Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, August 16, 2008
The Department of Homeland Security will soon erect a secondary fence across Friendship Park, eliminating public access to a historic place where for generations people from San Diego and Tijuana have gathered to visit through the border fence.
The seeds of Friendship Park's destruction were planted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Never mind that the 9/11 terrorists did not enter the United States illegally from Mexico. The psychic needs of an aggrieved nation matched nicely with the desire to limit undocumented Mexican immigration. Post-9/11, the idea that “securing the border” was a matter of national security became axiomatic for politicians of all ideological persuasions.
The Bush administration institutionalized the axiom in 2003, when the newly created Department of Homeland Security took operational control of the Border Patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a host of other border-related agencies. With life on the border now cast in the light of national security, the strategy of militarizing the region came to trump all others in U.S. border policy.
This recasting of the border as a battleground in the war on terror has dramatically altered the physical and social landscape of the region. By the end of the Bush administration, over one-third of the border's 2,000 miles will be covered by double or triple layers of fence. Vehicle and pedestrian waits at border crossings have doubled and tripled, too. Border Patrol staffing in the region has increased more than 50 percent since 2004, a figure that does not include periodic reinforcements from the National Guard and other branches of the armed services.
Heightened security has not significantly reduced rates of Mexican migration to the United States, but it has profoundly altered the patterns that characterize this migration. The cost of entering the United States illegally – as measured by the price of a coyote on the streets of Tijuana – has increased tenfold in the past eight years, a simple fact that has brought a whole host of unintended consequences.
Because there is now real money to be made in immigrant smuggling, the enterprise is more and more dominated by the forces of organized crime. The black market in falsified documents has exploded, as have cases of Border Patrol corruption. Poor Mexicans unable to afford more sophisticated means of entering the United States have assumed greater and greater risks by attempting to cross on foot through the borderlands' remote mountains and deserts. Thousands have died trying.
Most ironic of all, more Mexican immigrants than ever are making commitments to stay long-term in the United States because the cost of re-entry is now so high. What for generations was a pattern of two-way migration has been turned into a one-way street into the United States.
Champions of “gaining control of the border” achieved a significant breakthrough in 2005 when Congress attached a rider to the “Real ID Act,” granting to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff the authority to waive any and all laws he deemed necessary to expedite construction of supplemental fencing along the border.
On April 1 of this year, Chertoff took Congress up on the offer and waived over 35 federal, state and local laws and regulations. The Department of Homeland Security is now aggressively pursuing the construction of triple-fencing along the westernmost 3.5 miles of the border. To complete the triple-fencing project through the borderlands' canyons and mesas, DHS has condemned over 150 acres of public land and is engaged in one of the largest public-works projects in recent San Diego County history. The project will conclude with the fencing off of Friendship Park.
The transformation of the U.S.-Mexico border region has imposed a deep psychic toll on people who live near the international boundary, millions of whom live in extended families that span both nations.
This toll is most evident at Friendship Park, which many locals consider their spiritual home. I have witnessed people kiss through the fence, cry together through the fence, share meals through the fence, say goodbye to dying loved ones through the fence.
Unless something is done soon to save Friendship Park, these kinds of visits will be no more – a sad and telling commentary on the state of life along the increasingly dehumanized U.S.-Mexico border.
The Department of Homeland Security will soon erect a secondary fence across Friendship Park, eliminating public access to a historic place where for generations people from San Diego and Tijuana have gathered to visit through the border fence.
The seeds of Friendship Park's destruction were planted by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Never mind that the 9/11 terrorists did not enter the United States illegally from Mexico. The psychic needs of an aggrieved nation matched nicely with the desire to limit undocumented Mexican immigration. Post-9/11, the idea that “securing the border” was a matter of national security became axiomatic for politicians of all ideological persuasions.
The Bush administration institutionalized the axiom in 2003, when the newly created Department of Homeland Security took operational control of the Border Patrol, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (renamed Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and a host of other border-related agencies. With life on the border now cast in the light of national security, the strategy of militarizing the region came to trump all others in U.S. border policy.
This recasting of the border as a battleground in the war on terror has dramatically altered the physical and social landscape of the region. By the end of the Bush administration, over one-third of the border's 2,000 miles will be covered by double or triple layers of fence. Vehicle and pedestrian waits at border crossings have doubled and tripled, too. Border Patrol staffing in the region has increased more than 50 percent since 2004, a figure that does not include periodic reinforcements from the National Guard and other branches of the armed services.
Heightened security has not significantly reduced rates of Mexican migration to the United States, but it has profoundly altered the patterns that characterize this migration. The cost of entering the United States illegally – as measured by the price of a coyote on the streets of Tijuana – has increased tenfold in the past eight years, a simple fact that has brought a whole host of unintended consequences.
Because there is now real money to be made in immigrant smuggling, the enterprise is more and more dominated by the forces of organized crime. The black market in falsified documents has exploded, as have cases of Border Patrol corruption. Poor Mexicans unable to afford more sophisticated means of entering the United States have assumed greater and greater risks by attempting to cross on foot through the borderlands' remote mountains and deserts. Thousands have died trying.
Most ironic of all, more Mexican immigrants than ever are making commitments to stay long-term in the United States because the cost of re-entry is now so high. What for generations was a pattern of two-way migration has been turned into a one-way street into the United States.
Champions of “gaining control of the border” achieved a significant breakthrough in 2005 when Congress attached a rider to the “Real ID Act,” granting to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff the authority to waive any and all laws he deemed necessary to expedite construction of supplemental fencing along the border.
On April 1 of this year, Chertoff took Congress up on the offer and waived over 35 federal, state and local laws and regulations. The Department of Homeland Security is now aggressively pursuing the construction of triple-fencing along the westernmost 3.5 miles of the border. To complete the triple-fencing project through the borderlands' canyons and mesas, DHS has condemned over 150 acres of public land and is engaged in one of the largest public-works projects in recent San Diego County history. The project will conclude with the fencing off of Friendship Park.
The transformation of the U.S.-Mexico border region has imposed a deep psychic toll on people who live near the international boundary, millions of whom live in extended families that span both nations.
This toll is most evident at Friendship Park, which many locals consider their spiritual home. I have witnessed people kiss through the fence, cry together through the fence, share meals through the fence, say goodbye to dying loved ones through the fence.
Unless something is done soon to save Friendship Park, these kinds of visits will be no more – a sad and telling commentary on the state of life along the increasingly dehumanized U.S.-Mexico border.
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