Legal Commentary

The Futile Fence

By TChris

At $1 million a mile, you'd think it would take Spiderman or the Incredible Hulk to make it over Homeland Security's new border fence with Mexico. A terrorist job stealer should need the resources of the Impossible Mission Force to thwart such an expensive barrier.

Here's how "a group of ordinary Mexicans--one a grandmotherly woman, another a 10-year-old boy"--did it:

First they tossed their day packs over the 12-ft. (3.7 m) barrier of steel mesh. They had chosen to cross at a spot where the fence made a small right-angle jog, because there was a supporting post extending about halfway up the angle. This gave them a foothold, and from there, the strongest members of the group boosted the others to the top.

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The fence is pure politics, an expensive show for the hard-liners. Fences don't work.

At the Berlin Wall, guards fired live ammunition, and still an estimated 5,000 people managed to cross.

Where do we stop? Should we fence off the east and west coasts too? Canada?

Senators McCain and Obama joined 78 of their colleagues in voting for the Secure Fence Act. Both candidates have a comprehensive approach to immigration, and it's not likely that either seriously believes a fence to be the best (or even a necessary) approach.

But this is about politics, not sense, and like every other political project in the Bush administration, contractors suck up an endless supply of public dollars while the project looks like something thrown together by a kindergarten class.

No one seems able to keep track of it all. Even agents of the newly reorganized Customs and Border Protection (CBP) department find themselves coming upon sections they've never seen before. The work is less advanced in New Mexico and stalled in Texas, where fierce local opposition has delayed construction--a coalition of border-town mayors and chambers of commerce has sued DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, alleging he is trying to seize land at inadequate prices. ...

It's a hodgepodge of designs. The best--sections of tall, concrete-filled steel poles deeply rooted, closely spaced and solidly linked at the top--are bluntly functional. The worst--rusting, graffiti-covered, Vietnam-era surplus--are just skeevy walls of welded junk.

The linked article makes the argument that "marking the border and aggressively patrolling it can reduce illegal activity," although only if resources are invested that the administration has not provided -- resources that might better be spent on more effective security measures.

The fence also carries a lesson about limits, for it is only as effective as the force that backs it up. Even the Great Wall of China was not impermeable. Osmosis explains why concentrations of water seek equilibrium across a barrier. Something similar applies to money. The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian at Stanford. As long as that remains true, the border fence will be under extreme pressure. People will climb over it; they'll tunnel under it; they'll hack through it; they'll float around it.

The fence doesn't work. It's also a bad symbol. Aren't we supposed to be in favor of tearing down the walls that separate us?

"We want to secure our borders, but we can't wall ourselves off from Mexico," says Representative Ciro Rodriguez ...

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 19, 2008 (boomark / email).