Build Up That Wall! Pt. One
Donald Trump destroys a landscape
The border wall interrupts wildlife, endangers species, threatens ecosystems, wastes billions, kills people, and insults humanity.
The History
Walls are wearisome symbols. As objective-correlatives for political situations they are worn down, and would seem to be a relic of the 20th century; one thinks of the Berlin Wall, the Israel/Palestine wall, the Belfast Peace Lines. However, it seems that there is a good deal of potency left in the symbol.
Walls are erected and demolished as representations. They represent clashes of ideology, culture, and government. A political leader can holler “build up that wall!” just as emphatically as “tear down that wall!” and win points from his followers. But what is the relationship between the symbol and the thing itself? How does the abstract value of a wall compare with the fact of the wall? It is much more challenging to discuss walls as actual impediments to the movement of people and wildlife than to discuss them as symbols. How do walls change our lives? How do they change nature and plants and animals? What effects do they have on the landscapes they cleave? Studies on the ongoing impact of the US-Mexico border wall are scarce, since the information-gathering protocols that would have been necessitated by past legislation are now waivable by federal authorities. Studies, if they happen, must be conducted by independent groups. One such organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, has ventured out to construction sites on the border. They have released videos of the destruction of land sacred to the O’odham people, and of the dynamiting of important ecosystems such as the Organ Pipe National Monument. They discuss the fact of the wall. And the fact of the wall is a supremely difficult thing to engage with.
The flood of copious but disorganized information pairs ironically with the vacuum of popular knowledge about the wall. This is fueled by our inability to see past the symbol to the thing itself. The more beliefs, fears, uncertainties, and controversies a symbol accrues the more difficult it is to tear down. You probably have some version of the wall in your mind when you consider the US-Mexico border — the wall represents xenophobia and racism; the wall represents blunt, short-term solutions; or maybe the wall represents the frontier of safety, the strength and promise of an admired leader, and the integrity of a nation. But what do you know about that thing out there in the Sonoran Desert? The swarms of bulldozers, cranes, pickup trucks, sheets of metal, military and construction personnel? The communities impacted by private-land buyouts, water-rights violations, and unmitigated pollution?
Like the Great Wall of China, of which our popular conception is an unbroken line of stone denoting a hard border between an ideology of order on one side and chaos and barbarism on the other, the US-Mexico border wall tends to be thought of as a contiguous structure: one line of concrete stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. The border wall is actually a patchwork of different materials under varying stages of construction. There are simple vehicle barriers that stretch through the sand for miles as if anticipating some parched D-Day in the desolate future. There are fences, both chain link and slatted, some as tall as a person, some as tall as buildings. There are expanses of wilderness yet untouched by construction crews, waiting for them with bated breath. There are conspicuous gaps in existing structures through which any that can pass, does. There are solid barriers of metal, concrete, and rebar dozens of feet high; there are odd-looking structures made of tall posts spaced closely together so that you can see from one side to the other but through which nothing wider than a desert rat can pass. The quilted, Frankensteinish nature of the border wall is due to its piecemeal development over five successive presidential administrations.
In the early 1990s the primary locations of illegal migration from Mexico to the US were El Paso and San Diego, urban centers with a large population on either side of the border. During the George HW Bush administration the United States Border Patrol constructed a 14 mile fence which ran through Tijuana and San Diego and thrust into the Pacific Ocean. When they found that the wall alone did little to prevent migration, the USBP began “Operation Gatekeeper,” which increased the presence of agents and resources on the border. The goal of the new barrier was to reduce the large number of migrants crossing from the south through a “prevention by deterrence” strategy, beginning the long lesson that migrants cannot be in fact deterred, only redirected. Migrants, finding these new barriers in place, attempted to cross through more perilous and less inhabited terrains like the Sonoran Desert, where the intense weather conditions and severe aridity made the success rate low and the death rate high.
