In recent weeks a friend and I have enjoyed meeting at a local gastropub for long conversations about building the controversial wall along the southern border of the United States. Well, why not? Timely topic, good food, tasty brews. What began as an informal “wall / no wall” debate did not get us very far, but not because we ended up seething at each as many do on Facebook and other social media about this topic. Nor did we not get very far because we had exhausted the topic. Just the opposite. The “wall / no wall,” either-or polarization, we realized, had merely offered us a starting point that necessitated stepping back to see the bigger picture of immigration control, what President Trump and others call the broken immigration system.

Fixing a system of course entails engaging in systems thinking. As someone has aptly said, if you jiggle over here, something is going to wiggle over there. Said another way, you can never do merely one thing to fix a system – just ask any car buff who has restored an old jalopy. So Jim and I met again, but not to talk about fixing the system. Our goal was to start getting to grips with the bigger picture, or at least to see as much of it as we could identify given our resources. After all, how can wise decisions be made about fixing a system with multiple problems unless the bigger picture is first known?

This article identifies key aspects of the immigration big picture along our southern border, but what follows is not the last word on the subject. I offer it as a learner. The immigration picture at the southern border is complex and changing, and it has been grossly misrepresented by politicians, news media, and influential others who have us focused on watching a “wall / no wall” game of ping-pong. My aim is to share what I have learned so far (some of which was surprising) about a system that is not working. If it helps you, I would like to know about that. If you can help me further in my understanding, I would like to hear from you too.

The “wall / no wall” way of seeing is like a race horse wearing blinders. The thoroughbred’s peripheral vision is deliberately eliminated for the purpose of focusing the horse’s attention on the track ahead. Blinders narrow the horse’s vision to help keep it from running off course and to protect both jockey and horse from accidents and injuries. During a horse race this is beneficial for the horses, the jockeys, and the sport. Nothing beneficial, or sporting, has accrued to our country, or to the immigrants, by having a blinkered vision of immigration.

THE BORDERLAND
The U.S. – Mexico border is the world’s most transited international border. Four states make up its approximately 1,950 miles. California: 140 miles. Arizona: 370 miles. New Mexico: 180 miles. Texas: 1,254 miles. There are 5 Mexican states along the border: Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas, and 23 U.S. counties and 39 Mexican municipalities. A variety of towns, cities, small farms, deserts, and ecosystems comprise the borderland area, whose total population is estimated at 12 million people.

There are 48 legal crossing points along the long border (that figure does not include numerous railroad and ferry crossings). The crossings are staffed with thousands of U.S. Customs and Border personnel and maintained around the clock year after year. To that large number add tens of thousands of U.S. Border Patrol agents (they typically do not work at the crossing points) and their vast amount of equipment and its maintenance. Add up all the personnel, their equipment, and its maintenance and it is easy to see why the economic cost of running three shifts (24/7/365) to secure that border runs into hundreds of billions of dollars annually. (This figure does not include ICE agents and their equipment or the military.)

Health concerns and socioeconomic issues are also in play, especially at major crossings such as the three between San Diego and Tijuana, where as many as 50 million people pass through those three border crossings every year. The population for that region is estimated at 4,900,000, making it the second largest bi-national area of conurbation in the U.S., not far behind the Detroit – Windsor area’s population of 5,700,000.

Increasing air pollution has been a significant problem in the San Diego and Tijuana region due to the tens of thousands of cars and trucks that transit through the three crossings every year. And San Diego, already the second largest city in California, is one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. Because of its location on the Mexico border, developers in San Diego are seeking ways to expand into Tijuana. Although increased development would benefit many people in Tijuana, if handled unwisely it would adversely effect the city’s poor, which includes thousands of deportees from California who are typically turned over to Mexican authorities in Tijuana, where many have no place else to go and live in dreadful conditions.

