The Border Wall Is Symbolic of a Nation Trapped by History
Michael Nigro / Truthdig
The point was less to actually build the wall than to constantly announce
the building of the wall. We started building our wall. Im so proud of
it, Donald Trump tweeted. What a thing of beauty.
In fact, no wall, or certainly not the big, fat, beautiful one promised by
Trump, is being built. True, miles of some kind of barrier barbed wire,
chain-link and steel-slat fencing, corrugated panels, and, yes, even lengths
of what can only be described as concrete wall have gone up along the
U.S.-Mexico border, starting at least as far back as the administration of
President William Taft, early in the last century. Trump has claimed repairs
and expansions of these barriers as proof that he is fulfilling his
signature campaign promise. Plaques have already been bolted onto upgrades
in existing fencing, crediting him with work started and funded by previous
administrations.
And yet Trumps phantasmagorical wall, whether it ever materializes or not,
has become a central artifact in American politics. Think of his promise of
a more than 1,000-mile-long, 30-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel
running along the southern border of the United States as Americas new
myth. It is a monument to the final closing of the frontier, a symbol of a
nation that used to believe it had escaped history, but now finds itself
trapped by history, and of a people who used to believe they were captains
of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.
From Open to Closed Borders
Prior to World War I, the border established in the late 1840s and early
1850s after the U.S. military invaded Mexico and took a significant part of
that countrys territory was relatively unpoliced. As historian Mae Ngai
has pointed out, before World War I the United States had virtually open
borders in every sense of the term. The only exception: laws that
explicitly excluded Chinese migrants. You didnt need a passport, says
Ngai. You didnt need a visa. There was no such thing as a green card. If
you showed up at Ellis Island, walked without a limp, had money in your
pocket, and passed a very simple [IQ] test in your own language, you were
admitted.
A similar openness existed at the border with Mexico. There is no line to
indicate the international boundary, reported Motor Age, a magazine devoted
to promoting automobile tourism, in 1909. The only indication that you had
crossed into a new country, heading south, was the way a well-graded road
turned into a rambling cross-country trail, full of chuck-holes and dust.
The next year, the State Department made plans to roll great coils of
barbed wire
in a straight line over the plain across the open borderland
range where Texans and Mexicans ran their cattle. The hope was to build the
finest barbed-wire boundary line in the history of the world. Not, though,
to keep out people, as the border wasnt yet an obstacle for the Mexican
migrant workers who traveled back and forth, daily or seasonally, to work in
homes, factories, and fields in the United States. That barbed-wire barrier
was meant to quarantine tick-infested longhorn cattle. Both Washington and
Mexico City hoped that such a fence would help contain Texas Fever, a
parasitic disease decimating herds of cattle on both sides of the border and
leading to a rapid rise in the cost of beef.
As far as I can tell, the first use of the word wall to describe an effort
to close off the border came with the tumultuous Mexican Revolution.
American troops, announced the Department of War in March 1911 during
Tafts presidency, have been sent to form a solid military wall along the
Rio Grande. Yes, Donald Trump was not the first to deploy the U.S. Army to
the border. Twenty thousand soldiers, a large percentage of that military at
the time, along with thousands of state militia volunteers, were dispatched
to stop the movement of arms and men not out of, but into Mexico, in an
effort to cut off supplies to revolutionary forces. Such a wall would
prove an object lesson to the world, claimed the Department of War. The
point: to reassure European investors in Mexico that the U.S. had the
situation south of the border under control. The revolution in the republic
to the south must end was the lesson that the soldiers were dispatched to
teach.
The revolution, however, raged on and borderland oil companies like Texaco
began building their own private border walls to protect their holdings.
Then, in April 1917, the month the United States entered World War I,
President Woodrow Wilson signed into law a set of sweeping constraints on
immigration generally, including literacy tests, entrance taxes, and quota
restrictions. From that point on, the border sharpened literally, as
lengths of barbed wire were stretched ever further on either side of
port-of-entry customs houses.
