THE FENCE, THE WALL (2006)

“Tear down this wall!” ordered President Reagan to the Soviet leader Gorbachev in Berlin on June 12th 1987, without suspecting that a couple of decades later, some of his fellows Republicans would pass a bill to build a fence across the American border to stop illegal immigration. As the one who said” “Freedom leads to prosperity” and “The wall cannot withstand freedom”, Reagan would have been more pleased with those, both Republicans and Democrats, who in the House of Representatives, opposed the fence initiative comparing it to the Berlin Wall. As the great politician he was, he would have figured out a better way to dissuade Latin Americans from entering illegally into the United States than building a fence that only would remind Latin American and the world how totalitarian regimes protect themselves. The fence is not just a border patrol instrument but a symbol: a wall between the rich America and the poor America. A wall of fear which will part the American continent in two, as the Berlin Wall parted Europe. A wall of despise which will alienate even more the Latin American countries against the United States, at a war time where friends are more needed than enemies.

The United States has an illegal population of about 11,000,000 people. Half a million more illegal immigrants enter each year. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 left no doubts about the need to know who is who in the country, illegal or not, and to have a complete control on those who visit the country. So, something has to be done. James Sensebrenner (R-Wisconsin) authored a bill known as the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 and President Bush has spoken in favor of this bill, fence included, even if at the same time he sponsors a more sensible guest-worker visa program compatible with his all time friendship with the Hispanic American community. The fence, a rather sterile and expensive device when most of the illegal immigrants enter legally the country and then overstay, has create a heated debate in the Congress. Many Republicans and a majority of Democrats opposed the bill and the five initial fences of 698 miles out of the 2000 miles border between Mexico and the US and look for more efficient alternatives to the immigration issue. This represents also a big concern for the legal population of Hispanic Americans, who fears a big anti-Hispanic wave coming along with extreme immigration policies. We are in a pre-electoral year and not only the Hispanic vote is at stake. Which world policy the United States will adopt and which place Latin America will have within that policy is also a matter of serious debate in the frame of the war against terrorism and rogue states. The Latin American countries can join the rebels or become closer allies with the United States and, in regard to the immigration issue, they have noticed that there are no fences planned across the Canadian border nor any particular fishnet projected in the Pacific to prevent Asian immigration. The fence is a continental issue.

President Bush took office in January 2001 with a promise: that the Free Trade Area of the Americas (which would unite all the American countries in a common market bigger than the European Community), would be accomplished by 2005. That project, which was the priority for a President who understood at that time that the American power needed stronger continental roots to properly compete with the European Community, ended tragically – as a priority- on September 11th 2001. The US forgot its continental mission and went to Asia to secure the European gates. Since then, the image and power of the United States in Latin America has dramatically decreased and, while speeches talk in favor of the FTAA, other measures, like the projected 2000-mile fence, talk of another symbolical fence: the one that divides Americans from the US, from Americans of the rest of the American continent. Once again, it is necessary to remember that if Americans call themselves Americans because they were born in America, the country who took the name of the continent, Latin Americans also call themselves Americans, Americanos, because they were born in the same continent. The shared condition of Americans and the common property of the American continent pose the same type of questions Europeans raised at the time of their union. How to deal with boundaries, border, and common cultural assets is not easy, and that is exactly the problem the United States and the Latin American countries have to explore if they want to build a common market and a political unity. The FTAA –Free Trade Area for the Americas- was proposed as the beginning of the solution but resisted by the traditional enemies of the US. When people like Fidel Castro from Cuba and Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, organize big demonstrations against the United States all over the continent, including the riots in Argentina by the Summit of the Americas in November 2005 when President Bush was visiting, one wonders who the fence will serve, if the United States –who battles to spread freedom in the world- or its enemies –giving them the perfect pretense to regroup behind a fence that shouts the free world is not for them.

Why do Latin Americans want to work and live in the US? I am a Latin American and I can tell why. The differences between Latin America and the United States are not all related to wealth, but rather to the conditions that promote wealth: a strong democracy; solid and respected institutions; justice; respect for the law and the right of property; all conditions which precisely attract investment, which in turn creates jobs and better living conditions, like water supply, power, roads. Latin American countries lack of most of those things. That’s why Mexicans die crossing illegally the border, that’s why poor Colombians swallow packs of cocaine and illegally bring drugs to the US, that’s why drug lords dig tunnels across the border and that’s also why Americans get an illegal crowd that waits their tables, build their houses, take care of their children and mow the grass in their gardens, paying less than they would pay an US worker.

The problem of illegal immigration will only be solved by fair measures that recognize the US need of immigrants to sustain its economy. To legalize workers would create even wages for everybody and the jobs market would be completely clear, with no unfair treatment either for the immigrants or for the US American workers who suffer today a disloyal competition. If those who hire illegal workers were duly penalized, ending the hypocrisy of complaining about illegal immigration but at the same time encouraging the illegal hire, the immigration would be ruled by the natural laws of supply and demand. Justice could be the best fence because nobody would cross a border behind which there is no work.

The problem of illegal immigration goes beyond the Mexican border –with a fence or not. Most of the immigrants arrive with a tourist visa and then stay. They come not only from Mexico but from all the Latin American countries, more and more disorganized every day and with less and less hope. Thirty and more Cubas are on the horizon if things don’t change. Does the United States need that? Will a fence across the Mexican border stop the crowds of impoverished people living in terror of even more totalitarian regimes like the one growing right now in Venezuela? Is the fence the best defense a free country can build against those who don’t threaten its freedom but rather aspire to the same? Instead of the fence, a double answer is needed. First, to rule properly on the illegal hire so that illegal immigrants are not encouraged to an unfair competition with the US legal workforce, and second, and most important, the US should focus –through a political extension of the FTAA- in exporting to the Latin American countries, democracy techniques, institutional know-how and business organization wisdom. These countries which are feared by US workers and businessmen as competitors because of their lower prices, are in fact potential buyers –not only of sophisticated products- but of US services.

The infrared technology, cameras, drones, all the technology, the people to enforce the border, all the fence paraphernalia will cost anywhere from the $70 million already signed by President Bush to an estimate over $45,2 billion when the fence is completed. Wiser laws on work and wiser investment to spread freedom in Latin American countries would bring to the US not only more international friends and military allies but a lot of money, because America –not as a country but as a whole continent- has the potential to become the greatest common market in the world. Greater than Europe, of course, and even greater than China, and this is what will count in the second part of the 21st century. The Free Trade Area of the Americas is not only a commercial project; it’s the most important project the US has for its survival as the leader of the world. That’s why so many enemies of the US leadership are interested in poisoning its relationship with Latin America: nothing better for them than cutting the roots the US could grow below the border.

Reagan remembered, in that same wall speech at Berlin, the words of Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 -“Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” – and also the signs Berliners could see posted at that time - “The Marshall Plan is helping here to strengthen the free world.” In our days, Samuel Huntington is less generous: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.” If it’s true that immigrants accepted in the United States should respect the language and values of those who welcome them, it’s wrong to imagine that the Americano dream will stop. How to dissuade new immigrants from crowding at the border? Those who still remain in their countries might continue to dream in Spanish, but only as long as they have the freedom to dream. Since freedom has been a common cause for Americans and Americanos since the Independence, maybe the time has come to reverse the immigration. Pressure for pressure, Americans could now be those who cross the border bringing their knowledge and businesses to the Americano countries which desperately need it. A fence would only bother their friendly and joyful march south.