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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Border wall: Once-busy spot now quiet |
| 2016-05-09 |
| [SANDIEGOUNIONTRIBUNE] Jose Arias Martinez is 83 and has lived in Tijuana’s Colonia Libertad neighborhood for 40 years. He remembers when a patch of American soil a few hundred yards from his house was the busiest and most famous spot on the U.S.-Mexico border for illegal crossings. The good old days... Every day, hundreds of migrants who were heading north for work gathered at dusk and waited for darkness before moving through the brush and up the canyons, into San Diego and points beyond. So many people used it as a staging ground that a marketplace emerged: Vendors in tarp-covered stalls sold food, clothes, shoes — even shots of tequila, said to be good for courage because the journey was risky. Bandits were in the nearby hills. Border Patrol agents were on the canyon rims. I've seen a few shots of tequila make people stupid. I supposed that's sometimes been mistaken for brave. Nobody waits at the dirt field any more. Ask Arias why and he nods at the rust-colored 10-foot-tall metal wall that sits a few paces from his front door. “It ended,” he said, “when they built the fence.” Nope, nope. That'd never work... At first glance, what happened here may seem to some like it belongs in a Donald Trump campaign speech about the need for a border wall. Sure does combine cause and effect. Hordes of people breaking the law, swarming into America under cover of night, overrunning the Border Patrol. Then a fence goes up, and it stops. Imagine that for about fifteen hundred miles. But the border is not a soundbite, and the complete story is far more complicated. The wall has had dire consequences elsewhere. Ahah. The law of Cause and Side Effects. It’s pushed migrants east, into the treacherous desert and mountains. By some estimates, more than 5,000 people have died trying to cross there, a doubling of the fatality rate. So extending the wall would stop them from killing themselves in the desert? It’s separated families who might have stayed together across a more porous border, They don't check your ID on the U.S. side going into Messico, so what's stopping the happy reunification of such families? turned what some characterized as a temporary, circulating labor supply in the U.S. into a more fixed population of underground residents. Those bridges between the two countries remain, with no ID check. And it’s used tax dollars that might have gone to other things — health care, transportation, schools. Who paid for the wall? If it was the feds, it was well within their range of responsibility. If the wall was built by state or local government, then the argument's valid, though there's a counterargument that cutting the flow of illegal immigrants saves having to spend more money for health care, transportation or schools. So whether you think what happened in this one small slice of the border is beneficial probably depends a lot on how you digest the complex, swirling, super-hot stew that is American immigration policy and practice. First you gotta get past the scorching, superheated prose... This is a place that has always meant different things to different people. You might say walls mean different things, depending on which side of them you're on. They're supposed to. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #2 Actually, you have to have your passport in hand to go to Messico and return, nowadays |
| Posted by: Frank G 2016-05-09 15:10 |
| #1 The author of this article epitomizes why Trump got traction. The elites have closed their mind to anything other than their point of view and are determined to spin and control the news in their favor. Some are useful tools like this author, others want the cheap disposable labor. Both have poisoned the US government to whre people are so angry they are willing to vote for a dunderhead who spouts off about this issue despite severe inadequacies of character and intelligence on many other things. You brought this on yourselves libtards. When Trump loses, and you try to cram down this crap even more, these people are going to blow up like a volcano. You want a revolution, this is the way to go about it. Problem is, you libtards not the ones with the guns nor the balls to act. These angry people are. That should frighten you into truthfulness and facing facts, but I doubt it. Good luck following King George III into history. |
| Posted by: Clolutch the Weasel9446 2016-05-09 01:48 |