What follows is a chronology of both the physical fortification of the
U.S.-Mexico boundary and the psychic investment in such a fortification
the fantasy, chased by both Democrats and Republicans for more than half a
century, that with enough funds, technology, cement, steel, razor ribbon,
barbed wire, and personnel, the border could be sealed.This timeline
illustrates how some of the most outward-looking presidents, men who
insisted that the prosperity of the nation was inseparable from the
prosperity of the world, also presided over the erection of a deadly run of
border barriers, be they called fences or walls, that would come to separate
the United States from Mexico.
A Chronology
1945: The first significant physical barrier, a chain-link fence about five
miles long and 10 feet high, went up along the Mexican border near Calexico,
California. Its posts and wire mesh were recycled from Californias Crystal
City Internment Camp, which had been used during World War II to hold
Japanese-Americans.
1968: Richard Nixons southern strategy famously played to the resentments
of white southern Democrats who opposed civil rights. As it turned out,
though, the president had another southern strategy in mind as well, a
border strategy. As historian Patrick Timmons has written, running for
president in 1968, Nixon promised to get tough on illegal drugs from Mexico
the marijuana problem, he called it. Shortly after winning the White
House, he launched Operation Intercept, a brief but prophetic
military-style, highly theatrical crackdown along the border. That operation
created three weeks of chaos, described by National Security Archive analyst
Kate Doyle as an unprecedented slow-down of all plane, truck, car and foot
traffic legitimate or not flowing from Mexico into the southern United
States. That it would be run by two right-wing figures, G. Gordon Liddy and
Joe Arpaio, should be a reminder of the continuities between the Nixon era
and the kind of demagoguery that now rules the country. Arpaio would become
the racist sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who gratuitously imposed
humiliating, brutal, and often deadly conditions on his overwhelmingly
Latino prisoners. He would also become an early supporter of Donald Trump
and would receive the first pardon of Trumps presidency after a judge found
him in criminal contempt in a racial-profiling case. Liddy, of course, went
on to run Nixons Plumbers, the burglars who infamously broke into the
Democratic National Committees headquarters at the Watergate Hotel,
precipitating the presidents downfall. In his 1996 memoir, Liddy said
Operation Intercept primarily wasnt about stopping the flow of pot.
Instead, its true purpose was an exercise in international extortion,
pure, simple, and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will to force
that country to be more cooperative on a range of policies.
1973-1977: The United States had just lost a war in Vietnam largely because
it proved impossible to control a border dividing the two parts of that
country. In fact, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, desperate to keep
North Vietnamese forces from infiltrating South Vietnam, had spent more than
$500 million on 200,000 spools of barbed wire and five million fence posts,
intending to build a barrier dubbed the McNamara Line running from
the South China Sea to Laos. That line failed dismally. The first bulldozed
six-mile strip quickly became overgrown with jungle, while its wooden watch
towers were, the New York Times reported, promptly burned down. It was as
that war ended that, for the first time, rightwing activists began to call
for a wall to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Biologist Garrett Hardin, a professor at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, was typical. In Population and Immigration: Compassion or
Responsibility?, an essay in the Ecologist, he wrote: We might build a
wall, literally. Hardin was an early exponent of what today is called race
realism, which holds that, in a world of limited resources and declining
white birth rates, borders must be hardened.
During these years, southern border conflicts were especially acute in
California, where Ronald Reagan was then governor. As San Diegos sprawl
began to push against agricultural fields where migrant workers from Mexico
toiled, racist attacks on them increased. Vigilantes drove around the back
roads of the greater San Diego area shooting at Mexicans from the flatbeds
of their pickup trucks. Dozens of bodies were found in shallow graves.
Such anti-migrant violence was fueled, in part, by angry Vietnam veterans
who began to carry out what they called beaner raids to break up migrant
camps. Snipers also took aim at Mexicans crossing the border. Led by the
27-year-old David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan set up a border watch in 1977 at
the San Ysidro point of entry and received significant support from local
Border Patrol agents. Other KKK groups soon set up similar patrols in south
Texas, placing leaflets stamped with skulls and crossbones on the doorsteps
of Latino residents. Around this time, in the swampy Tijuana estuary, an
area that border vigilantes began calling Little Nam, U.S. border agents
reported finding pitfall traps modeled on the punji traps the Vietnamese had
set for American soldiers.
