Click Here for the Story Border communities have been fighting for years in an effort to keep walls from closing in and economically and socially isolating them. Like the majority of the American public they realize a wall doesn't prevent further immigration. Other than being a massive waste of money the wall is now threatening to uproot families that have been there since the 1700s.
Before anyone gets the wrong impression, let me clarify. The borders do need to be secure but it has to be done sensibly and at the same time we need a rational immigration policy. You can't have one without the other. A wall will only push the traffic to another location unless immigration polices are also changed.
Here are some interesting quotes from the article.
Many border residents still can't believe that a fence they ridiculed as a politician's pipe dream is about to become reality. They're stunned that the wild river that served as the playground of their youth will soon look like a military zone.
Most here don't believe illegal immigration is becoming worse, or was ever bad. Gloria Garza fondly recalled that her mother used to leave aromatic plates of tacos on her porch at night -- a token of Tejano hospitality for the migrants trudging north.
If anything, the clannish Granjeno folk -- who shift easily between Spanish and English, often midsentence -- seem more leery of newcomers such as the Border Patrol and the Minutemen than they are of illegal immigrants and drug-runners.
Thank you to the anonymous reader who forwarded me this article.
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1 comment:
Thanks for posting this. I saw the link somewhere, but the LA Times always freezes my computer for some reason.
Anyway, more and more it's looking like we're going to have our own Great Wall isolating our neighbors from us. Politicians fail to realize that the problems of illegal immigration, and even of drug trafficking, start beyond the border, and that building a wall will suffocate the problem, not solve it humanely. Just like closing off the safe routes without a fair immigration policy is causing people to die in the desert.
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