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Puerto Vallarta News NetworkEditorials | At Issue | November 2005 

The United States Needs Bridges, Not Walls
email this pageprint this pageemail usJim Wright - Star-Telegram


The terrorists who wish us ill would like nothing better than to transform our confident, friendly, outgoing people into a panicky heap of paranoid xenophobes. Their prime objective, obviously, is irrational fright.

Unreasoning anxiety can induce counterproductive reactions, making us do self-destructive things.

The idea of building a huge, steel-enforced wall along our nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico strikes me as one such reaction - frantic and futile. Financial costs aside, such a project would cast our country and our people in an image antithetical to our nature.

People throughout Latin America would interpret it as a display of gratuitous unfriendliness, implying that we considered all those south of us as inferior and undesirable. The real terrorists, no doubt, would take encouragement from it, as a sign that they have us on the run.

The madmen who plotted and financed the deadly 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda hierarchy - are not so bereft of cash that they must resort to entering our nation afoot along furtive, cactus-strewn wilderness trails from rural northern Mexico.

They have, alas, considerably more imagination and money than that. So, sad to say, do the Colombian druglords.

So the agents of jihad and drugdom are discouraged from walking in through Mexico? What, then, of the even more remote and less patrolled stretches of our Canadian border? Must we wall them off, too?

Would such a massive structure achieve any predictable good, worthy of its cost? Undoubtedly it would make it harder for hungry, jobless Mexicans looking for work. But the sponsor, U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, is promoting the 1,951-mile dividing wall as essential to our national security.

Hunter is a congressional veteran, a staunch advocate and consistent supporter of national defense. No disparagement of his motivation is intended here.

As a congressman, Hunter has been instrumental in securing funds to improve border-crossing facilities and procedures between Tijuana and San Diego and eradicating some notorious local sanctuaries of illegal activity by erecting double chain fences in that area.

For these, Hunter deserves commendation. Similar improvements have been made in the El Paso and Laredo areas, totaling maybe 50 miles of fencing.

But that's a far cry from a double steel-girded wall across half the continent, with barbed wire at its base and other physically intimidating objects grimacing at our Mexican neighbors across the whole northern breadth of their country.

As for reducing illegal immigration, the laws must crack down harder on the "coyotes," those greedy profiteers who prey on vulnerable jobless Mexicans - smuggling them across the border, providing fake identification and then demanding unreasonable kickbacks from their meager pay.

In these tense times, it seems to me that what we need to be spending our money and talents upon are not more walls but more bridges - bridges of comprehension and understanding between ourselves and the rest of the world, and bridges of education that could lead a new generation to a better future.

Walls, by their inherent nature, separate and divide people. Bridges connect and reconcile them.

Our nation, historically, has been a builder of bridges. East Germany earned the contempt of mankind during the Cold War by building the Berlin Wall not just to keep the rest of the world out but to imprison its own.

Our country's history, given occasional aberrations, has been a long, sometimes sporadic but generally continuous process of building bridges.

We have been breaking through the ceilings that hold people down and the walls that hold people in. We have become the most upwardly mobile, the least economically and socially stratified of the world's societies. This, from the beginning, has been our most distinctive national characteristic.

Jim Wright is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. PO Box 1413 Fort Worth, TX 76101



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