Señorita Ruth on: A fence is not a fence is not a fence

Immi­gra­tions and Emo­tion
At a Q & A with the Mon­ti­cello, MN Cham­ber of Com­merce, Con­gress­woman Michele Bach­man (R-MN) pointed out that Amer­ica is being lost to immi­grants, and that a fence at the bor­der between Mex­ico and the U.S. from Ari­zona to Texas is a well-thought-out answer to the seem­ing prob­lem. Fol­low­ing is the excerpt from the Mon­ti­cello Times:

She touched on var­i­ous top­ics, includ­ing the Iraq war, immi­gra­tion con­trol, health­care and energy con­ser­va­tion.

She was par­tic­u­larly emo­tional about immi­gra­tion, a sub­ject that she made head­lines with back in Feb­ru­ary when she was very crit­i­cal of the sys­tem that allowed the woman charged with crash­ing into a bus in Cot­ton­wood, Minn., to con­tinue dri­ving.

“We’re los­ing our coun­try,” she said. “Peo­ple are not assim­i­lat­ing them­selves to Amer­ica. They’re not speak­ing Eng­lish, and you must speak it if you want to suc­ceed here in this coun­try.”

A Mon­ti­cello busi­ness­man asked about a fence along the south­ern bor­der of Texas and Ari­zona.

“The money is there. Why haven’t we seen any­thing?” he asked.

“Exactly. The money is there. It’s our (Con­gress’) fault. We aren’t doing our job here,” Bach­mann replied. “And the argu­ment that fences don’t work doesn’t hold water. Look at Israel and Pales­tine Fences work. Maybe peo­ple have too much inter­est or ben­e­fit from open borders.” 

Where to begin! I’d like to address first the fla­grant mis­un­der­stand­ing she seems to have regard­ing the “suc­cess” of fences in Israel and Pales­tine. Obvi­ously a con­gressper­son that hasn’t trav­eled to the region, or one who keeps up with inter­na­tional news, because if she did, she’d know that suc­cess is elu­sive in the con­flict between Israel and Pales­tine, and that the fence she so right­eously cham­pi­ons is one put in place as a deter­rent from a pop­u­la­tion with whom Israel is in fre­quent con­flict, and whose goal is the eth­nic cleans­ing of Israelis in cer­tain areas they inhabit within that fence. In other words, the fence is part of a com­pre­hen­sive defense sys­tem against ene­mies with whom they’re at war. At least one Min­nesotan agrees.

To equate the neces­sity of the Israeli-Palestinian fence with one along the south­ern bor­der of the U.S. is noth­ing short of ludi­crous and incon­gru­ous. It min­i­mizes the strug­gle between Israel and Pales­tine, equat­ing it to the overblown immi­gra­tion media cir­cus in this coun­try, and it fur­ther scan­dal­izes an issue that gets lit­tle ratio­nal thought and much ide­o­log­i­cal abuse. This irra­tional urgency in fin­ish­ing the fence between the U.S. and Mex­ico has lead to the head of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, Michael Chertoff, waiv­ing (via con­gress approved waivers) more than 30 laws in place to pro­tect prop­erty, envi­ron­ment, and peo­ple.

An imme­di­ate trig­ger of sus­pi­cion for me is the report that the con­gress­woman got “par­tic­u­larly emo­tional” regard­ing immi­gra­tion poli­cies. This is indica­tive of an opin­ion not based on fact or fig­ures, but on a “gut feel­ing,” or a set of ideas cob­bled together through hearsay or mis­un­der­stand­ing about the topic at hand. To be led, as a politi­cian, by one’s emo­tions regard­ing any pol­icy will inevitably cause one to pro­ceed with blind­ers on, to cham­pion things other than log­i­cal courses of action or clear-headed notions of the facts, thus moti­vat­ing leg­is­la­tion that does not have a clear prac­ti­cal goal, but rather serves to stand as an ide­o­log­i­cal state­ment of such emo­tions. She appeals to those present by using words like “los­ing our coun­try,” which is a base­less state­ment meant to rile the emo­tions. Again, a clear indi­ca­tion of a lack of knowl­edge regard­ing the issue, and fur­ther­more an encour­age­ment to oth­ers adopt sim­i­lar myopic views.

Con­gress­woman Bach­man would be well-recommended to visit the areas about which she speaks with such igno­rant com­mand. By stand­ing next to and appre­ci­at­ing the full mean­ing of the wall between Israel and Pales­tine, I would hope she might come to appre­ci­ate its true pur­pose and rea­son for exis­tence. By vis­it­ing the Amer­i­can South­west and star­ing out across the vast miles of desert the bor­der tra­verses, she might come to under­stand that what doesn’t hold water is her uni­lat­eral, une­d­u­cated view of what a fence will and won’t do.

A fur­ther dis­cus­sion of immi­grant assim­i­la­tion, begin­ning with a crit­i­cal view of Eng­lish Only poli­cies and the demys­ti­fi­ca­tion of bilin­gual­ism will fol­low in the days and weeks ahead. Stay tuned!