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 Editorials | Opinions | May 2006 
A Fence of Folly
 Jules Witcover - Salt Lake Tribune
| | The wall constructed on the United States and Mexican border, to help keep people from entering the U.S. illegally, is a backdrop for residents of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico relaxing in a friend's yard across the border from Nogales, Arizona, May 21, 2006. The owner of the property said that searchlights stationed on a hill behind the wall are so bright he must wear eye shades at night to sleep. (Reuters/Jeff Topping) |
Before the echoes fade of President Bush's call for "a rational middle ground" on immigration, he needs to back it up by denouncing the nonsensical idea of trying to stem the flow of illegal Latino entrants by fencing off 370 miles of the Mexican border.
In a bid to appease the anti-immigrant furor in Congress, the Senate -- with 28 Democrats joining all 55 Republicans - has voted overwhelmingly for an amendment by GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama to throw up barriers across much of the Arizona desert.
In a twist on the famous line from the baseball movie, "Field of Dreams," wherein a fan builds a diamond in an Iowa cornfield that attracts the great players of yore, if the fence is built, the immigrants will come anyway, in their desperate search for jobs.
The proponents will defend this embarrassing monstrosity on grounds of national security, casting the targets as potential terrorists. But such a fence would obviously aim at the hundreds of thousands or even millions of migrant and other workers who want a small piece of that other American dream, of a better life here.
The president's party in the Senate could have passed the Sessions amendment on its own. But the votes of those accommodating Democrats suggest they too are willing to go to ludicrous lengths to appease the House Republicans who overwhelmingly passed a much more punitive immigration measure.
The Senate version is more in harmony with Bush's middle-ground plea except for the proposed fencing in of Mexico. If he really wants a middle ground, he should push the Senate conferees to drop that idea when they eventually meet their House counterparts to reconcile the differences.
At a time America's reputation in the international community is at a pitifully low state for reasons going beyond the Bush administration's essentially unilateralist policy in Iraq, walling in the Mexican border will be more than a huge eyesore.
It will be a confession of a failure of ingenuity in finding other means, either on the ground or through diplomacy, to cope with the situation. The president's support of a broader guest-worker program, granting temporary entry to field hands whose labors are in great demand here, is one way, accepted reluctantly by many Democrats.
But the Senate, by a much narrower 50-48 vote with most Democrats and a few Republicans opposing, undercut that program by requiring an employer's prior sponsorship for a worker's participation. It also would exclude, without a dissenting vote, any applying immigrant convicted of a felony or three misdemeanors.
All these conditions are designed to placate the anti-immigration sentiments of most Republican conservatives in the House, whose earlier bill would make illegal entry into the United States a felony requiring the perpetrators' deportation.
Meanwhile, the president's other approach to catching or turning back illegal aliens - the use of 6,000 National Guard troops to supplement the efforts of the U.S. Border Patrol - continues as a subject of debate on the Guard itself.
The administration and Guard officials insist the auxiliary military arm has plenty of manpower to take on this new function as well as fighting in Iraq and coping with potential challenges from the approaching hurricane season and other natural disasters.
But some state governors and other critics see the border duty as a further erosion of the standard role of the National Guard, putting extraordinary pressures not only on the troops themselves but also their stressed-out and economically damaged families at home.
If the United States were faced with the threat of repeated violence of the sort that has persuaded Israel to construct protective walls on its border with the Palestinian territories, a fence separating this country from Mexico might be defensible. Thankfully we have not come to that.
Rather, what we're dealing with is an economic and humanitarian challenge, the solution to which the President has rightly identified as that "rational middle ground" of which he spoke the other night. It need not include a Maginot Line that would mock our inability to come up with an answer more worthy of our history as a nation of immigrants.
Jules Witcover's memoir, "The Making of an Ink-Stained Wretch," has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Contact him at juleswitcover@earthlink.net. |
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