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Robert Frost said it best, in the first line of one of his
most famous poems, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall."
People have been trying to keep other people out of their
countries for as long as there have been countries. Now
that we’re thinking along the same lines, in terms of building a wall between
the United States
and Mexico, it
might be interesting to take a look at some other famous walls of history, and
how they have fared.
In what was probably the first attempt at creating an
artificial barrier between nations, the Great Wall of China
was built more than 2,200 years ago by Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of the
Qin Dynasty, in what was ultimately a futile effort to keep the invading Hsiung
Nu tribes out of his territory.
The Roman Emperor Hadrian built his famous wall across the
width of Great Britain
beginning in the year 120 AD in an equally futile effort to keep the Picts out
of the Roman colony that occupied the southern half of the island.
Walls don’t work.
Not having learned the lesson from Hadrian's Wall, the British
themselves “built" a Great Hedge, a 2,300 hundred mile hedge grove across the
Indian sub-continent that was intended force the rural population of India
to purchase highly taxed government salt by preventing them from trekking to
the ocean, where salt could be easily harvested for nothing.
That didn’t work either.
The cost of the effort required to maintain the Hedge, and the 12,000 troops the
British had stationed along its length, far exceeded the income derived from
the tax.
After the Great War ended, the French decided they were
fed up with being invaded by Germany
every few years. Their answer was the Maginot
Line, a 1,500 kilometer long string of tank traps, fortifications and tunnels that
were supposed to prevent the Germans from ever again invading France, until
German paratroopers demonstrated the folly of fixed fortifications in 1940 by
simply flying over them while their tanks punched their way through an
undefended Belgium.
The Germans, in turn, demonstrated that they were capable of
stupidity equal or superior to the French by building their own Siegfried
Line. Maybe they weren’t so stupid,
because sections of the Siegfried Line held out until March of 1945. On the other hand, by the time the last
section of the Siegfried Line surrendered, the outcome of the war was already a
foregone conclusion because the Allies simply went around the sections of the
Line that they couldn’t go through.
Not to be outdone by the Germans, the Russians demonstrated
an equal inability to read the lessons of history by building an "Iron Curtain,"
a string of barbed wire barriers that were supposed to separate East and West
Germany, and the Berlin Wall, which was
supposed to isolate the West Berlin from the rest of Western
Germany.
The Berlin Wall didn’t work either. Not a day went by during the years of its
existence that someone didn’t try to climb over it, tunnel under it or blast
through it. Often, the people who were supposed to be
building or maintaining the Wall were the first to go through it. Some made it.
Some died. The net result of the
wall was to make a laughing stock out of the Soviet Empire, which tried to
convince the world that the Iron Curtain was designed to keep others out,
rather than to keep their own people in.
The Great Wall of China has lasted
some 2200 years. The Berlin Wall lasted
from 1961 to 1989, a mere 28 years.
You would think that the world might have learned the lesson
by now: walls don’t work.
Nevertheless,in a valiant attempt to ignore the lessons of
history, there are two controverial walls now under
construction, the
Israeli Wall of Separation and the Immigration Wall between the United
States and Mexico.
The Israeli Wall of Separation is designed specifically to
keep terrorists (and demonstrators) out, not to separate Arab and Israeli
populations. Israel’s
economy is even more dependent upon Palestinian labor than the American economy
is dependent on Mexican labor, so they have gates in their walls for
Palestinian workers. The theory is that
the gates will stop the terrorists and allow the legitimate workers to pass
through to their jobs.
The problem is that Israel,
like every other seacoast nation, has extremely porous borders. Terrorists who
cannot gain entry by land, can simply come in by sea.
And that’s exactly the problem with the Immigration Wall.
When two-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanon first
proposed building a fence between the US
and Mexico in
1996, he was excoriated from all sides.
The US-Mexican border is two thousand miles long, but that’s not a
tremendous undertaking with current technology.
Philosophical issues aside, Buchanon’s plan had two serious
drawbacks: we already have a fence
between Mexico
and the United States,
and the fence wasn't doing anything to hold back the flood of illegal immigrants
seeking entry into the United States.