California’s and Arizona’s borders with Mexico are nearly completely sealed. New Mexico has many miles of old fencing; it is one of the Trump administration’s chief goals to replace that fencing with better barriers. Sealing the border of Texas with Mexico is also a priority of the Administration. But that project is hugely problematic. The Texas-Mexico border is formed by the winding Rio Grande River, whose often twisting, jagged route not only serves as a natural barrier but also creates problems both for crossers and patrol agents. This long common border has 28 international bridges and border crossings, including two dams and one hand-drawn ferry, for commercial, vehicular, and pedestrian traffic. Also, according to the Texas Department of Transportation, the “Texas and Mexico border crossings are vital to the economies of Texas and Mexico, and have contributed to Mexico’s status as Texas’ #1 trading partner.”

One hundred and fifteen miles of the Texas border with Mexico are fenced (e.g., tall steel slating), the longest stretch near El Paso. Business Insider reports that a “host of laws and regulations – from international treaties to flood-zone requirements – make wall-construction along the Texas-Mexico border a daunting task.” When fencing does get constructed, it usually ends up being placed far inland, cutting across private property. “And Texas landowners haven’t taken too kindly in the past to government officials attempting to co-opt their land.”

Amid all this are the immigrants themselves. Although they live in today’s world, they are part of the perennial human problem of “the stranger,” and they are at the mercy of how both the U.S. and Mexico authorities treat them.

MOSES THE STRANGER
Let’s remind ourselves that the United States is not the only country that has been embattled over seemingly unresolvable differences of political opinion and prolonged legal wranglings over the status of immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Millions of refugees fleeing the war in Syria to nearby countries and to European nations is a recent case in point. Previously, the war in Iraq saw millions of Iraqis displaced from their homes. Just over forty years ago, huge numbers of the so-called Vietnamese boat people were arriving by boats and ships on the shores of many countries, including the United States. Seventy-five years ago, Jews were fleeing Nazi Germany. And so it has been throughout history.

The challenges that countries face from immigrants date back even to biblical times, to what the Bible calls the treatment of “the alien,” “the foreigner,” “the stranger.” The well-known story of Moses offers insight into the perennial challenges. In brief: the Hebrew people (aka the ancient Israelites) lived for hundreds of years as resident aliens in Egypt. Under Egyptian immigration policy they fared well and “were fruitful and multiplied greatly and became exceedingly numerous” (Exodus 1:7). But when a new leader of Egypt perceived this large population of resident aliens as a national security threat, he changed the policy toward them. He turned the Hebrews into slaves and forced them to live and work in the harshest of conditions.

Enter Moses, raised from infancy in Egypt and specially educated from childhood in Pharaoh’s royal court. It was an unusual upbringing because Moses was not an Egyptian. He was a Hebrew. Yet he was groomed as an Egyptian prince and led a privileged life among the Egyptian elite. At age forty, however, after killing an Egyptian and burying the body, Moses fled from Egypt to escape the death penalty. He ended up hundreds of miles away in the land of Midian, in the northwest Arabian desert somewhere, and worked as a shepherd for forty years.

What is not well known is that in Midian Moses was given the status of a gēr (“alien” or”stranger”) and was taken in by a gracious Midianite priest and his family. Moses married one of the priest’s daughters, who gave birth to a son, to whom Moses gave the name Gērshom (“stranger in a strange land”).

When Moses turned eighty, he was called by God to return to Egypt to free the Israelites from slavery. As God’s appointed leader of a million-plus refugees out of Egypt, the Bible records that Moses received a set of commands from God for the social legislation of this large unwieldy population. One of those commands, which stands out by virtue of its repetition in a number of contexts, applied to how the Israelites were to treat the strangers (aliens, foreigners) in their midst.

“Do not ill-treat a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in Egypt” (Exodus 22:21). “Do not oppress a stranger; you yourselves know how it feels to be a stranger, because you were strangers in Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).

This was a significant law because it was not only Israelites who had fled from Egypt. Many non-Israelites had left Egypt with the Israelites and had become refugees themselves. God, apparently, had no qualms about that. If there had been a question among the Israelites about how to treat non-Israelites in their midst, it was no longer a question. They had God’s view on the matter.

