The Bush Administration Announces the Completion of 500 Miles of the Berlin Wall

Here in its final month of executive power, the Bush administration just announced that 500 miles of the US border wall have been completed...and they expect to get another 100 more done before President-elect Obama is sworn into office.

Nice to know our democracy continues to be crushed even in the waning hours of this "lame duck" session.

As hate crimes are on the rise towards the Latino population, immigrants are being abused and even dying in the poor conditions of our immigrant detention system, and hundreds of people are being killed along the US border, our government celebrates spending BILLIONS of dollars on a wall which has desecrated the sacred sites of native peoples, violated numerous environmental and religious freedom laws, and on top of it all is not even effective in reaching its purported (though faulty) goal of stopping undocumented immigration.

Is this really the vision we have for our country?

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Appropriations and the Wall

The Democratic leadership just released the details of their continuing resolution (CR) which is a "stopgap" measure meant to keep the government and discretionary programs funded by the Appropriations Bill running until March 6th.

For the most part, a CR just keeps programs running at their current levels. But the leadership decided to make a couple of exceptions:

Another $1.053 BILLION (yes that is $1,053,000,000) to border fencing, i.e. the wall--both physical and virtual.

Another $516 million to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE as they are commonly known)

And another $60 million to Immigration and Citizenship Services

Total: $1,629,000,000 spent on immigration enforcement.

That's a lot of money. Imagine if that went into education. You could give full tuition scholarships to 38,000 students for a four year degree program. You could fund all of the public schools, including supporting charter schools, in the state of New York for a year providing for a 5% increase in teacher pay and still have $100 million left in discretionary funds.

But instead we want a wall?

A different look at the US wall

While looking through the AFSC's (American Friends Service Committee) website on immigration, I came across a video produced by PBS on the border fence which provides an alternative perspective on the wall emphasizing property rights rather than immigrants' rights. Given that I posted about the wall yesterday, I thought I would offer a quick summary here.

To see the complete video, click here.

What PBS points out in this video is that the US border fence does not actually follow the exact border between the US and Mexico. At times, the fence comes as far as two miles inward into US territory.

The result of this is that many farmers are cut off from sections of their land and crops. Even more drastic, many people's houses are actually caught in this "no man's land" between the fence and the actual US-Mexican border.

Apparently, neither Congress nor the contractors have thought about how these people will get through the wall to go to the grocery store, the doctor, or to visit friends on the "US side." When a local whose house did fall on the "Mexican side" of the fence asked Homeland Security what she would do, she was told that they guessed she would have to "follow the Border patrol." As she described it to the reporter, she was being "locked out of the US."

As the PBS documentary points out, people in these border towns are not traditional supporters of immigration reform. However, the border fence has become a matter of property rights. What right does the US government have to separate people from their land, houses, and families?

Moreover, the legislation which authorized the construction of the wall also gave the contractors more leeway than any construction project in history. An amendment was tagged to the bill waiving any federal laws which impeded construction of the wall. So far, over 36 federal laws have been broken, including the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Farmland Protection Policy Act.

Who still thinks this is a good idea?

The Bush administration asks Congress for $400 million more to build the Berlin Wall

...I mean Jericho. No, wait...the US wall.

This is the most recent attempt by the Bush administration to "salvage" their plan for a 670 mile border fence between the United States and Mexico (as a point of reference, the Berlin Wall stretched a little under 100 miles long). Congress had designated authorization and funding for the fence through both the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (a bill which was meant to provide the resources to "combat terrorism" and "other measures") and the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

The fence is intended to stretch nearly 700 miles, combining "virtual" fencing with a physical wall. The virtual fence is a complex system of mobile towers, satellite systems, cameras and control vehicles which are linked with "real-time" technology that border agents can constantly monitor. The physical wall is exactly what you think it is, a 15-foot three-layer thick,"unclimbable" wall.

The first section of the fence was supposed to be completed at the end of this year. But according to the latest news, this section won't be completed until 2011. The originally estimated (rather small..?!?!) figure of 4.5 million dollars per mile of wall has now gone up to $7.5 million. If you do the math, the $400 million more requested by the Bush administration won't even be enough to keep the project going, let alone finish it.

It's a shame--really--that such 'tactical infrastructure' may come to a halt and another $400 million wasted on a destructive project rather than spent on something a bit more useful...like food banks or hurricane relief.

Did I mention the environmental consequences of the wall? And that the most likely cause for displacement and refugee resettlement in the near future may be from natural causes like climate change, soil erosion, run-off...?

But I guess that's a subject for another post.

I'm alex, by the way, the new program assistant on civil liberties, human rights, and immigration. This is my first post on "Of Peace and Politics." Apart from keeping you informed on the usual comings and goings of intern life on the Hill, my hope is to use this blog to reinvigorate our current network, as well as reach out to others, on issues like comprehensive immigration reform, habeas corpus, and the ban of torture.