Saturday, June 17, 2006

Walls and fences and ladders

Ranchers add ladders to border fences
A few Texas ranchers tired of costly repairs to cattle fences damaged by illegal immigrants have installed an easier route over the U.S.-Mexican border — ladders...
Ranchers could build walls, of course. There could be a series of walls, each circumscribing a state-like entity (although tax-free zone) for which ladders function as visas. Immigrants could move into the US little by little, according to the system of scalable visas, working in one mini-state and then another once the ladder-visa rules change based on labor demand. They could open restaurants and an informal social services sector, restrained only by how efficiently ladder transport of goods functions.

If ladder-visas are amended or denied while the immigrant resides within the mini-state, we could have a de facto system of indentured servitude in which immigrants pay into a ladder-purchasing system if they choose to move into a different mini-state. Immigrants would not know the conditions in the next mini-state, however, and their risk-assessment of the process of ladder-purchasing, and installation would thus have a naturally conservative element. Risk assessment would be conditioned by high levels of uncertainty.

Said constructive ladder-visas would be based on fluctuating demands for cheap labor and resource-use within each mini-state. The economy of mini-states could thereby function as voluntary immigrant credit-trading. Why not draw up a picture ID system and trade them like baseball cards between mini-states? The mini-state economies might, however, also be based on a system of voluntary controls installed by immigrants in which their own ladder-purchasing regulates and distributes the flow of ladder transport of goods, services, and labor. If needed, they might even create well-regulated militias to enforce such regulation and distribution.

We shall call this system - or civitas - of mini-states the Cellular State, comprised as it is of individual cells which themselves constitute the Body Politick of the Unity of States.

2 comments:

barba de chiva said...

Good thinking, Helmut.

Also: I've not seen any ranches down here without ladders. I don't know where they come up with "a few ranchers," but it's standard practice to have 'em in South Texas . . . and they've been there for years. I guess that's another way of saying: unsurprisingly, ladders on fences isn't news at all.

Still, your proposal is nice. That's just the kind of thinking our country likes in a pragmatist.

hjnfeze!

helmut said...

Thanks, Barba. I've tried to combine a penchant for rabid xenophobia with learnin' in political theory and a fondness for biological metaphors (that's the shit!).

Research funding for further development of the Scalable Ladders Theory of the Cellular State is welcomed.

If not, ofcks you!