Some rabbis have discovered as many as four dozen places in the Torah where the alien/foreigner/stranger is mentioned, including in the context of the treatment of widows, orphans, and the poor. And more than once the Torah specifies:

“You shall have the same law for the strangers as for the native-born” (Exodus 22:49; Leviticus 24:22; Numbers 15:16, 29).

As Rabbi Sacks reminds us, “Not only must the stranger not be wronged; he or she must be included in the positive welfare of Israelite / Jewish society.” But even more remarkably, the “law goes beyond this; the stranger must be loved”:

“When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:33-34).

This divine law, echoed in Deuteronomy 10:19, signifies the high value of life that God places on the human beings that today we call immigrants, refugees, foreigners, aliens, and asylum seekers. It is a law focused on the treatment of strangers. It is a law to which the people will be held accountable. It is a law implied when Jesus, the archetypal alien in the world, says, “I was a stranger and you took me in” (Matthew 25:35). It is a law that fits hand-in-glove to another of the Torah’s repeated commands: the exercise of impartial justice, which, incidentally, Jesus took to soaring heights, blowing some minds, in his parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). Ultimately, it is a law that finds its root in the truth of Genesis chapter one, where we see that human beings, male an female, created in the image of God, are called good, and very good. That is the value God placed on human beings.

ARTICLE 14(1)
Down through history, nations have granted protection, if not possibilities for citizenship, to individuals, families, and groups fleeing persecution, slavery, and threats of death, even if these nations do not acknowledge its basis in divine law. Today, one finds this protection appearing in Article 14(1) of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR is a milestone document that owes much of its emergence to a biblical influence.

Article 14(1) does not define what kind of protection policies nations must implement. It leaves each nation to its own jurisprudence for determining that. The same was true for ancient Israel. Its commands regarding treatment of strangers was a kind of general social-legislative principle to which the people would be held accountable (by God). But the commands were not themselves policy. As is frequently the case in the Torah, once a general principle has been revealed it is then up to the monarch, the courts, or the political system to hammer out a policy consistent with the principle.

CITIES OF REFUGE
A compelling example of ancient Israelite policy grounded in the above concert of laws appears in the appointment of six cities as “cities of refuge,” as they are called in the biblical text. After the people were no longer wandering refugees in the Arabian desert but settled in a new land, they turned six of the already-existing cities of that land into sanctuary cities. The chief reason for doing so was to provide legal asylum for anyone to flee to who had killed another person. As safe havens, the cities of refuge limited and controlled injustices, for they gave the accused a place to stand trial, where it would be determined if the killing was accidental or intentional. And these cities were spread out in key locations throughout the land, so no one involved in a court case would have to travel too far.

The legal proceedings for determining guilt or innocence are spelled out in Numbers 35 and Joshua 20 but do not concern us here. What needs underlining, however, is that the six cities were places of physical and legal refuge not just for Israelites but for “aliens and any other people living among them” (Numbers 35:15; Joshua 20:9).

Also, these cities were overtly religious cities, in that all six had to be Levitical cities, that is, cities of the priests, the Levites. In other words, these places of asylum were an integral part of ancient Israel’s religious life. This was significant. For it was not just to the king, or to the courts, or to the elders but also to the priests that the people looked for rulings of justice.

With the law of asylum in place across the country in six of the (forty-eight) Levitical cities, the accused (who may be an alien, and innocent), when received into a sanctuary city, knew that he awaited trial under the protection of divine mercy and grace. Whenever the accuser (aka the “avenger of blood”) had tracked down the accused to a city of refuge, the accuser was forbidden by divine law from taking the life of the accused, and a trial would determine the latter’s legal status.

U.S. SANCTUARY CITIES & THE CONSTITUTION
Here, then, in the ancient Middle East we see an example of a nation-wide policy in a criminal justice system that is based on the high value of life that God has placed on immigrants, refugees, foreigners, and asylum seekers even if they have been accused of committing a capital offense. The United States, of course, has no official religion. Constitutionally, it is not a religious polity. It is not possible for Congress to replicate ancient Israel’s religious cities of refuge in the country but, as the apostle Paul recommends, we can learn from ancient Israel’s history (1 Corinthians 10:1).

