As we tend to observe from time to time, it looks like there is an eminent domain angle to just about everything. This time, this post has been inspired by our coming across an old story about U.S. land condemnations along the Mexican border for the purpose of erecting a border fence to keep Mexicans (and other Central Americans) from migrating illegally to the United States. Alas, as you read on, you will see that the process of acquisition of land for that fence, and its functioning upon completion, are not what you might call an exemplary government effort.
Apart from the usual illegal immigration problems, this time, what has caught everybody’s attention, is the sudden migratory invasion from Central America that has taken the form of thousands of young kids, many of them making the perilous journey alone, braving the privations and hazards of the journey across hostile foreign lands. In this case the “foreign land” is Mexico. Mexico doesn’t cotton to the idea of foreigners, young and old alike, crossing its southern border en masse, and using Mexico as a transit way to get to the U.S. border, and thence north to fabled Gringoland where life is good, and Americans take care of you if you are a kid. Compared to the poverty-stricken, violent, failing states that are ruled by narcotics gangs, what’s not to like?
Nominally, we in the U.S. purport not to cotton to this state of affairs either, but actually we tolerate it and de facto encourage it, particularly in the case of those child migrants who are well taken care of, housed and fed and placed in foster homes upon being apprehended on the U.S. side of the border. That beats the hell out of starving in Central America.
Unsurprisingly, we say we want to exclude this flood of illegal migrants by maintaining a fence across the Mexican border, but that effort isn’t doing much good, as evidenced by the steady flow of illegal immigrants and those hordes of Central American kids just walking across the border on their way to the promised land. So that fence, as the saying goes, is a job that may be good enough for government work, but by other standards leaves much to be desired.
So what does eminent domain have to do with all that, you ask. Good question. As it happens land for that fence was acquired by Uncle Sam using the power of eminent domain, causing not only the usual problems but also some pretty fancy ones. Like locating the fence so that in places it has left American territory on the Mexican side, much to the annoyance of Americans living there on American soil. (see Richard Marosi, L.A. Times, Fencing Off Forbidding Land, February 15, 2010, at p. AA1). For the Huffington Post’s take on the problems with these federal land acquisitions (such as undercompensation), click on http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/landowners-seized-border-properties_n_1966636.html
In short, our fence has not been much of a success in spite of its $57.7 million price tag. Among other reasons, in the Otay Mountain area the terrain is dangerous and forbidding enough without a fence, so none has been built there, leaving that area as an entry point – albeit a dangerous one. Besides, to repeat ourselves, that fence can’t be much of a barrier since, as noted, Central American kids, are simply walking across our southern border by the tens of thousands, responding to rumors down there, that if you are a kid and you make it across the border, you’re home free – the gringos will take care of you. And so they do, inspiring a veritable flood of youngsters from all over Central America to brave the hazards of the journey and head north.
As it happens, those kids turn out to be right. Soft-hearted gringos have been overwhelmed by this migratory invasion and don’t really know what to do about it, except to yield to their feelings of compassion and take care of the child-migrants, which as far as the latter are concerned was the whole object of the game.
So the AK-47-toting Mexican coyotes and the pollos (their illegal immigrant charges) cross our southern border in droves, even though many of them suffer and die in in the harsh desert environment in the process. But our response to these tragedies is pretty much to shrug them off, and to enjoy the benefits of cheap, if illegal, Mexican labor. You sure don’t see the kind of lamentations that are routine – for example — in the case of the Israeli “wall of separation” (which is mostly a fence that keeps out terrorists). Here, in contrast with that Israeli fence, there are no lachrymose op-eds, no threats of boycotting anybody, no denunciatory UN resolutions — no nothin’. Most important, no terrorist attacks targeting the imperialist gringo“settlers” occupying Mexican land on the north bank of the Rio Grande. It’s an interesting case of judgmental asymmetry, making it clear that morally, something isn’t kosher here. So we decided to take a look at how such border fences are treated elsewhere.
