Guest Column
Only purpose of fence is to appease bigots
- By David Benjamin
- Capital Times (Madison, WI)
Reading about the U.S. Senate's plan to build 370 miles of fences along America's Mexican border set me to thinking about my hometown in Wisconsin.
When I was growing up in Tomah, it was possible (in fact, it still is today) to walk from one end of town to the other entirely through people's back yards. Fences were not considered either necessary or neighborly.
When I lived near San Francisco, much later on, the abundance of fences struck me as the true distinction between Californian and Midwestern cultures. California is a place not given to easy neighborliness. I've considered the possibility that this culture gap relates somehow to the fact that California has far more Mexican immigrants than Wisconsin. Maybe all those fences are a line of defense against barbarian hordes. ...
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AP Photo/John Miller This is the border fence that separates the U.S., left, from Mexico, right, in downtown Nogales, Ariz. |
Except that the hordes are devoutly Catholic and among the politest people on Earth. In fact, among the few visitors allowed inside those California fences are Latin immigrants, given free rein as long as they bring along a lawn mower, leaf blower and a few bags of mulch.
The California example, in fact, demonstrates that we're not planning Congress' awesome and costly Southern Wall for the sake of "national security," because after all we've already winked and shrugged as (at least) 11 million "aliens" crept across this border and took up squatter's rights in the U.S. economy. Everyone knows that destitute Mexicans, Guatemalans and Panamanians don't sneak northward carrying bombs and bitterly plotting to murder white people in their office towers.
We want our illegal aliens. The president has admitted as much, praising illegals for their willingness to accept menial jobs at starvation pay and implicitly scolding America's homegrown poor for their dogmatic obsession with health plans, indoor toilets and the minimum wage.
The great Rio Grande fence will fail. People will get around it, go under it, fly over it, swim beyond it, cut holes and crawl through. We'll kill some of them and deport thousands more. But they'll keep coming back.
I find this pattern both inspiring and sad, because while we welcome these immigrants and give them work, we hold them in contempt. I'm reminded again of my small-town childhood. You remember that there was always one kid, short or fat or ugly or younger than anyone else, desperate to join the group, to fit in and be befriended. He would do anything. If you tempted him with acceptance, he would eat a worm or pull down his pants in front of all the girls at recess.
But after he had suffered that rite of initiation, he found himself still isolated, an object of greater scorn than before. Now he was an outcast not only for being short, fat and ugly, but also because he ate worms.
Likewise, we make Mexicans eat worms, as the price of admission into America, and then we're disgusted with them for eating worms.
The latest expression of our disgust is going to be a fence which, of course, won't work. Fences have never worked. The forebears of this particular fence include the walls of Jericho, the fortifications of Troy, the Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall and that cockamamie deadline they're stringing up now along the West Bank.
The fence won't work because we really don't believe in the damn thing. We're building it to appease xenophobes and bigots who keep finding new uses for Sept. 11, 2001. We're building it despite 300 years of welcoming foreigners not just as "guests" but as aspiring Americans. We were all aliens once, except for a lingering handful of natives who are ironically blood relatives of the Indo-Americans against whom we're supposedly mounting this barricade.
We're building this fence not as a barrier but as a colossally expensive act of symbolism.
- David Benjamin is a novelist
and journalist who splits his time between Madison and Paris. His latest
book is "The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked" (Random House, 2002).
Published: May 22, 2006 - Capital Times article at: http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/index.php?ntid=84697&ntpid=
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