VIEWPOINT

We are told that there are about 12-million undocumented Latin Americans in the United States. So what do we propose to do about them?

Our Congressman, Steve King, believes that the solution is to send all of them back “South of the Border” and to build a high fence along that entire border to keep them from coming back.

Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, has said, “Show me a 50-foot wall and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder”.

Friends who winter near Douglas, AZ report there is presently a 12-foot high, solid steel fence through that area. It is topped by sharp points, bent toward the Mexican side. The US army has dug a deep trench right next the fence so that any kid who makes it over it will slide right down into the 15 foot deep pit and be unable to get out by him/her self.

In addition, it is heavily patrolled. Those desperate Mexicans still get into the United States somehow! Since enforcement policies were implemented in the 1990s, over 3,000 migrants have died crossing the border or walking through the desert beyond.

Peter Phillips is a professor of sociology at Sonoma State University. He says that the US government has contracted with Lockheed-Martin to design and develop enormous unmanned airships, seventeen times the size of the Goodyear blimp, outfitted with high-resolution cameras to spy on the Mexican border. The airships are designed to float 12 miles above the earth, far above planes and weather systems. The cameras will watch over a circle of countryside 600 miles in diameter and could be moved to spy on any region of the United States.

Danielle Short of the American Friends Service Committee in Colorado believes that such border-militarization is a form of warfare. She says that, “Over the past 20 years, the federal government has invested billions of dollars in a futile attempt to prevent undocumented immigration by fortifying the US-Mexico border. Migrants have voluntarily accepted the kinds of conditions African slaves were subjected to in the trans-Atlantic slave trade – cramming themselves into packing containers and ships. How can we accept a system where this is the only option people see?” She believes that borders and laws should serve human beings rather than vice versa. Our laws are broken and need to be fixed.

Short also reminds us that “Immigrants are clearly *not *responsible for decisions about out-sourcing or increased automation of work. By scapegoating immigrants, we deny ourselves the opportunity to find real solutions to our nation’s economic problems which are based in the dramatic increase in concentration of wealth and power in our society.

Immigration is not a *cause *of injustice, but a symptom.”

Unfortunately, there really are no easy or simple solutions to this enormous problem. Workers are needed in our fields at harvest time and in our meat packing plants year round. Present laws restrict legal ways to enter our country to a very small number. Latin families like to stay together just as our US families do. The North American Free Trade Act has devastated Mexican farmers who no longer can make a living on their small plots of ground. *Their* corn can not compete with imports from the United States.

Therefore, our challenge is to study the realities of present day policies that force human beings to risk dangerous and illegal actions in order to survive.

Olive Wilson, member of Northwest Iowa Peace Links

280 2nd St. NE

Primghar, IA 51245

(712) 957-2760