Fast forward to George Bush’s recent speech on the subject,
in which he proposed the construction of high-tech fences in
urban corridors, and new patrol roads and barriers in rural
areas, complete with motion sensors,
infrared cameras, and unmanned aerial vehicles to prevent illegal
crossings, backed by 12,000 border guards.
In other words, he’s building a wall that includes all of
the worst features of the British Hedge, the French Maginot Line, and the
German Siegfried line.
The French thought their "high" technology would prevent the Germans
from crossing the Maginot, and the Germans were convinced that their
esprit de corps would prevent the Alllies from pushing through the
Siegfried. Now, we're going to rely on our own technology, but
technology only goes so far.
Sooner or later, someone has to slap handcuffs on that illegal alien, and no amount of technology can do that.
If there is anything to be learned from the failure of these
previous attempts to wall people in or out, it is that the wall in question is
only effective if you have an army behind the wall to protect the wall
itself.
President Bush wants to increase the size of the U.S. Border
patrol from 9,000 to 12,000 officers. Given an eight hour shift, and a 40 hour work
week, that gives us 4,000 Border Guards on active duty, not counting time off
for weekends, vacations, and sick days. The
border is 1951 miles long. Given those
parameters, we could station one border guard every 2,575 feet along the
border, in other words, one guard for every half mile of border.
This illustrates the obvious impossibility of securing a
1951 mile border with 12,000 policemen.
No matter how much technology you bring to bear upon the problem, the
equation remains the same: the border
guard has to cover a half a mile in order to intercept a single illegal alien
crossing the border…but the illegal alien only has to cover a few hundred feet before
it becomes impossible for the Border Guard to track him down as the culprit
merges in with the indigenous population.
In the meantime, a few dozen other illegals are slipping through the
border behind the Border Guard’s back.
The situation isn’t similar to interdicting the flow of
illegal narcotics into the country: it’s
identical.
The United States
has more than 12,000 miles of general coastline, and more than 88,000 miles of
tidal coastlines. Pay attention to that second
figure, because that’s the amount of real estate that has to be guarded, and
includes every bay, harbor, inlet, outlet, river mouth and tidal estuary around
the coast of the country.
Eighty-eight thousand miles of coastline is a lot to watch
over. Making matters more complicated
are the millions of small craft owned and operated by the citizens of this
country on their legitimate errands. Trying to filter out the drug-smugglers, terrorists,
and illegal aliens from those legitimate boaters is completely impossible. And even if we could do that, anyone who
wants to get into this country badly enough can fly in on an ultra-light
aircraft costing a few thousand dollars and capable of flying just a few feet
above the ground.
The president and his staff probably know all this. So, why bring up the issue of building an
Immigration Wall in the first place?
Sovereign nations have an absolute right to control who
comes into their countries but, in order to do that, they have to define their
borders clearly. You have to draw a line
in the sand and tell everyone on the wrong side of that line to keep out or
face the consequences.
The Immigration Wall is, therefore, a ridiculous
necessity. Like a coyote marking his
range, we have to put up a Wall, no matter how ridiculous it seems, to
demonstrate our resolve with respect to protecting our borders.
But don’t be misled:
strong walls do not a strong border make!
In order for such pronouncements to have any deterrent
value, they have to be backed up with resources necessary to enforce the
sanctity of the border. Since it is
clearly impossible to interdict the flow of illegal immigrants at the borders,
we have to do the next best thing, which is to catch them and send them back to
wherever they came from.
The problem with wholesale deportations is the belief that, because
some illegal aliens have been here longer than others, they should be allowed
to stay while we go about deporting the more recent arrivals. Unfortunately, it is specifically because we
are not deporting the illegal aliens who are already here that the more recent
arrivals become convinced that it is all right for them to come here too.
If we simply deport them all as soon as we find them, the
message would be unmistakable: there’s
no reason to waste money, or risk your life, to get into the United
States because they’re just going to send
you right back here again.
There’s a street sign in mid-town Manhattan,
on First Avenue and 32nd
Street, near the entrance to the Queens Midtown
Tunnel.
The sign says, “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here."
It’s a funny thing, but in a city where illegal parking is
rampant, I’ve never seen a car parked in front of that sign.
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