Meanwhile, lots of yammering going on on social media. "Everybody's talking at me, I can't hear a word they're saying." Brings to mind the famous Gary Larson dog, Ginger.
blah blah blah WALL blah blah blah TRUMP blah blah blah
Here are a few of my own thoughts.
First, other than partisan politics, I'm not sure why this has to be an either/or issue. It seems to me the issue is multi-faceted. A physical barrier makes sense as one facet. Not the main or only facet. One facet. I was listening yesterday to the Three Martini Lunch podcast, with Jim Geraghty and Greg Corombos, and their first topic was Trump's scheduled prime-time broadcast scheduled for last night in which he was going to appeal to the American people about the need for a border wall. Geraghty says this whole discussion has turned into a proxy fight about Trump: if you like Trump you like the idea of a fence, and if you don’t like Trump, you don’t like it. But he thinks it's important to set aside what you think about Trump and listen to people who actually work along the border:
Listen to these border patrol officers. They’re the ones who are out there, whose job is to stop people from coming across the border. Let them describe what they see and what they experience, the dangers of smugglers, the dangers of cartels. We all remember Fast and Furious and the use of American-made guns that killed border patrol officer Brian Terry. And the head of the Border Patrol Officers’ Union made an argument before Congress that basically said, Look, we don’t need the Great Wall of China from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. We need a couple hundred miles worth of fencing. Can that stop everyone? No. But what it does is it acts as a funnel by narrowing down the areas where people who are trying to cross the border are going to go to, and that makes it easier for the Border Patrol to catch them.Again, one prong of a multi-pronged approach to a complex problem. I think this is a very compelling argument.
Second, the Democrats seem to have one primary counter-argument to Trump's insistence on a wall, and it boils down to this: a wall is immoral. This argument is essentially the one that's being repeated on social media. Yet the notion of a wall being immoral flies in the face of reason. Nobody disputes the necessity of fences in practical, everyday, normal life. Homeowners have fences to keep things out (neighbor kids, stray dogs, strangers) or to keep things in (their own kids or pets). We lock doors at night or when we leave for the very simple reason that our house (or car or apartment) belongs to us or contains items that belong to us. People are not free to enter without permission, either through the front door or the back. But to offer these simple analogies is to invite scorn, opprobrium, mockery, and accusations of racism.
Thinking about this issue, I was reminded of the maxim, "Good fences make good neighbors" (which was apparently based on an aphorism from Poor Richard's Almanac by Benjamin Franklin), which led me to Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the poem begins, and that seems to be the case in this debate. Yet in spite of the poet's aversion, there does seem to be at least an implied or reluctant acknowledgement that walls are necessary. The title itself suggests the narrative arc: two neighbors working together to mend the wall that separates their properties. Does the act of mending the shared barrier foster harmony? Is a wall, in fact, a bridge and not a barrier? Is this notion not even worth contemplating in this debate?
Third, back to facets. Republicans talk about physical barriers, Democrats call such barriers immoral, and the painted ponies go up and down. Can we not jump off the merry-go-round and look at other options? Syndicated columnist Froma Harrop--not a conservative, by the way--wrote an article called, Republicans are Afraid of E-Verify. Harrop argues that a physical barrier is a dumb idea--it's inefficient, expensive, unsightly, it doesn't address other issues, such as immigrants overstaying their visas. But the thing we're forgetting, she says, is the main reason people come to America: "The vast majority of foreigners entering this country come for jobs. Turn off the jobs magnet for those without the proper papers and their numbers would shrink radically. That makes an E-Verify-type program the most serious means of curbing illegal immigration." The problem is E-Verify is not federally-mandated, so only eight states are currently using it (all Republican-led).
Why are we not talking about E-Verify? Harrop claims that Republicans in other states "have opposed mandating E-Verify because their companies would have to pay their workers more than do their competitors in non-E-Verify states." She doesn't mention Democrats, but my hunch is Democrats also would oppose E-Verify, most likely on moral or emotional grounds because, well, that's how Democrats tend to argue--from emotion (what about people who are already working here illegally, for example? Do we just send them back?).
E-Verify won't work as it should unless and until employers in all states are held to the same standard. Without a federal mandate, E-Verify is a toothless tiger. So there's the rub. Democrats and Republicans and Donald Trump need to do the hard thing. The easy thing is to build a barrier. The hard thing would be to mandate E-Verify for all states.
Everybody's Talkin' (Harry Nilsson)
“Love your neighbor;
yet don't pull down your hedge.”
Source: Poor Richard’s Almanac, by Benjamin Franklin
