Open Borders
June 27, 2007
This talk of building fences along the border gives me the willies. When I was a little kid — first through fourth grades — I lived in Berlin. Except then it was called “West Berlin,” and the Soviet-built Berlin Wall was visible from my back window.
There are few more visible symbols of a totalitarian regime than wall. A fence is close enough, but I have no doubt that a wall will is what we will end up with if we persist. And the former East Germans know that walls can keep people in as well as out. When the fence is ineffective, we’ll add guard towers and guard dogs. We’ll create a no-mans land, take people’s property, break up communities and families. If not immediately after the fence is constructed, then sometime after.
If you want to avoid having a totalitarian regime, it’s a good idea not to allow the construction of the supporting physical infrastructure. Just sayin’.
Image from Berlin-Wall.org.
Posted in Politics
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June 27th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Nice sentiment. Only thing is, the Berlin Wall was built to trap people IN a totalitarian environment. The wall along our southern border (which has been in existence to some extent for many years, (it’s not a new concept) was built to keep lawbreakers from fleeing a socialist state and from gaining their freedom without doing it the way hundreds of thousands of others do it each year - legally.
Ain’t nobody climbing the walls to get out of the USA. Everyone around the world wants in.
So I wouldn’t worry about that totalitarian takeover happening anytime soon.
June 27th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Generally speaking, if you’re not worrying about a totalitarian takeover of the American government I’d suggest you’re not doing your duty as a citizen. We are the final defenders of our freedom. And as I’ve pointed out, it’s a little late to holler about the wall keeping you in once it’s already built.
I don’t want a totalitarian state. And I don’t want the trappings of one either.
June 27th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Actually, the people who built the wall did not call it The Berlin Wall. They called it the antifascist protective barrier, and it was built to separate ideas and people. In principle and in substance, it matters little who was kept out and who was kept in. Logistically, the wall circled West Berlin, The British, U.S., and French sectors. The “free” people were closed inside the circle of the wall. And it started with people holding guns and stringing concertina wire.
The Berlin Wall was abhorrent. It was somewhat effective for a while, but that was before satellites and microchips. Keeping the wall repaired drained the East German and Russian economies, and through time it became ever more expensive and ineffective. A fence or wall along the southern border of the United States will also be ineffective, expensive, and most of all abhorrent.
June 30th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I may be the only person thinking this but, I don’t have any problem with our current illegal immigration system. People who need jobs and money to support their families come across the river (well, I do have a problem with that, it is way to expensive and dangerous for those folks) and find jobs that no one here wants to do. They then stay here for a few months and then go home or make this their home, all the while sending money to their families back home. I can see granting residency to those who have been here for a number of years so that their children can legally go to school and get aid, but isn’t that what this country is all about? A place to go for people seeking a better life.
31 out of 32 parts of me floated across the atlantic in the 18th and 19th centuries, I wonder if they had such problems getting to stay. Sometimes I think it is more about racism than it is about security or economics.
July 1st, 2007 at 7:45 am
Ashley, I do have quite a few problems with our current tolerance for illegal immigration. First, it’s a black market in people-trade, and many immigrants are being exploited financially by the criminals who smuggle them across the border in conditions that are sometimes life-threatening.
Secondly, those “jobs that no one wants to do” are usually positions where the employer is hiring illegals because illegals do not have legal protection. They can cheat them out of money, force them to work in unsafe conditions, and generally abandon any responsibilities we’ve decided employers have to those they employ. A company hiring illegals has an illegal and unfair business advantage over one that doesn’t, and they get it at the cost of human suffering.
July 4th, 2007 at 12:13 am
I have to assume that if they build a big wall on the Mexican border then they’ll be doing the same thing along the Canadian border. When they’re done with all that then we’ve got ourselves another Kurt Russell movie.