Border Security is a Slogan - just a SLOGAN!

The Picture shows the Great Wall of China.  Like the great wall, our border wall will fail.  

Millions of people come to the US each year, perhaps as many as 100 million.  Among them are birth tourists (mainly from China and Korea) regular tourists, businessmen and students.  They arrive at US airports, or drive over crossing points where their passports and travel documents are checked.  They also come by train (over the Canadian border) and even by boat.  None of these people came over the desert from Mexico.  

The Boston bombers were legal immigrants, as were the September 11 terrorists.  So were the couple who did the shooting in San Bernardino, California.  

But as much as the media present foreign born tourists as a threat, they are no match for the US born terrorists, usually Christian, some even veterans, who commit all manner of acts of terror from the Oklahoma bombing to shooting up churches to the recent shooting of a synagogue in Pittsburgh.  

Then there are drugs.  Though weed can be grown easily in the US, most of the rest of our illegal drug supply come from overseas - in the old days, heroin would arrive in the hold of a ship, hidden in crates holding olive oil, coffee or cheese.  Drugs still come in shipping containers or all sorts.  In more recent years, we have seen drug mules (people who carried packs of cocaine swallowed and hidden in their intestines).  Cocaine also arrived by small planes and by boat - often in the hold of small sailing vessels that sail up and down the east coastline from Texas to Massachusetts.  And much comes from China, some by container ship, some in small parcels delivered by UPS.  

All of this is illegal, but has nothing to do with our border with Mexico.  

The US/Mexican border does remain a significant crossing point.  Many who make the journey are refugees from violence and poverty.  Almost all expect to work and have an idea of where they will go to find work before they come.  They usually have contacts here in an ethnic enclaves, often in towns abandoned by whites over the last 4 decades.  I live in one such town.  Originally home for German immigrants, in the 1940s and 50s, it became a place for Puerto Ricans to settle and find work.  With cheap housing just a few dozen miles from New York City, it was a good place to find work and settle.  The Puerto Ricans were citizens, but over the years, others who spoke Spanish moved in as well - Dominicans, Columbians and of course Mexicans.  Our town’s dying downtown (killed by the nearby Rockaway Mall), became viable again as businesses were established that catered to a Hispanic market - so our restaurants often feature food from home for Spanish speaker.  The old Kresge’s is gone, but we have Spanish grocers, beauty parlors and so on.

In the 1980s Dover NJ’s population would rise and fall when workers went home for the winter.  But with stricter border controls, the workers could not guarantee a return is they left the US, so they began to stay in ever larger number.  Hmmm, it turns out that increased “border security” keeps them here.  

We willingly employ them to do jobs that are no longer performed by most Americans.  They pick fruit, vegetables and tobacco.  They clean rooms in hotels and act as bus boys and bell hops.  These jobs were once done by native born Americans.  Before the second world war, black Americans and southern poor whites picked cotton and travelled north with the season to pick crops like apples and lettuce.  Times have changed.  Blacks have more opportunities; and the poor whites who still exist no longer join the itinerant fruit pickers.  When I was in college, I worked as a bus boy, and many teachers would supplement their incomes with summer work as waiters and waitresses (are we allowed to use waitress anymore?).  Many girls would go to a place like Martha’s Vineyard to clean houses for the vacationers.  They don’t do this anymore. The illegals who filled the niche in the economy that was abandoned by others.  

Meat packing is full of illegals too.  Meat packing was once a job done in cities by unionized workers.  Now it is done in rural America and by migrants.  

So why the emphasis on “the wall” - a wall which won’t be built until we have seen at years of litigation over eminent domain, the environment and so forth, and which in the end will fail as all walls do.  (Think the Maginot Line or China’s Great Wall). 

The answer is simple.  Republicans have replaced policy with marketing slogans.   Slogans have replaced policy across the board.  When someone says that he favors free market solutions, he or she either is lying to you, or to himself.  The markets really only solves for price.