Why Walls?
In rural
Vermont where I grew up and Robert Frost lived for many years, neighbor is a verb
as much as a noun, like summer and winter.
One summers at Joe’s pond and winters in Florida. One can either neighbor well or be a neighbor. Frost published North of Boston in
1914. It included Mending Wall. His friend
over the hill declared, “good fences make
good neighbors.” After an afternoon
of setting stones, Frost rejoined “something
there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.” [i]
The
Great Wall of China (246 BC) kept marauding hordes out of the Qin Empire. When I walked it, I imagined thousands of soldiers
slinging arrows and chariots carrying troops to the next battle. Hadrian’s Wall, (122 AD) is eighty miles from
sea to sea in northern UK. It kept the barbarians
out of Roman lands. The Western Wall in Jerusalem
is a holy place of prayer even today.
Walls kept invaders out.
The
Berlin Wall was different. They built it
to keep people in. From 1961-1989 it
divided the city, and its families, until the waning days of communism when
people in East Germany had had enough, and tore it down while the world watched
and the army shrugged.
Many believe
we need a wall across our southern border and are willing to spend $40 billion over
the next few years to build it. The
argument goes something like this: if we don’t control the borders, we won’t
have a country any more. Illegals will
take over, change our culture, and make English a second language, take low
paying jobs, increase crime, and drain our health dollars with visits to the
emergency rooms. Will we build a wall to
keep out the Canadians? Why are we
fixated on the people from south of the border?
Who are we walling in and walling
out? Will this wall make good neighbors?
What
about the walls of our mind? What
beliefs do we carry in our minds that create our walls? Do mental walls keep information and beliefs
in, or do they keep new opinions and information out? Do we build our walls based on facts or
fear? I build too many of my walls based
on information I knew long ago, or believed long ago that isn’t true
anymore. If you have above average
grandchildren as I do, there is constant updating and rolling of eyes.
We have
a million fewer undocumented immigrants than before the 2009 Great
Recession. Mexicans aren’t the majority
immigrant population anymore. That data
crashes against one of my mental walls. Central
Americans, Koreans, Chinese, and Indians make up a big chunk of undocumented
workers. About two million are from
other countries spanning the globe.[ii]
Undocumented
immigrants, on average, have been in the country over ten years, have
reasonable jobs, own homes, pay taxes, and send their kids to school and
college. I can hear the stones falling off
another of my mental walls. Undocumented
immigrants make up a mere five percent of the workforce. Another wall smashed. From 2009-2017, over two million Illegals
were deported; 97% of them convicted criminals.[iii] Another wall torn down. I wonder what the world would be like if we
didn’t cling to our mental walls.
Most Central
Americans come because of oppression by the government or drug cartels in their
home countries. They want to stay
alive. They are refugees and we should treat
them as refugees. Some are members of
drug cartels who come north to support the retail side of drug dealing. We should deport them immediately.
Reality
is that we can’t physically deport millions of people. Reality is that a fifty-foot wall won’t keep
people from entering the country when they need to escape tyranny or feed their
family. We should act on data, not on
preconceptions; mind walls. Reality says
we can fix many of the immigration issues, legal and illegal if we set our
minds to it.
Frost
read The Gift Outright at JFK’s
inauguration. No one who witnessed it will ever forget
that moment: “The land was ours before we
were the land’s….” “Something we were withholding made us weak until we found
out that it was ourselves.” We are a
nation of immigrants; it’s one of our many strengths. American tradition celebrates welcoming those
seeking asylum and a better life: Vietnam, Laos, China, Central and South America,
South Sudan, Ireland, Germany, and Italy, and scores of others. What are we withholding from others? Neil Diamond told us about immigrants: Far/We've been traveling far/Without a home/But
not without a star/Free/Only want to be free/We huddle
close/Hang on to a dream/On the boats and on the planes/They're
coming to America/Never looking back again/They're coming to
America.[iv]
Shouldn’t
we be here to welcome them to America rather than turning them away? No one turned away my grandparents!
Our
culture, who we are, is written on that tablet held by The Lady in New York
harbor. It urges us to welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning
to breathe free.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall….
