Border fence video goes viral
Back in December, I posted a video of my friends Laura and Sara climbing the fence at the US-Mexico border. On January 3, the video suddenly went viral and, as of writing, has been viewed 435,000 on YouTube.
In the days that followed, the video was talked about by the likes of InfoWars, Colorlines, Newsweek, Tu Vez, The Blaze, The Tucson Sentinel, Slate (France), Les Inrocks (France), and many others. The Atlantic’s Daily Dish called the video “a strong argument against a border fence.” KVOA News in Tucson ran a fantastic story on their evening news. Roberto De Vido drew a cool cartoon about the video that was published in the Tucson Sentinel.
So what’s the point of the clip?
Well, in the most general sense, the objective was to reveal the absurdity of the border fence and to raise questions about border fortification as our primary approach to managing Mexican immigration.
Physical borders are strong and convenient symbols, but fortifying them has shown little return. At more than $10 billion a year, we now spend about twice as much on border enforcement than we did in 2001. Since we began building border fences in the mid-1990s, the undocumented population has more than doubled to an estimated 11-13 million. We wasted nearly $1 billion on a so-called virtual fence—a project that the U.S. abandoned on Friday because Boeing’s cameras and sensors couldn’t tell the difference between tumbleweeds and actual national security threats. At an average cost of $4 million per mile, the wall itself is expensive. But remember that people cut holes in walls, so we are not just committing to construction costs, but also to maintenance and repairs—an estimated $6.5 billion over the next two decades.
Rather than building symbols in the desert, we should be working to develop effective solutions that make us better off. Why not invest in an immigration system that offers more temporary work visas so that we may actually regulate and monitor the immigration flows that are inevitable, meet the labor demands of our economy, and prevent the tragic and unnecessary deaths and rapes that occur in the Arizona desert as a result of our failed border policy? Why waste $1 billion on a virtual fence when we could invest in programs to help immigrants learn English, integrate, and develop skills that will make them and our economy stronger? Why not commit ourselves to a true economic partnership with Mexico that leads to greater prosperity and security on both sides of the border?
Even Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which Congress tasked with building walls, cannot honestly claim that walls do anything. A November 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that, “As of May 2010, CBP had not assessed the effect of fencing on border security.”
Academic researchers have studied the effectiveness of the border wall and border enforcement by analyzing how successful migrants are at getting through it. The Migrant Policy Institute found that 97% of undocumented immigrants eventually succeed in entering the United States, a number that has been unchanged since the first border walls went up in 1995. Wayne Cornelius, Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California-San Diego told the House Judiciary Committee that according to his research.
“Tightened border enforcement since 1993 has not stopped nor even discouraged unauthorized migrants from entering the United States. Even if apprehended, the vast majority (92-97%) keep trying until they succeed. Neither the higher probability of being apprehended by the Border Patrol, nor the sharply increased danger of clandestine entry through deserts and mountainous terrain, has discouraged potential migrants from leaving home.”
http://www.no-border-wall.com/walls-do-not-work.php
Maybe exposing the absurdity of the fence between the U.S. and Mexico will inspire some politicians to think “outside of the box” and put their efforts into positive ways to solve our immigration issues. At a cost of $4 million dollars a mile for a link of fence, factories could be built along the border employing hundreds or thousands of people! Jobs would be created for many and people could feed their families!
We tried building factories on the border around the time of NAFTA, but unfortunately many of those jobs have since moved to China since labor costs are cheaper there. I think it would be more effective to invest in the communities deep in Mexico where migrants originate. The Mexican government has many interesting social programs that, for example, help young people build greenhouses, increase their yields, and export their produce, or which provide funds to women to start small businesses. These types of programs are underfunded, however, meaning that few people actually have access to them. We have the opportunity to cooperate with Mexico to expand programs like these, in effect convincing young Mexicans that they can be successful without ever having to leave home. Or we could work with the Mexican government to expand education programs–e.g., greatly increasing the number of Fulbright-Garcia Robles grants and targeting to students in the Mexican countryside–so that young Mexicans can develop skills and apply them at home rather than migrate. All of this might sound like the dream of a dreamer, but what people often forget is that it is completely in our national interest to promote peace and prosperity in Mexico. If we have a more stable and secure neighbor, we have a border that’s under control and a more stable and secure nation for ourselves. We paid attention to the benefits of working with allies in times past–e.g., the Marshall Plan after WWII. And while we waste time and money on fences and laws like SB 1070, China is investing in and forming relationships with developing countries around the world.