The bottom line of such a comparison is that one border fence, and only one, receives virtually daily denunciations, compleat with indignant calls for boycott, and denunciatory U.N. resolutions. Can you guess which one? Of course you can. It’s Israel’s fence that separates it from hostile Arab territories that are home to suicidal terrorists trying to sneak across the border to kill people with bombs strapped to their bodies. In contrast, our fence over here gets a free pass, and – surprise, surprise – so does a similar fence, serving a similar function in North Africa, surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta. It bars the way of Moroccan and sub-Saharan folks trying to make it north into Europe via the Spanish-occupied African territory. But you didn’t know that, did you? Our admittedly inexpert Internet search has disclosed almost no American news stories covering that, save the New York Times, and we got the word from British sources. See for yourselves. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/10859959/Spanish-border-stormed-by-400-migrants-from-Morocco.html
Here is a picture of that Israeli “wall” which is mostly a border fence like this. Check it out.
And here is a photo of that Spanish fence around Melilla, being stormed by Africans trying to get into Spanish territory.
Sub-Saharan migrants scale a metallic fence that divides Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla Photo: Santi Palacios/AP
So what’s going on here? Why is the Israelis’ border fence (called a “wall of separation,” though most of it is a fence) bad, as opposed to that Spanish fence which gets a free pass?
More important to us, why is the Israeli’s fence bad but ours good? And please don’t try to give us the conventional wisdom propaganda about how the wicked Israelis are using that “wall” to occupy Arab land. The Israelis acquired the land in question – historically known as Judea and Samaria — in the process of defending themselves against a genocidal Arab attack in the 1967 six-day war. They captured it, along with the Jordanian-occupied part of Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley, when the Arabs massed their armies on Israeli borders, blockaded the Israeli port of Eilat – a casus belli in itself if you want to get technical about it – and announced their intention to annihilate the Israelis by “driving them into the sea,” as they were fond of putting it. Instead, the would-be conquering Arab armies – all four or five of them — suffered a humiliating defeat, while the Israeli army wound up recapturing territory that the Arabs had captured after invading it in the 1948 Israeli war of independence.
So we are hardly in a position to cast stones because, apart from all that, we have been occupying Mexican land conquered in the Mexican-American war that we started without just cause, simply as an act of gringo imperialism. You can conveniently check out the historical facts on Wikipedia, under Mexican-American War. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, we Southern Californians live in gringo settlements on the conquered and occupied north bank of the Rio Grande. So why is our aggressive conquest of Mexican territory to which we had no legitimate claim good, but the Israelis’ defensive conquest of their ancestral land of Judea and Samaria (now known as the West Bank of the Jordan River), bad?
These days, what the Israelis are about in building and maintaining that “wall” separating Israel from the “West Bank” is to keep Arab terrorists from sneaking into Israel – an activity that the Israeli fence has interdicted admirably. Arabs who have legitimate business in Israel or in the Israeli held territories are free to cross it peaceably, even if that may require waiting in a long line at a border checkpoint, not all that different from the case of folks who wish to cross the U.S.–Mexican border. If the L.A. Times is to be believed, four-hour waits are not uncommon in both instances. More important is the parties’ motivation; unlike the Israelis, we have built that Mexican border wall not to exclude suicidal Mexican terrorists (who for some reason are not much in evidence around San Diego), but to keep poor Mexicans from sneaking into the U.S. in search of work, in an effort to put food on their children’s tables. So who are we to kvetch at another country that has to worry about keeping out border-crossing suicide bombers?
In case all this talk of border fences has stimulated your interest in international border walls, you can check out that subject on Wikipedia which informs us that there are over a half-dozen border separation walls or fences currently in use all over the world, notably in places like Morocco (of which more presently), the Iran-Pakistan border, Cyprus, the Saudi-Yemen border, the Malaysia-Thailand border, the Kuwait-Iraq border, and the China-Korea border. So why no fuss about any of those? Why complain only about the Israeli, clearly defensive fence?
Even Pope Francis has gotten into the act. During his recent visit to Israel he made a point of displaying his concern over the plight of Arabs who are concededly inconvenienced by that fence over there, though for non-terrorist Arabs crossing it is not all that different or time-consuming than what is required to cross our southern border. I find that puzzling. Would the Pope feel better if there were no fence, and Arab terrorists could easily walk into Israel over and kill unarmed Israeli civilians with suicide bombs? I don’t think so; he seems like a nice fellow who would abhor such a state of affairs. Still, his display of concern over that Israeli “wall of separation,” but no other, does make one wonder what’s going on here.