Contemporaneous Mexican press coverage of the San Diego/Tijuana barrier (Americans called it the “tortilla wall”) indicated that sentiment south of the border was negative indeed. Tijuanians viewed it as a personal insult. From a Los Angeles Times article from 1993: “The beach barrier represents ‘an act of ill will,’ said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, Baja California’s human rights ombudsman. He supports [a] boycott… in response to a series of perceived affronts to Mexico: the immigration control campaign by California politicians, fierce opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Border Patrol’s blockade in El Paso-which some U.S. officials want to impose along the California border.” This quotation indicates that Tijuanians viewed the new barrier wall as part of an almost conspiracy-like series of moves on the American side of the border to “blockade” Mexico. They saw the beginnings of NAFTA and the simultaneous development of border infrastructure as contradictory and hypocritical moves, part of a confusing and opaque political game that they couldn’t make sense of. These suspicions gave the US too much credit; the contractions were not a part of a master-plan, but merely the result of quotidian political partisanship and posturing in Congress.
There were 14 miles of border fencing by 1993.
The next development came during the Clinton administration, in 1996, with the passage of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). This act laid out Bill Clinton’s broad strategy for increasing the “integrity” of America’s US-Mexico border and removing undocumented immigrants faster and more methodically than ever before. In a memo preceding the IIRIRA, Clinton vowed to increase US Border Patrol personnel by 50% and give them an arsenal of new resources including “sensors, night scopes, helicopters, light planes, all-terrain vehicles, fingerprinting and automated recordkeeping.” He promised to increase the difficulty of attaining asylum, of overstaying visas, of paying in-state tuition at universities, and to keep detained immigrants at detention centers across the United States (promising to be the first administration to reimburse states for the cost of this incarceration) until they could be removed. Two of the most significant effects of the Act were to give the Attorney General the authority to construct new barriers and reinforce existing ones, and allowed local governments the option to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in enforcing the IIRIRA. According to a study published in the National Bureau for Economic Research, which examined the effect of the Act and the methodology of its implementation, “24 jurisdictions signed Task Force Enforcement (TF) agreements, 47 signed Jail Enforcement (JE) agreements, and 5 signed both TF and JE. Overall, TF agreements covered 22% (690 out of 3140 counties) of the counties nationally, and JE agreements cover 3% (106 counties) of all counties.” This means that a relatively broad section of the immigration population in border states could expect both federal and local authorities to be eyeing them carefully. What toll does this take on communities and individuals? The study reports a consistent decline in mental health scores in this population.
Estimates suggest that [the Secure Communities Program] increased the proportion of Latino immigrants with mental health distress by 2.2 percentage points (14.7 percent); Task Force Enforcement under Section 287(g) worsened their mental health distress scores by 15 percent (0.08 standard deviation); Jail Enforcement under Section 287(g) increased the proportion of Latino immigrants reporting fair or poor health by 1 percentage point (11.1 percent) and lowered the proportion reporting very good or excellent health by 4.8 to 7.0 percentage points (7.8 to 10.9 percent). These findings are robust across various sensitivity checks.
The above study suggests that US border policies during the last several decades have not only been detrimental on a human level, but quantifiably detrimental. They have consistently failed to prevent the drug trafficking that they were designed to curtail (the Congressional Research Service reports 1.2 million apprehensions in 1992, and 1.2 million apprehensions again in 2004), and have merely terrorized a large portion of the population.
Clinton’s IIRIRA was the first comprehensive package aimed at addressing the magnitude of extra-legal migration from Mexico to the United States. Not only did it initiate several now twenty-five year old methodological precedents (increased border barriers, increased personnel, subordination of environmental legislation to border initiatives, and greater authority for the executive branch i.e. Attorney General and the Department of Homeland Security) but it also began a legacy of rhetoric that would come to sound familiar, especially during the Bush Jr and Trump administrations. Clinton’s memo opens with the declaration, “It is a fundamental right and duty for a nation to protect the integrity of its borders and its laws.” By thwarting illegal immigration, it claims, the “front door” to legal immigration will be protected and legitimized. “This program,” promises the memo, “protects the security of our borders, our jobs and our communities for all Americans — citizens and legal immigrants alike.” This reinforces the age-old notion that illegal migrants saturate the job market and prevent legitimate citizens from getting work and receiving appropriate wages. The immigrant, like the wall, becomes not an reality but a symbol. Rather than recognizing that a community of workers and spenders only grows the economy and creates jobs, opponents to the presence of migrants see a zero-sum game — a defined number of hypothetical jobs increasingly claimed by the Other. The illegal immigrant became a symbol of declining economic power, of fear of loss, of — like the Mongols in ancient China — encroaching chaos.