In the difficult context of America’s broken immigration system, controversy has swirled around so-called sanctuary cities in recent years, particularly after President Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 to withhold federal funding from jurisdictions that limited cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities. Many of these jurisdictions include sanctuary cities – an imprecise term used for cities across the U.S. that are viewed as lenient toward non-criminal undocumented immigrants.

I am not an immigration professional, but here are some discoveries I made about this area of jurisprudence. Although the Trump administration implied that the President’s executive order was issued because sanctuary cities or counties don’t cooperate with U.S. immigration authorities, that is a misnomer. From what I can tell, a sanctuary jurisdiction is probably not working outside federal law. It tries to work within federal immigration law to limit its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agents in order to protect low-priority immigrants from deportation. But it will turn over to relevant authorities those who have committed crimes. For instance, being undocumented is not a crime; it is a civil violation, which can be handled by local jurisdictions (2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Arizona v. U.S. ).

Also, undocumented immigrants have the right of due process under the U.S. Constitution. The due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which concern the administration of justice, act as safeguards from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property by the government outside the sanction of law. For example, police cannot detain anyone who hasn’t at least been suspected of a crime. Meaning: to hold a non-criminal undocumented immigrant past the point when he or she should be released just so that ICE can pick the person up is unconstitutional. (ICE: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a law enforcement agency of the federal government.)

In a sanctuary city, local police will most likely release an arrested immigrant after he has been cleared of charges, posted bail, or completed jail time for whatever he was arrested for. A non-sanctuary city might hold that same person until ICE can come to pick him up – even though that extra holding is not constitutional.

A piece of legislation from Congress, or a dictate from the Attorney General, or an executive order from the President that seeks to penalize sanctuary cities because they refuse to hold non-criminal undocumented immigrants for ICE pickup has marked the wrong target. For it is the cities that hold non-criminal undocumented immigrants for ICE pickup who are acting unconstitutionally. I would argue that sanctuary cities, in following the Constitution, are also practicing their own version (consciously or not) of the general law of Leviticus 19:33: not mistreating a foreigner who resides among them but treating them as native-born.

Further, when non-criminal undocumented immigrants know that they won’t be treated outside the law, it’s an incentive for them to cooperate with local law enforcement authorities when they need to. This kind of cooperation has been long understood and needed by police departments, sheriff departments, and other law enforcement agencies in sanctuary jurisdictions, which is why they pushed back against President Trump’s combative stance against their (legal) handling of non-criminal undocumented immigrants. Police chiefs in Los Angeles, Denver, Tucson, and other cities have made strong cases that their communities have been made safer and better because non-criminal immigrants know that when they come forward, for instance, to report a crime or to act as a witness, they will not be turned over to ICE.

SANCTUARY CHURCHES
Besides cities of refuge, houses of worship in ancient Israel protected people under threat of death. Across the United States today, sanctuary churches perform a Good Samaritan role for non-criminal undocumented immigrants who get stuck in the most desperate straits. Daily care for these “church families,” which includes food and finances, is multi-faceted and provided by members of the congregation and networks of pro bono lawyers, advocacy support groups, concerned individuals in the wider community, and even sympathetic synagogues and mosques.

Although the total number of persons in the U.S. who have sought protection from deportation inside churches remains relatively small, they have good and sufficient reasons for wanting to remain in the U.S. Many have worked and raised families here for years, if not decades. As with other aspects of our broken immigration system, this one is also complex and not easily resolved. Here’s a typical scenario: undocumented immigrant parents seeking legal status but unable to obtain it yet and facing imminent deportation. But their children were born in the U.S. and are therefore U.S. citizens (Fourteenth Amendment) and cannot be deported. The parents quite naturally and reasonably don’t want to be separated from their children, so they enter the safety of a sanctuary church in order to pursue their options and continue to plead their case with relevant authorities. Another scenario would be that of an undocumented parent with a child who is gravely ill.