What is more interesting, is that you almost never hear much about yet another border fence — the one erected by Spain in North Africa. It separates Spanish-occupied territories of Melilla and Ceuta from Morocco whose inhabitants, along with hordes of desperate migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, do their best to get across it in order to gain a foothold in that European enclave, so they can get from there into Europe and get a leg up in the struggle to improve their wretched lives. Sort of like the poor Central Americans who struggle to cross our southern border in order to improve their lives in our first-world economy. And if you doubt me, and want to see things for yourself, check out photos of poor Africans storming that Spanish-built Melilla fence in order to make it into Spanish-held territory, and thence into Europe where they can get a crack at a better life.
If you want to see the N.Y. Times’ take on this problem, click on http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/world/europe/africans-battered-and-broke-surge-to-europes-door.html. It reports inter alia that the Spaniards are not content to let their fence do the excluding. They help things along by firing rubber bullets at the would-be African border crossers, killing a number of them in the process.
But wait a minute! What in the world are Spaniards doing occupying and ruling parts of North Africa? And why aren’t they being denounced for their colonialist “occupation” by the U.N., the peace-loving churches and NGOs, and all those other enlightened folk who never tire of bashing Israel for protecting itself in the same way, even though the latter’s claim to their ancestral territory in the Holy Land is considerably stronger than Spain’s claim to Africa. Why revile the Israelis as “occupiers” while giving the Spaniards a free pass? “Is a puzzlement,” as the King of Siam used to say to Anna. Or is it?
So being the sort who tends to be concerned about similarly situated folks being treated alike, I wonder why no concern has been expressed over that Spanish “wall” and its exclusionary effect on poor Africans who are trying to get a piece of a better life for themselves and their kids. Of course, an effort to get the Spaniards to tear their fence down would be a hard sell because the Spaniards are no dummies, and they remember the mass slaughter of their people effected by North African terrorists’ attacks on the Madrid subway only a few years ago. So if the Spaniards want to keep their fence good and tight, who can blame them? But then again, why blame the Israelis for doing exactly the same thing for the same and, if anything, stronger reason?
Bottom line: If you perceive a – shall we say? — asymmetry in the intensive press coverage of the “wall” that protects Israel, as opposed to the bare mention of the Spanish fence separating Morocco from Melilla, and the lack of similar concern over the American fence on our southern border, that’s a subject worth pondering. A truthful insight into the respective motivations in these instances of border fence-building would be nice. But your faithful servant is a realist who is ever mindful of the fact that all too often answers to moral questions that arise in the context of international realpolitik depend, not on any principled policy decisions, but only on the ever-shifting answers to the question of whose ox is being gored. So we are not holding our breath waiting for an international display of even-handedness where that Israeli “wall” is involved. And what we find really disturbing is why the American media are ever ready to offer excuses for the Middle Eastern terrorists, that amount to a handing out a moral free pass in such matters, in spite of their demonstrable, avowed, and often lethal hostility to America and Americans.
Follow-up: We learn from today’s L. A. Times (Texas Warns of a Border “Trail of Tears,” June 24, 2014, at p. A5), that so far this fiscal year some 52,000 “unaccompanied youths” have been caught along the border, almost double last year’s total. Brooks County, Texas, has recovered 87 bodies last year, and 129 bodies the year before. Thirty-eight bodies so far this year. And if you are into the fiscal side of this calamity, Senator Dianne Feinstein informs us in an L.A. Times op-ed of the same date, that the Senate Appropriations Committee has just approved $.94 billion (with a “b”), for something called “Unaccompanied Alien Children program”, which the Senator characterizes as a “good start.” She expects that sum to be matched by the House of Representatives. Dianne Feinstein, Desperate Children at the Border, L.A. Times, June 24, 2014, at p. A11.
Second follow-up. We learn from today’s N.Y. Times that our border fence has been so placed that it is impossible to enter or leave the town of Arivaca, Arizona, without having to cross a U.S. border checkpoint, a state of affairs that has angered the affected American town population. See Jess Bidgood and John Schwartz, Border Patrol Scrutiny Stirs Anger in Arizona Town, N.Y. Times, June28, 2014, at p. A13.
Follow up. We just discovered, from a New York Times Story no less, that for years there has also been a “wall of separation” isolating a — ta da! — New Haven, Connecticut, from a nearby public housing project. No, we are not making it up. It is now being torn down. To get the story, pictures and all, click on http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/nyregion/in-connecticut-breaking-barrier-between-a-suburb-and-public-housing.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSum&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0