Decorating the Rio Grande

ALL IN ALL, it makes for a pretty display, rather like Christmas decorations. A line of big orange plastic floating balls bobbing gracefully atop the gentle currents, truncating, bifurcating the nation's border river, which really isn't much of a river, as far as rivers go. Any decent swimmer or even wader can easily cross it in most places, with or without middle of the river barricades. A salient fact remains, and can never be denied, even by climate, and immigration deniers: against determined huamn immigration, no wall or floating display of neatly arranged beach balls can hold firm. Sufficiently desperate people, hungry, without hope, believing that hope lies elsewhere nearby, as close as the crossing of a river, are going to get to where they want to go, notwithstanding all obstacles thereto. Just as General Patton correctly told us that "fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man", walls, floating or anchored on land, are but inconveniences which at best will only serve to slow folks down in circumventing them, with maybe a few scratches, bruises, and wet or torn clothing. There will of course be a few drownings along the way, death at the hands of stupid, short sighted, vicious people, the erectors of barriers. Here the reference is to the governing Republican party of the former Mexican province of Texas, determined to keep out the descendants of the original owners of what Davy Crockett described as "the garden spot of the world". Crockettt and a few of his friends came to Texas in 1845 for the same reason Latin American immigrants go there now; for opportunity, a chance at a new and better life, which they often fail to find in the land of milk, honey, and opportunity, choosing often to return to their country of origin, where conditions are actually better than in the third world mire of American bigotry and concentrated wealth. Crockett's timing could not have been worse, but, that's another matter for another day. The Mexicans at first, in the eighteen twenties and thirties, invited and welcomed Yankee gringos to populate and economicaly develop their sparsely inhabited northern provinces, dreaming of a treasure in taxes flowing into the coffers in Mexico City. Anglos, confidently ensconced with their stolen land firmly under their caucasian control, had a similar idea about immigration of brown skinned pbople from the south; they make good, cheap labor for corporate exploitation. But like Santa Anna decided in about eighteen thirty, enough is enough, and too many is too much. Among conservatives, the most horrifying idea imaginable is the turning of their fair state to a darker shade of brown. Donald Trump, spokesperson for and cult leader of America's white conservative Christian minority, expressed a definite preference for immigrants from fair skinned places like, say, Norway, to those from what he termed "shit hole countries" of Africa, with their hordes of the much more darkly pigmented. His disciples fervantly agree. We stole this land fair and square in 1846; what's ours is white; if you're not from Norway, stay home. The fly in the ointment is that the federal government and only the federal government is responsible for national border defense, immigration, and security. Federal law may not be usurped by the states, as the civil Wra forcefully and forever enshrined and reinforced. So, here come the Feds, in the form of the United States Department of Justice, brief cases in hand, ready to seek and obtain justice in the form of federal jusridiction where federal jurisdiction is due. Who do you suppose will win the forthcoming battle in federal court? The only question is: will Texas, after its inevitable legal defeat, choose to secede yet again? Predicting the future behavior of far right wing extreists is rather like predicting the future position of an electron using quantum mechanics, but another divorce between the U.S. and Texas is more than mere remote possibility, considering the whimsical nature of its current government. Five'll get you ten that if it does - and good riddance if it does - that it'll fall flat on its arrogant ass economically and come crawling, begging back into the union, just like it did once before.