It is an act of the highest perception and intelligence to allow real things not to be symbols.
The next legislation of consequence came during the George W Bush administration. The Real ID Act (2004) was an eccentric mix of loosely related changes to previous legislations, with the aim of delegitimizing illegal immigrants and legal immigrants who were unable to prove their status. It imposed federal guidelines on state drivers’ licenses and ID cards which would prohibit illegal immigrants from getting driving licenses (making it much more difficult to get to work, let alone find work), changed visa limits, made asylum more difficult to obtain and allowed courts to demand evidence from claimants. The IIRIRA had allowed the Attorney General to circumvent two specific environmental laws; The Real ID Act transferred authority from the AG to the now three-year-old Department of Homeland Security and allowed the Secretary of Homeland Security to unilaterally waive all legislation which would impede the “expeditious” construction of barriers. The only legal challenges to barrier construction that courts would be allowed to hear must allege a violation of the US Constitution.
Coming four years after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers, the climate in which the Real ID Act was passed was one of heightened fear: fear of “weapons of mass destruction,” and fear of terrorists infiltrating a border that was increasingly seen as lacunose — fear, in short, that the US was not as safe as it had thought. Terrorism doubled as a passcode to justify further delegitimization of immigrants in the US.
There were 75 miles of border fencing by 2005.
The notion of a wall spanning the whole distance was still a decade in the future. A huge leap toward it was taken by the Secure Fence Act, passed in 2006. This Act authorized the construction of 700 miles of fencing along the border and passed with a supermajority in both houses of Congress. Only a few Texans who would see some of the immediate economic ramifications of the barriers expressed dissent. The mayor of Loredo was among them. “These are people that are sustaining our economy by forty percent, and I am gonna close the door on them and put [up] a wall? You don’t do that. It’s like a slap in the face.” Governor Rick Perry believed that Congress should take the opposite approach: make legal immigration easier and welcome rather than demonize the migrant workforce. The first legal challenge to barrier construction came in October of 2007, when the Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club sued the Department of Homeland Security, which was initiating construction in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area in Southeastern Arizona. The DHS was found not to have carried out the legally required environmental assessment of their project before beginning, and the district court judge halted the barrier construction. Exactly one year after the passage of the Secure Fence Act, the Secretary of Homeland Security exercised his power to waive all legislative road blocks to the expeditious construction of the barrier. Activity in the San Pedro Riparian Conservation Area resumed. Legislation waived by the DHS included: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Protection Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the Noise Control Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act, the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Act, the Antiquities Act, the Historic Sites, Buildings and Antiquities Act, the Arizona-Idaho Conservation Act of 1988 (which created the San Pedro Riparian Reserve in the first place; to waive this act would seem to deny the existence of the reserve itself), the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, and the Farmland Protection Policy Act.
By spring of 2008, the Secretary had exercised his new power in New Mexico and in Texas. Construction was beginning in earnest.
The subordination of the environment to capricious political policies was now encoded in law. This will be a clear trend in our exploration of the bad acts of our forty-five presidents: any good effort made by anyone, any real person and real landscape that could pose an obstacle to a president’s bad idea, becomes instantly subordinate to the president’s bad idea. Laws are tiered; whatever dehumanizes and destroys takes precedence.
The Secure Fence Act gave the Secretary of Homeland Security greatly increased authority to build fencing at his own discretion, at mileage he thought necessary and in locations he believed to be the most important. It also required him to consult with local authorities, property owners and Native American tribes but made a point of asserting that this requirement was not to be interpreted as giving locals and tribal communities any specific right to legal action.