1979: President Jimmy Carters administration offered a plan to build a
fence along heavily trafficked stretches of the border, but scuttled the
idea as the 1980 presidential election approached.
1980-1984: You dont build a nine-foot fence along the border between two
friendly nations, Ronald Reagan said on a presidential campaign swing
through Texas in September 1980. By taking a swipe at the Carter
administrations plans, he was making a play for that states Latino vote,
87% of which had gone to Carter four years earlier. You document the
undocumented workers and let them come in here with a visa, Reagan said,
and let them stay for whatever length of time they want to stay.
Then, four years later, President Reagan shifted gears. Our borders are out
of control, he insisted in October 1984. As he ran for reelection, his
administration started pushing the idea that the border could indeed be
sealed and that the deployment of high tech equipment infrared scopes,
spotter planes, night-vision goggles might provide just such effective
control. New stuff, claimed a Border Patrol official, though some of the
ground sensors being set out along that border were leftovers from Vietnam.
In his second term, Reagan did get an immigration reform bill passed that
helped more than two million undocumented residents obtain citizenship. But
his administration, looking to appease a growing caucus of nativists in the
Republican Party, also launched Operation Jobs, sending federal agents into
workplaces to round up and deport undocumented workers. In 1984, the Border
Patrol saw the largest staff increase in its 60-year history.
1989: In March 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, the new
administration of President George H. W. Bush proposed building a
14-foot-wide, 5-foot-deep border trench south of San Diego. Some likened it
to a moat, since it would be filled with run-off rainwater. The only
thing they havent tried is mining the area, quipped Robert Martinez, the
director of San Diegos American Friends Service Committee. Opponents called
it an inverted Berlin Wall, while the White House claimed that the trench
would solve both drainage and immigration problems. The idea was shelved.
1992: Richard Nixons former speechwriter Patrick Buchanan provided an
unexpectedly strong challenge to a sitting president for the Republican
nomination, calling, among other things, for a wall or a ditch a Buchanan
trench, as he put it along the U.S.-Mexico border and for the
Constitution to be amended so that migrant children born in the country
couldnt claim citizenship. Bush won the nomination, but Buchanan managed to
insert a pledge in the Republican platform to build a structure on the
border. It proved an embarrassment at a moment when there was an emerging
post-Cold War consensus among Republican and Democratic Party leaders that a
free trade agreement with Mexico had to be encouraged and the border left
open, at least for corporations and capital. Bushs campaign tried to fudge
the issue by claiming that a structure didnt necessarily mean a wall, but
Buchanans people promptly shot back. They dont put lighthouses on the
border, his sister and spokesperson Bay Buchanan said.
1993: Having passed the North American Free Trade Agreement in Congress,
President Bill Clinton immediately started to militarize the border, once
again significantly increasing the budget and staff of the Border Patrol and
supplying it with ever more technologically advanced equipment: infrared
night scopes, thermal-imaging devices, motion detectors, in-ground sensors,
and software that allowed biometric scanning of all apprehended migrants.
Stadium lights went up, shining into Tijuana. Hundreds of miles of what the
Clinton White House refused to call a wall went up as well. We call it a
fence, said one government official. Wall has kind of a negative
connotation.
The objective was to close off relatively safe urban border crossings and
force migrants to use more treacherous places in their attempts to reach the
United States, either the creosote flatlands of south Texas or the gulches
and plateaus of the Arizona desert. Trips that used to take days now took
weeks on arid sands and under a scorching sun. Clintons Immigration and
Naturalization Service commissioner, Doris Meissner, claimed geography as
an ally meaning that desert torments would work wonders as a deterrent.
The Clinton White House was so eager to put up a set of barriers that it
barely paid attention to the actual borderline, at one point mistakenly
running a section of the structure into Mexico, prompting a protest from
that countrys government.
