Good Fences redux

Another re-post. This one is Barba's.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

It'll be cheap to build an 1800-mile fence between the United States and Mexico, says Representative Duncan Hunter of California. Here's a snippet from an interview with NBC's Rita Cosby:

COSBY: That was what I was going ask you. Is that what you're asking for, the whole stretch, all 2,000 miles?

HUNTER: Yes, we propose to extend that fence all the way the 1,800 miles from San Diego, California to Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. It could be done quickly. You can start the sections in different places. For example, you could start a section -- what we ought to do with the murder and the killing and the violence in Nuevo Laredo is to immediately build a triple fence on the American side of the border and cut that route off to the drug industry, which is using Nuevo Laredo as a jump-off point.

In case you missed it: "What we ought to do with the murder and the killing and the violence in Nuevo Laredo is to immediately build a triple fence on the American side of the border . . ."

Ignore the split infinitive. The redundancy here (not murder and killing! Surely!) is the least imaginative, but, let's face it, the most scary way of describing the on-going fighting in Nuevo Laredo. I don't claim it isn't scary; I used to spend a lot of time in Nuevo Laredo--as I live quite close--and I admit it's kind of crazy right now, kind of like the poorer, ignored sections of a lot of larger American cities themselves embroiled in drug-related violence.

More importantly, his conflation of drug-related violence with illegal crossings is typical of our collective wish to simplify the issue. This is not "what we ought to do with" the problems in Nuevo Laredo. What I suspect Hunter means is this is "what we ought to do about our fear" of those problems.

I want to expand on both points:

Right: the drug-cartel violence is scary in Nuevo Laredo at the moment. But that drug violence has much more to do with I-35's role as a major NAFTA corridor than the fact that the border is unusually porous here. Were the drug trade as lucrative everywhere we lack triple fences, we would see lots more drug violence along most of the border. So what's unique about Nuevo Laredo/Laredo? It is the busiest land port in the country, at present. Despite the real poverty of South Texas and Northern Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, millions of dollars in freely traded commodities are moving through here daily. Daily, trains laden with Chevrolets built in Saltillo plow noisily north. Daily, tankers of high-fructose corn syrup head south. This is a trade route quickly on its way to becoming a legend. CAFTA and FTAA only mean more traffic north--to all kinds of traders, including drug cartels. What happens when you make the trade route even more difficult to access? Supply? Demand? Don't the risks--and violence--inherent in the drug trade become more lucrative? What we ought to do "with" the violence in Nuevo Laredo is confront our complicity in that violence, to begin to address the phenomenal demand for drugs in the United States, to admit, first, that we have a problem. Having accomplished that, we need to admit that "free trade" is burdened by real complexities, that at least part of the economic windfall resulting from free trade comes from our reluctance to deal with the problems fomented by free trade, such as intense fighting in Northern Mexico about access to vitally important trade routes.

More importantly, drug violence and illegal immigration are not the same thing. It is easy but sloppy to believe this, and it makes us feel justified perhaps, in keeping "them" out. Most Americans--however they feel about illegal immigration--understand that the Mexicans and Central Americans who struggle to make it into the United States are here to work. What most of us are unwilling to acknowledge, however, even as we complain bitterly about the cost of social services for immigrants, is that such immigrants make our lives less expensive. Finally, what few of us are willing to admit--perhaps the cost is simply too great--is that many of the Mexicans now working illegally in the United States were driven here by the trade liberalization (in the form of NAFTA) that meant they could no longer compete with heavily-subsidized U.S. agribusiness. But we don't count labor as a freely-tradeable commodity. So we need a fence for that one.

Trade liberalization, American-style, does not necessarily cause these problems, and I'm not deeply opposed to free trade. But inherent in the U.S. approach is a penchant for simplicity: free trade makes everything better for everyone. Were we willing to learn from NAFTA before we tried to bully our way into CAFTA and FTAA, we might recognize that such liberalization is bound to have big consequences in labor markets (I'm speaking not as an economist, but as a regular guy); that trade liberalization leads to new, profoundly important trade routes; that trade routes are obviously prone to being used for the movement of goods we don't necessarily want to flow freely.

If nothing else, it ought to make lots more people angry that Representative Hunter speaks as though we were stupid enough to be persuaded that a fence is going to address drug violence or trade and that either of those things has anything to do with trekking your way from El Salvador in an odds-against-you attempt to achieve the American Dream.

Hunter should be ashamed of himself, then, not for wanting to build a fence. It's among the oldest of human impulses, after all, and he's just looking to protect his country. He should be ashamed for being unwilling to understand or (having understood), to express the complexities of the commodities and the peoples crossing the border. In the end,

[ . . .] I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

(From Robert Frost's "Mending Wall")