when I realize what a glass house we live in back here in the States.
The opening:
Between cynicism and hypocrisy lies the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border. America is raising a wall in the desert to separate Mexican drug exporters from American drug consumers, to separate Latin American peasants who will work for low wages from the Americans who would hire them.
The Great Wall of America, straddling less than half the length of the border, descends into canyons and across the desert floor. For the Mexican, it represents a high hurdle. For the American, it is an attempt to stop the Roadrunner's progress with an Acme Border Sealing Kit.
In some places the wall is made of tennis-court-style cyclone fencing or dark mesh of the sort used for barbeque grills in public parks. In other places the wall is a palisade of 20-foot-tall bars that make a cage of both sides. The most emphatic segments are constructed of graffiti-ready slabs of steel.
Richard Rodriguez, the author, adeptly compares our fence to Israel's, but the larger point is that we should be expanding our definition of America, not contracting it.
On patriotism-for-profit talk radio and television, the illegal immigrant is, by definition, criminal. She comes to steal the American dream. But in my understanding, the dream belongs to the desperation of the poor and always has. The goddess of liberty in New York harbor still advertises for the tired and the poor, the wretched refuse. I tell you, there is an unlucky man in the Sonoran Desert today who will die for a chance to pluck dead chickens in Georgia or change diapers in a rest home in Nevada.
Great empires expand beyond their own borders. Empires in decline build walls.
Nicely stated.
I watched Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" last week. It captures, glancingly, some of the intense, thoroughly righteous anger from the other side (albeit with rather fantastic expressions of gratifying violence), and when you examine the economic roots of that anger, it's not all that different from that of the Palestinians vis-a-vis Israel.
Reader Comments (1)
Tom, it's nowhere close to the Israel V. Palestinian problem . . In that one, the Palestinians have decreed to eradicate the Country of Israel . . their fence is a totally defensive one and will remain so until the Palestinians and their sponsors decide to recognize israel, or the Jews choose to abandon the country . .
The Southern border of this country needs a fence because we cannot (or will not) control the influx of illegals coming across the border, not just to "Pluck Chickens, but for other nefarious and often expensive (to US taxpayers) reasons . . Add to that, roughly 2.5 million Mexican citizens who have jumped though the hoops required to legally come here and work, be educated or attempt to become citizens, but are forced to wait, because the jobs (and other things) that were promised them were taken by another Mexican who came here illegally . .
It is a shame that it has come to this, but it's just one more challenge that America has to meet and solve . . so far, the Federal government and administrations, for several decades, have turned their backs on it, using it as a political football rather than choosing to make hard choices . .