There were 580 miles of border fencing by 2009.
By this time the US Customs and Border Protection reported having spent $40,000,000 on environmental impact analysis and mitigation; it pledged an additional $50,000,000. What has this huge sum of money accomplished? Along the Southwest border there are extremely fragile ecosystems that suffer from the smallest changes. The USBP strategy of redirecting migration from urban centers to wilderness areas puts these ecosystems at high risk. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, “…a total of 18 federally protected species have the potential to be found along certain sections of the California border. In Arizona, at least 39 federally endangered, threatened, or candidate species can be found living along its border. More than 85% of the lands directly along the Arizona border are federal lands, much of it set aside to protect wilderness and wildlife.” The Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge all lie within this vulnerable area.
The final period of barrier construction before 2016 will set the stage for analyzing the impact of Trump’s immigration policy and the “Trump Wall” itself. Despite Barack Obama’s pro-immigration rhetoric and the reputation for inclusion he won with the passage of his DREAM Act, the Associated Press claims that in his first year he built more than 130 miles of border fencing. In a speech on immigration reform Obama himself said that “We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement.” This summarizes the Obama administration’s position on the border: build fences and infrastructure in return for congressional promises to entertain immigration reform. In other words, he was paying for his DREAM Act by continuing to construct barriers along the California and Arizona borders. Spending a whopping $5.6 billion a year, the Customs and Border Protection’s immense budgetary requirements caused the fulfillment of the Secure Fence Act to be delayed, and despite expressions of dissatisfaction by Republicans the Government Accountability Office reported that the Secure Fence Act goals had been met by 2015.
In 2006 Barack Obama, then junior senator from Illinois, had this to say about the Secure Fence Act: “The bill before us will certainly do some good. It will authorize some badly needed funding for better fences and better security along our borders and help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.” Nevertheless, he goes on to claim, the Secure Fence Act is merely an election-year stunt and that anyone who thinks that border walls are sufficient to stem the flow of illegal immigration are “seriously kidding [themselves].” Janet Nepolitano, former governor of Arizona and then Department of Homeland Security secretary, said in the first year of the Obama administration: “In 2007, many members of Congress said that they could support immigration reform in the future, but only if we first made significant progress securing the border. This reflected the real concern of many Americans that the government was not serious about enforcing the law. Fast-forward to today, and many of the benchmarks these members of Congress set in 2007 have been met.” Six years after Nepolitano’s statement, the Obama administration would see the completion of the Secure Fence Act project. Obama did perhaps more than any other president to construct border barriers and increase the strength and resources of the Border Patrol. He also beat George W Bush’s record number of deportations, nearly reaching 400,000 removals in each of the first three years of his presidency. We can identify an increase of power and authority in the executive branch during this period. In “Obama’s Immigration Reform; Triumph of Executive Action” published by the Indiana Journal of Law and Equality, John Skrentny and Jane Lopez argue that these policies of accelerated deportation and barrier construction were all designed to further the administration’s goal of comprehensive immigration reform, and to legitimize its status as the best administration to finally accomplish this decades-old goal. They identify a trend of increasing power in the executive branch to control migrant flow through the “back end,” i.e. determining who gets kicked out rather than who gets let in. The latter requires notoriously difficult-to-pass legislation, usually in the form of something comprehensive and ambitious. The former, in contrast, can be carried out at the discretion of the president and his Department of Homeland Security staff. This would set a precedent for the extraordinarily ambitious project of Obama’s successor. Obama himself never achieved the comprehensive immigation reform legislation for which he strived. He claimed to have deported strategically, with a stricter focus on undocumented immigrants engaged in criminal activity. He did deport more criminals than his predecessor, but only because of the greater numbers of deported overall — the percentage increased negligibly.
Obama’s legacy on immigration reform is defined by a significant increase of activity, hundreds of miles of new barriers, and greater ability for the president to act unilaterally in deportations, all of which would set the stage for Donald Trump to take things even further.