In 1985 while the U.S. and Soviet Union was competing for the hearts and minds of the non-aligned nations, President Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall, the symbol of a divided Europe, and said ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe…tear down this wall’. At home Mr. Reagan had launched the largest peace-time military budget in U.S. history spending 2.4 trillion dollars including the infamous SDI-the placing of weapons in outer-space. American politicians are renowned for their double standards. Worshipping at the altar of self-righteousness and superiority brings out the worst in the areas of denial and contradictions. Supremacy breeds fear and insecurity while words do not reflect action. From the European colonization of North America, where newly arrived settlers displaced millions of the indigenous populations by building fences, forts, and reservations, to the deadly and warlike trade embargoes against such countries as Japan, China, Cuba, Libya, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, the U.S. has become enslaved to a vast network of bulwarks and military complexes. This fortress mentality trickles down and spans across America to the thousands of high-tech security and gated communities in which every home has a ’panic room‘. Several of America’s foremost politicians are now leading the charge to build a parallel multi-billion dollar, two-thousand mile long fence between Mexico and the U.S. President Fox is right in claiming the fence would be disgraceful and shameful to the people of Mexico. Unfortunately, past and present U.S. policy makers have erected other walls that still remain hidden to this day.
In the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846, Manifest Destiny, the belief that God chooses and ordains certain people to conquer and civilize a continent or peoples, raised its ugly head. As the U.S. was gobbling up half of Mexico, mainstream newspapers in America were describing the Mexicans as inferior, lazy, and lower than reptiles and snakes. After the war, newly arrived Anglo-Protestants carried this view into the occupied and conquered territories as they clashed with Catholic-Indigenous Mexicans. Thousands of Mexicans were removed from their land and deported across the border. Tensions continued to rise throughout U.S. history as some Mexicans were never assimilated or accepted U.S. hegemogeny. During WWII, thousands of U.S. sailors stormed Mexican-American neighborhoods in the southwest attacking Mexican-American youth for their long hair and clothing, known as the zoot-suit riots. In the 1960’s when Mexican-Americans and Chicanos attempted to rediscover their ancestors cultural heritage and traditions and gain equality and justice in America, the movement was brutally crushed by riot police in Los Angeles as thirty-thousand women, children, and men were beaten, arrested, and even killed during a peaceful demonstration and gathering. Struggles still exist today with the debate over bilingualism, cultural traditions, and even the forbidding of the use of Spanish in some businesses and institutions. The wall of prejudice still remains with many politicians and U.S. citizens in their perception of Mexicans.
Economic fences still exist between Mexico and the U.S., some have never been mended. During the 1800’s American mining, railroad, and commercial farming barons hired millions of Mexicans to work and help build the infrastructure of the U.S. and produce food. As Hispanic workers were taken from the farms and industrial plants and sent off to WWI and WWII, the U.S. government contracted, (at the insistence of the Mexican government in order to protect the rights and wages of Mexican nationals), and imported millions of Mexicans to work in the U.S. due to labor shortages. Starting in 1942, the Bracero Program imported 4,203 Mexican immigrants and by 1957, 436,019 Mexican nationals arrived in America to work. Mexicans added to the war effort and American victories while oftentimes living in sub-standard housing and being oppressed and even beaten by management. Currently as the debate surrounds the contributions or dependency of Mexican immigration on the U.S. monetary system, most economists agree that without the thousands of farmers, custodians, maids, child-care givers, and service sector providers, the U.S. economy would collapse in some regions. Also, almost ten percent of the U.S. armed forces are immigrants that have not yet received U.S. citizenship. Instead of a user-friendly society, the U.S. has become a user-enemy society as immigrants are discarded after they provide a valuable and necessary service. Instead of assuming that immigrants lower the wages of the American worker, why not ask how and why corporations make exuberant profits?
The most destructive wall has been the American political-corporate practices imposed upon Mexico. Another reason for the U.S.-Mexico War concerned the issue of slavery. Since Mexico freed their slaves years before the U.S., millions of slaves were escaping and finding independence in Mexico. Enraged that their plantation economy would be ruined and wanting more southern states to represent them in congress, many southern elite politicians and planters pushed for a war with Mexico. Today with NAFTA, inequitable free-trade policies, the maquiladoras, subsidies, industrial pollutants by U.S. corporations, and the weakening of labor unions, both American and Mexican workers are burdened by a neo-capitalistic market. As Mexican farmers and workers cannot compete with the ‘profit mentality’ instead of the ‘people mentality’ and unemployment rises, their only hope is either revolution, as happened in Chiapas, or attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexican border and find employment in America. Unfortunately, these ruthless policies mentioned above cause hundreds of deaths each year while crossing the border, as women, men, and even children die in the desert heat or become disabled due to injuries sustained by trains, trucks, and automobiles. The Good Neighbor Policy has turned into the Greedy Narcissist Policy where only the rulers and corporate elite benefit at the expense of the poor and working-class.
Finally, in building this two-thousand mile long fence in Mexico’s backyard, Americans may experience blow-back unintended consequences due to misguided political decisions. Since 9-11, Homeland Security and the Bush Administration has militarized and fortified the border with thousands of agents, security cameras, drones that constantly fly overhead, and diluted human rights for immigrants. As a result of the Patriot Act, immigrants can be arrested and imprisoned without legal counsel, tried in a secret court, placed in solitary confinement, physically punished and coerced, found guilty for the crime of association, and deported or ’outsourced’ as ’ex post facto’ laws and inalienable rights have been nullified. How does this relate to U.S. citizens? Because of expensive and un-affordable health care costs in the U.S., each year millions of Americans travel to Mexico for medicines, dental care, hospitalization, and surgeries. As the health care conglomerates and pharmaceutical companies lobby and pay congress and the Bush Administration to prevent Americans from going to Mexico so that instead they will have to spend money for health care in the U.S., it may be only a matter of time before Homeland Security Agents begin arresting U.S. citizens!
As a result of 9-11, the mantra by the Bush Administration is that security is the means by which America will achieve fundamental freedoms. On the contrary, intelligence, economic justice for all, and cooperation with other countries is the means by which the U.S. will achieve fundamental freedoms. On 9-11, the terrorists did not attack the Statue of Liberty. They attacked the Pentagon, WTC, and attempted to attack Washington DC where the U.S. government resides. The terrorists do NOT dislike our freedoms but instead abhor the U.S. for its foreign militarism, violent interventions, destructive economic policies, and an ill-advised government that is sheltered from the realities and sufferings of the underprivileged and exploited. Therefore, it is these words and the policies on the base of the Statue of Liberty that America should continue to abide by…
Give me your tired, your poor.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
-Emma Lazarus
In order to break these chains, America should recognize how Mexican workers have and are contributing to the U.S. The second step is the realization that no human individual is illegal. Third, the U.S. should stop building walls and fences and instead build bridges of cooperation, economic equality, and human rights for all. If the U.S. continues to build fences of prejudices, walls of false memories, military bases that protect economic self-interests, and deny basic human rights to others, it is America who will be imprisoned in a fortress of insecurity and fear. As the border-fence is a symbol of a divided North America, Mr. President and Congress, if you seek peace, and if you seek prosperity and security for the U.S….tear down these walls.