Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

30 MAY 2014 (original Patch post date)

It’s fitting that documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy, daughter of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, would do a film about immigration. Her Uncle Teddy left the United States quite a legacy on immigration.

Thanks to Teddy, we got the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, legislation that put us on the path of unchecked mass immigration on a scale never seen before and helped create the lawlessness of our immigration system in which we now flounder, challenging the idea of what a nation is.

Kennedy’s film, “The Fence,” or “La Barda,” takes the POV that the $3 billion spent on the fence at the U.S.-Mexican border, by way of 12 designs, 19 construction companies, 350 engineers, 7,000 construction workers and 120,000 tons of metal created unforeseen consequences, was un-American, ineffective and an environmental disaster. Building the fence was meant to “contain illegal immigration, crack down on drug trafficking and protect America from terrorists,” Kennedy explains, with none of that accomplished. Not only is the fence a failure, Kennedy concludes, noting funding for it was frozen as of March 2010, but taxpayers will continue to be on the hook for fence maintenance and lots of money for years to come.

I just watched the documentary for the first time (it was released in 2010). With International Biological Diversity Day recently passed and World Environment Day around the corner (events I’ve been reading or writing about), the environmental impacts of the fence particularly resonated as I viewed the film.

Pull up a map of North America and the seeming arbitrariness of manmade borders is striking. But we know they exist for a multitude of good reasons. That said, when looking at the idea of building hundreds of miles of fencing as a way to enforce a manmade border, from an environmental perspective, the words “sheer folly” come to mind.

Circumventing environmental laws to build fencing is bad just at face value. According to Kennedy’s film, 36 federal and environmental laws were waived to build the fence. One result was massive flooding in Nogales, according to the film. Further, the barriers impact habitat and crossings for mountain lions, javelina, bears, bobcats, ocelot, roadrunner, deer and the Sonoran pronghorn, among others. Fencing cuts through part of the Rio Grande Wildlife Refuge and other areas of sensitive habitat.

Perhaps there’s some irony here. Because man can’t live sustainably and peaceably, and has grown his numbers so large and to the detriment of both himself and other living things, man can’t move completely unfettered in the world (throw in all the economic and geo-political reasons too). The more fettered man becomes, the more important it is that wild things – for them to survive – can be unfettered. Good fences may make good neighbors among humans – not so much in the animal world.

That the United States reached the point of this absurdist building exercise speaks to our inability to govern effectively and enforce existing laws. On a very basic moral level, it speaks to our collective inability to understand right and wrong. Years of lax border enforcement and an immigration system lacking integrity, as Mike Cutler says, have fed the belief – and now under Obama, the reality – that if you can get yourself into the United States, the likelihood that you’ll be deported is small (the utter disregard for American laws by illegal crossers comes through clearly in the film). Short of driving through the streets of other countries with a megaphone shouting that the U.S. is open to all comers and dropping leaflets with that message out of planes, we can’t have been any clearer to the world about what our “real” immigration policy is.

We could have done things differently. Putting sufficient border agents on the U.S.-Mexican border – actual boots on the ground – would have been a start. With U.S. military deployed to 150 countries around the world and military spending at approximately $150 billion a year more than the post-WWII average (inflation-adjusted dollars), there’s room to shift resources for real, effective, efficient and flexible border enforcement.

We also could have changed our communications strategy to communicate to the world that we have zero tolerance for illegal immigration – the deterrence effect. As well, we could have been doing a better job at encouraging family planning efforts worldwide and supporting programs and policies in countries to strengthen their economies.

All combined, these efforts would have delivered a better return on investment and certainly been less damaging to our biodiversity. It’s not too late to take that road.