A ringing in the ears greets the news that the United States has big plans for a permanent solid wall along its border with Mexico. The ringing is caused not by psychic trauma, but the banging of the head against a lesser wall, a handy brick one, in disbelief at the stupidity of this idea, writes Angela Long
The 3,140-kilometre border is famously porous, and an estimated 1 million people have been slipping through each year, despite the best efforts of hard-necked border patrols, for decades. The issue of "wetbacks", as it is politically incorrect to call the Mexican illegals, has been the main thrust of the controversy over recently shelved US legislation to give many economic refugees full status. In Ireland the obsession has been with the tens of thousands of Irish emigrants who are affected, but a much larger chunk of the 11 million people in this limbo are Hispanic.
The wall has been, in this part of the world, a largely ignored section of the immigration reform bill that included regularising the status of many illegals. But it is still very much on the minds of its proponents, and would require little encouragement to rise in another form.
There are already patches of wall along the border, running to some 100km in total. Some are makeshift fences, some more serious affairs of military steel, several metres high. These barriers are ludicrously basic in some sections - they wouldn't keep out a Jack Russell. Nature provides much more of a deterrent in a number of border areas, such as the Sonora Desert and mountainous stretches of Arizona.
After the bill was parked in the Senate earlier this month, it was business as usual. The Irish keep doing their white-collar jobs, in hairdressing, taxi-driving, and other service jobs where they blend in easily. The Mexicans are usually working further down the social scale - in factories, restaurants, gardens, construction sites. These are jobs, as it is often pointed out, that need doing, and many Americans aren't keen to do them. Last Monday's mass protests across the US were intended to show, in part, the importance of such work to daily life.
But the Mexicans are a running sore with Washington, and despite George W. Bush's protestations of desire for great friendship with President Vicente Fox - recipient of his first visit abroad after his inauguration, and recently again the lucky target of Dubya's down-home charm - there has been little done to improve the wetback situation. And now, the wall plan.
Mind you, it's not just Mexicans who are angry at the Great Wall proposal. Eleven Latin American leaders, from Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic, as well as Mexico, met in Guatemala last month to launch a concerted campaign against the building of another 1,000 kilometres of "real" wall. All these countries have citizens living illegally in the US.
What is this thing with walls? The Americans seem to be looking admiringly at their friends in Israel, and the Kafkaesque wall which has been built, often illegally, to divide Palestinians from their land, though ostensibly to protect settlers from murderous attacks. Yet for Washington such a proposal surely smacks of desperation; such a crude approach which is unlikely to succeed where the bullets of the border guards have failed. And its cost - estimated in the Christian Science Monitor at $2 billion - could be better spent on investment in Mexican enterprises in border locations which could pay better wages and encourage people to stay at home.
This 21st-century mania for wall-building is proof, yet again, that those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. What better inheritors of the Bourbons' pride and stupidity are the neo-cons, the tired old warhorses who have never fought a battle and never seen two sides of a question. In some sort of twist on the old saw that good fences make good neighbours, two of the most militarily powerful states in the world are resorting to a strategy that the Chinese started around 200BC.
Memories are short: the celebrated dismantling of the Berlin Wall began less than 20 years ago. And did that wall accomplish, except to take the lives of 263 people, impoverish half of Germany to the extent that reunification was a crippling cost to the whole, and leave scars that are still apparent in the prolonged economic slump of a former European powerhouse? In
our own country the Belfast "Peace Wall" stands as an unattractive monument to fear, and attempts to heal by division. "No country that is proud of itself should build walls," Vicente Fox told George W. Bush a year ago, when the wall plan was on the drawing board.
It would be instructive for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and co to look at the fate of the Chinese dynasty, the Qin, which began the building of the Great Wall to repel invaders.
The Qin lasted barely 15 years.