Another stretch, spanning 15 miles from the Pacific Ocean, would be built
using Vietnam-era steel helicopter landing pads stood on end. Their edges
were so sharp that migrants trying to climb over them often severed their
fingers. As one observer noted, the use of the pads raised the chilling
possibility that the U.S. might be able to wall off the country with
leftover war matériel.
2006: The Secure Fence Act, passed by President George W. Bushs
administration with considerable Democratic support, appropriated billions
of dollars to pay for drones, a virtual wall, aerostat blimps, radar,
helicopters, watchtowers, surveillance balloons, razor ribbon, landfill to
block canyons, border berms, adjustable barriers to compensate for shifting
dunes, and a lab (located at Texas A&M and run in partnership with Boeing)
to test fence prototypes. The number of border agents doubled yet again and
the length of border fencing quadrupled. Operation Streamline detained,
prosecuted, and tried migrants en masse and then expedited their deportation
(mostly using an immigration reform law Clinton had signed in 1996). Agents
from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (created after 9/11) seized
children off school buses and tracked undocumented residents deep into
liberal states, including in the exclusive Hamptons on New Yorks Long
Island and in New Bedford, Massachusetts. All told, in his eight years in
office, Bush deported two million people, at a rate roughly matched by his
successor, Barack Obama.
2013: The Democratic-controlled Senate passed a bill in June 2013 that in
exchange for the promise of a one-time amnesty and a long-shot chance at
citizenship for some of the millions of undocumented residents in the
country offered more billions of dollars for policing, fencing, and
deportations. According to the New York Times, with a winding down in Iraq
and Afghanistan (however brief it would prove to be), defense contractors
like Lockheed Martin were betting on a military-style buildup at the border
zone, hoping to supply even more helicopters, heat-seeking cameras,
radiation detectors, virtual fences, watchtowers, ships, Predator drones,
and military-grade radar. The bill failed in the House, killed by nativists.
But the Democratic Party would continue to fund tough-as-nails (in the
phrase of New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer) border security
programs that amounted to years of up-armoring the border in what was then
referred to as a border surge.
No one really knows how many people have died trying to get into the United
States since Washington began to make the border tough as nails. Most die of
dehydration, hyperthermia, or hypothermia. Others drown in the Rio Grande.
Since about 1998, the Border Patrol has reported nearly 7,000 deaths, with
groups like the Tucson-based Coalición de Derechos Humanos estimating that
the remains of at least 6,000 immigrants have been recovered. These numbers
are, however, undoubtedly just a fraction of the actual toll.
June 16, 2015: Donald J. Trump descends an escalator in Trump Tower to the
tune of Neil Youngs Rockin in the Free World to announce his
presidential campaign and denounce Mexican rapists.
I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, he tells
Americans. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.
Show Me a 50-Foot Wall
Something there is that doesnt love a wall, poet Robert Frost once wrote.
Borders, not to mention walls, represent domination and exploitation. But
they also symbolize the absurdity of political leaders taking the world as
it is and trying to make it as they think it ought to be. However much
people might curse border fortifications, they also enjoy subverting them
even if the subversion only lasts a moment, as when citizens of Naco,
Sonora, and Naco, Arizona, play an annual volleyball game over the border
fence; or when an artist decides to paint the worlds longest mural on
border fencing; or when families come together to gossip, tell jokes, and
pass tamales and sweets between the posts; or when couples get married
through the spaces separating the slats. As long as the United States keeps
coming up with new ways to fortify the border, people will keep coming up
with new ways to beat the border, including tunnels, ramps, catapults and
homemade cannons (to launch bales of marijuana to the other side), and
GoFundMe campaigns to pay for ladders.
As Janet Napolitano, former governor of Arizona and former director of
Homeland Security, once said, Show me a fifty-foot wall, and Ill show you
a fifty-one-foot ladder.
Greg Grandin / TomDispatch
#american history #border #border wall #border wall history #donald trump #
