Going Home

EVERY YEAR, in the brutally inhospitable desert separating Mexico from the United States, approximately four hundred human bodies are found by good Samaritans and border patrol police. They are in various stages of decomposition, depending upon what killed them,, how long ago they died, and whether the vultures and coyotes have had time to pick their bones clean. Many of them are children, some, infants. usually they die of thirst, exhaustion, sun stroke, or diarrhea. All along the border there are sporadic fences, intended to force desperate impoverished people so far out into the desert that they can hardly hope to survive their attempt to find opportunity and escape poverty, violence, drug cartels. The great wall of Trump has not yet been built, and probably never will be. The Mexican government lacks the funds and the willingness to pay for it, and the American people lack the political will and requisite insanity to undertake it. Besides, the fence that is already there is quite sufficient for the purpose, particularly since the flow of illegal immigrants has virtually stopped. And what, after all, would a massive wall, thick and towering, achieve? Would the bodies begin to pile up on the Mexican side? Would the underground tunnels be dug ever deeper? In 1846 President Polk fabricated a war with Mexico as a pretext for the theft, in 1848, of half of Mexico. Many Mexicans today refer to this land, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, as "the occupied territories", appropriately. That many of Mexico's most desperate refugee have poured into their former territory is, in a sense, ironically appropriate. To build a multi billion dollar wall to glorify trump and American arrogance and greed would serve no purpose, since the immigrants have long since arrived, and are even now contributing their cheap labor and tax dollars to an American economy which desperately needs them. Since 2007 more people have crossed the border back into Mexico than have entered the United States, having been deported, or having given up their dreams of success in the United States and returned home. Ask the experts, unless you happen to be an expert, like most Americans seem to be these days. Then, you already know this. In the United States of Arrogance, experts are never hard to find.