Yeah but…..there is a world of difference between walls which keep some people out…and walls which keep other people in.

When you live in a world of 793 billionaires and 10 million millionaires amidst a population which (of the bottom half) lives on less than $2.50 each day, you’re going to have walls.

And how, pray do you tell the difference?

You might say a gated community keeps out the riff-raff. Until you consider a teenager’s position inside the Gated Community, and now there is nothing to do inside but plan escape (driving license), have sex, and take drugs.

Protection for some, and prison for others.

If I were Mexico I’d police the boarder too, to keep out guns. I’d weld the gates shut on the Mexican side. There is little (except dollars) coming over the boarder from the US that Mexico wants or needs — Tourists can fly.

Or, if you live among people our government doesn’t like, you need bomb shelters, not walls.

You are, until enough folks decide that the walls have to go.

See Berlin, 1989.

heard on NPR @ 9:40 this morning that israel is planting landmines along the Syrian border to keep out people fleeing Syrian tanks. apparently walls aren’t enough…

Agreed. Whether putting deadbolts on all the doors is a good idea or not depends on if you give your wife a key. I have no problem fencing the entire Southern border, especially since no immigrant reform deal is possible when half the country (correctly) think its rather odd to build a fence that trespassers can walk around.

The Army Corps of Engineers wrote an interesting report 25 years related to upgrading South Korea’s triple line Korea Barrier System.
The Strategic Performance of Defense Barriers
FINDINGS
The Selection of Relevant Barriers 2
French Barrier Experiences 2
German Barrier Experiences 7
British Barrier Experiences 9
Barriers in the Low Countries (Belgium and the Netherlands) 13
The Finnish Barrier Experience 14
Israeli Barrier Experience 15
III THE KOREA BARRIER SYSTEM AND HISTORICAL BARRIERS
Comparative Parameters 20
Comparison Summary 22
IV CONCLUSIONS
Peacetime Barriers Deter Attacks But Do Not: Defeat Them 23
Peacetime Barriers Quickly Decay and Become Obsolete 24
Peacetime Barriers Are Poorly Understood

Self-segregation is almost the antithesis of democracy. When we shield ourselves from interaction with other people, we don’t have a way to influence them or be influenced by them, which is the basis of democratic action. We lose track of the things that unite us when we are able to tie ourselves tightly to people just like us.

Bad behavior.

Well, the walls I’m discussing are there to keep the people out, because the owning classes of the rich nations view the rabble in the poor nations as trespassers. The Berlin Wall was there to keep people in, like a prison wall. The point is that the old wall represented a different political formation than the new one, and that different political tactics will therefore be necessary in order to tear them down.

As long as the super-rich guard their hoards they will hire people to build walls to keep in said hoards.

The US-Mexico wall is an economic wall, by which the poor are meant to be excluded from the land of the wealthy. Maybe we can do something about that when democracy comes to America and/or Mexico.

For those of you who have not seen them, I urge you to visit the US-Mexico border fence and the concentration camps that have been built in the Southwest over the past ten years to detain mainly “Other Than Mexican” Latino immigrants. These can’t be truly appreciated or understood until you see them with your own eyes. South of San Diego there is a place called Friendship Park where immigrants and their friends and family on the Mexican side who could not come across could visit each other through a chain link fence. The new wall put a stop to this. Or sit at any bar on the Mexican side and you will find someone crying in their beer because their sister, or brother, or father, or aunt made it across, and they are sure they will never see them again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/world/americas/22iht-22border.17155357.html

Walls are like labels. They only serve to divide, enabling the haves to maintain control and prosper.

There are about a million people employed in the maquiladora complex on the Mexican side. Minimum wage in Mexico is one-fifth that in the US. OSHA and US environmental regulations don’t exist in for these factories. Read the chamber of commerce websites of US border towns to see how these are promoted to US businesses. Or, to look at it from another economic angle, if the minimum wage in Canada were five times that in the US and Canada had built a wall to ensure a labor force on the US side that would work for a fraction of domestic wages, how many US working class folks would cross into Canada to make $40/hr.?

Yes, let’s open the border completely, let everyone in who wants to come. No passports, no visas, no background checks, just open the country — and what’s left of its job market — to everyone. We have enough capital, enough public services, enough water, schools, etc., for everyone. We have no unemployment problems, no state and local government funding problems. And we owe it to the rest of the world.

Is a snark tag really necessary?

Oh, please.

I’ll repeat one line from the Der Spiegel quote in the post: “Every one of these barriers is a monument to the failure of politics.”

To the extent that I have to live behind a wall — any wall — it represents some kind of failure, some kind of brokenness. Perhaps that wall may be necessary, as the alternative might be worse, but that is no reason to love building walls.

And it’s certainly no reason to say “Gosh, aren’t we so great in the West, that we don’t build walls like the communists did”.

More common is the kind of mindless “wall mentality” that I see in metro Kansas City. There is State Line Road, which straddles the border between Kansas and Missouri. There are folks on either side who live as if that street is the Berlin Wall, and the “other side” is East Berlin. “Who’d want to go there?” In Missouri, there’s the Missouri River, dividing the city of Kansas City MO in half. When folks say “Kansas City” they mean the part that is south of the river, otherwise they say “North of the River.” Again, the disdain and ugliness pointed toward the folks on the other side — whichever side that is — is palpable at times.

