Waivers Make Good Neighbors?

The war against terrorism has landed in my neighborhood. Last week homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff issued two waivers to bypass federal environmental legislation to speed construction of the border fence. The waiver covers 470 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border (approximately 2,000 miles long) from California to Texas and a 22-mile stretch in Hidalgo County, Texas.

Fences make good neighbors, so the saying goes. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to construct fencing up to 18-feet high, through private and public lands, including wildlife refuges and other protected areas. Fence materials range from tall metal barriers to “impede” pedestrians (see photo at left, from my neighborhood), to stubby concrete posts designed to block cars, to the much-hyped “triple fence” –a mixture of three parallel barriers that give border agents extra seconds to nab crossers.

Why all the cement and barbed wire? “Border security” -that vague term that somehow collapses economic migration with terrorists. “Congress and the American public have been adamant that they want and expect border security,” insists Mr. Chertoff, “We’re serious about delivering it.”

Note Mr. Chertoff and allies (such as Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-San Diego) carefully avoid using the waiver and fence as a promise to curb illegal immigration. That’s because, as experience proves, the fence doesn’t stop migration. Recall President Clinton’s Operation Gatekeeper (fences are not just Republican initiatives), which intensified fencing in border twin cities, such as Tijuana-San Diego. The response? Undocumented migration simply shifted streams to dangerous Arizona deserts. Push and pull factors across the Americas are still stronger than steel.

So what work does the fence do? Some of us sleep better at night. For the rest of us, “border security” makes geopolitical and everyday trouble. People migrate in life-threatening environments. Coyotes and polleros, the human smugglers, charge higher prices. Habitats and wildlife are adversely affected. I cannot walk the 2 direct miles to my office at the Tijuana Estuary; instead, I drive 24 miles round-trip, wait 2 hours at the San Ysidro garita, and am often searched by an INS agent (I think they don’t like social researchers).

Protest art on the fence (Photo by Heather Z.)

But within and beyond the borderlands, it’s the waiver that works the hardest. With the passage of the REAL ID Act in 2005, Congress granted DHS the authority to waive federal legislation to pave the way for fence construction. DHS has since expanded the boundaries of this authority to trample a lot of local and federal regulation. Most recently, on April 3, Mr. Chertoff neatly stepped over 36 laws, among others, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The spatial and social reach of these effects should deeply alarm democracy-lovers. We (in particular our elected representatives) have created a Leviathan in the US: an agency with the power to trump public laws and legislation (and therefore other branches of government?), to sink millions into a project that, at best, allows fence-lovers to sleep soundly. Apart from ethical commitments I feel we are failing to meet, one of my greatest worries is the uneven political geography we are creating within our government.

Robert Frost questions his fence-loving neighbor in the poem Mending Wall:

Spring is mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out…

People, are we listening?

Hey man, where are the cows? (Photo by Heather Z.)