You may enjoy living behind bars and gates and walls, but not me. I may put up with it, recognizing it as a necessary evil, but I don’t have to like it.

Please mention animals and migration. The US-Mexico wall is an environmental catastrophe and monument to political shame.

“The more ye judge, the less ye love.”

This paranoid hatred is killing the America I love.

You may enjoy living behind bars and gates and walls, but not me. I may put up with it, recognizing it as a necessary evil, but I don’t have to like it.

Necessary Evil was the camera plane that accompanied Enola Gay to bomb Hiroshima. I don’t believe evil is necessary.

That presumes it is not, or was, a great trip to drive across the bridge somewhere into Mexico and travel as a tourist, sure flight is a great, another wall of sorts and getting to be more like a prison.

We have enough capital, enough public services, enough water, schools, etc., for everyone.

Ah yes, capital, that most elusive of human needs. In a world of 793 billionaires, 10 million millionaires, and a bottom half of humanity living on less than $2.50/day, everyone needs capital. Or to look at it in another dimension: over the vast preponderance of the human race’s 200,000 years of existence, people died right away because they had no capital. Along comes capitalism, and suddenly this most elusive of human needs is satisfied!

Is a snark tag really necessary?

Indeed. As you say, these are the totality of our realistic options: An impenetrable wall around all that is Good and Ours, or a prostrate, chaotic self-destruction. Be very afraid and think no further than this dichotomous non-choice.

Is a snark tag really necessary?

“It’s no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.” –Kurt Vonnegut

I love the responses to my earlier post. All emotiona, all an appeal to the utopian, and no responses to the actual facts.

I’m a little tired of the proposition that we owe everything to everyone in the entire world. When are other countries going to be responsible for the quality of life and opportunity for their people?

So let’s break this down into simple yes or no questions:

1. Should we let in everyone who wants to live here?

2. Should we have any procedures to insure that people who come here are not terrorists, drug smugglers, or members of criminal gangs and cartels?

3. Do we have the resources — land, food, water, schools, roads, housing, hospitals, jobs — to take care of everyone in the entire world who would like to come here?

4. If people persist in evading legal ways to visit and/or immigrate, how should we stop them? Or should we just let them come?

Love to hear concrete answers, because all I’ve heard so far is platitudes and magical thinking.

Just start with a vision of am immigration program that is humane, rational, and effective; our entire immigration scheme is broken. Everyone goes crazy at the amnesty word: is it rational to think of deporting everyone who is here from a foreign country? NO. There is the true reality of backbreaking labor that US citizens have refused to do. There has to be a path to citizenship. Workers who can come in for certain employment/jobs should not be held hostage by those employers. There are many issues that should be addressed; the Dream Act was rational.
Some very useful solutions are not magical thinking. They may not be punitive enough to your liking.

I love the responses to my earlier post. All emotiona, all an appeal to the utopian, and no responses to the actual facts.

I suppose that wealth pyramid I mentioned isn’t an actual fact or something. No, wait…

I’m a little tired of the proposition that we owe everything to everyone in the entire world.

Another justification of imperialism. Let’s frame the “immigration issue” this way. Our Euro-American ancestors stole 40% of Mexico from the Mexicans. Should Mexicans have the right to enter, and live in, that portion of their country (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado) that our ancestors stole from theirs?

Or here’s another fun framing. NAFTA made it possible for the corporate growers of cheap Federally-subsidized Great Plains corn (Zea Mays) to monopolize the Mexican corn market and throw millions of Mexicans out of the farming business they’d pursued for millenia. Now they want to come here since, after all, half of Mexico knows someone who lives in the States already and large portions of their country have been turned into a war zone on behalf of their Harvard-educated President’s war on an illegal drug business which panders after US money. The actions of the US government and its citizens are an intimate cause of every reason they wish to be here. What should we do about that?

Or here’s a thought. A number of countries in Latin America (Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Ecuador and so on) exist economically because their workers somehow migrate to other countries and send cash home. Should we put a halt to that “despicable” practice?

When are other countries going to be responsible for the quality of life and opportunity for their people?

Um, when their economies are no longer being conquered by largely-US-based transnational elites? Speaking of magical thinking…

Should we let in everyone who wants to live here?

No. Let’s just make it intolerable for them to live where they are, and tell them to suck it up.

Should we have any procedures to insure that people who come here are not terrorists, drug smugglers, or members of criminal gangs and cartels?

Since each of these phenomena are byproducts of US military or economic imperialism, we might consider having a procedure for ending such imperialism, but it’s probably too costly, so why bother?

3. Do we have the resources — land, food, water, schools, roads, housing, hospitals, jobs — to take care of everyone in the entire world who would like to come here?

Since it’s they whose labor takes care of us, only the most fatuous rhetoric proclaims us to be taking care of them. Carry on.

Fantastic….And amen.

Your well informed arguments reflect the valid perspective espoused by Eduardo Galeano in his writings, whether that it the source of your knowledge or not. Bravo.