These families are not trying to hide from ICE or USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles citizenship eligibility for immigrants, work permits, green cards, adoption requests, humanitarian services, and much more.) The families notify USCIS and ICE of their new address. There is no law that prevents ICE from entering a church, mosque, or synagogue to detain an undocumented immigrant, but ICE has typically refrained from doing that, for any number of reasons. The agency will, however, enter to make arrests if it concerns terrorism or public safety.

Reports are surfacing, however, of a trend developing in which ICE may not be so accommodating to sanctuary churches as it was during the previous administration. Perhaps Congress could pass a temporary law that would ensure undocumented immigrants safety from arrest in a sanctuary church while USCIS and the courts are sorting out the family’s status.

COURT SYSTEMS & THE SIXTH AMENDMENT
Court systems in the U.S. are also significant in how undocumented strangers are treated. Because ancient Israel’s cities of refuge were deliberately located in strategic areas throughout the land, no one involved in a case would be burdened with traveling a long distance for the trial. The accused would find asylum quickly and the accuser and any witnesses would most likely be nearby. The parties would have recourse to a speedy trial and a case could be adjudicated quickly.

Although the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right to a speedy trial, adjudication of immigration cases in the U.S. has slowed to a crawl. Near the end of 2018, there were approximately 400 immigration judges in 58 courts across the country. This was up from approximately 300 at the end of 2016. But the system remains overwhelmed. According to Executive Office for Immigration Review of the Department of Justice, as of August, 2018, there were more than 730,000 pending immigration cases, which means that the average immigration judge would have a backlog of 1800+ cases. It is not unusual for average wait times for cases to be fully heard to stretch to two to three years.

Even if it cost as much as $100 million, or even $200 million, to add or reassign judges or other necessary personnel in order to lessen the backlog of immigration cases, including the reuniting of children with their parents, that is only two percent or four percent (respectively) of the $5.7 billion that President Trumped sought from Congress in January 2019. I suppose some ungenerous soul would say, “Let ‘em wait three years. No big deal.” Well, put yourself in their shoes. It’s a big deal to the families who are stuck in the queue. How would you want to be treated? Processing them through the system in a fairer amount of time would be more humane than keeping them on pins and needles about their final status for years.

DACA
Another part of the immigration big picture is the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Launched in 2012, DACA allowed young people who came to the U.S. as children to be “lawfully present” without threat of being deported and to apply for a driver’s license and a work permit. When the program was rescinded in September 2018, federal courts kept most of the DACA recipients (700,000+ young people) from deportation pending a permanent legislative solution.

DACA is not a free-for-all. Immigrants who apply must have arrived in the U.S. before their sixteenth birthday and have lived in the U.S. continuously since June 15, 2007. They are required to be in school, or a high school graduate or hold a GED, or an honorably discharged veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces or the Coast Guard. They are ineligible if they have been convicted of a felony or various other crimes, and if they are deemed a national security threat. There is also a $495 application fee. DACA does not grant permanent resident status or a path to citizenship. (Much more straightforward information about DACA can be found here, which is where I found most of this information.)

EDUCATION
Education is another part of the picture. The education of undocumented immigrant children in K-12 public schools is guaranteed by law (Plyler vs. Doe; U.S. Supreme Court decision, 1982). Also, except in instances of a subpoena being served, federal law (the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) prohibits public schools from providing any outside agency, including ICE, with information from a child’s school file that would disclose the student’s undocumented status.

Educating undocumented immigrants benefits our country. The sooner the immigration status of undocumented students is resolved, including the status of those stuck waiting in DACA limbo, the sooner those who can stay in the country are free to dream about how they will become long-term contributors to American society.

“BUILD A WALL”: A MISLEADING SOUND BITE
In March 2017, during an address to Congress, President Trump stated that “we will soon begin the construction of a great wall along our southern border.” No surprise there. “Building a wall” had been a hallmark of candidate Trump’s campaign for President. In January 2018, he began negotiations with Congress for $25 billion to build it. After that appropriation for funding failed, chiefly due to months of wrangling between the White House and Congress over the status of 700,000 DACA immigrants, the President in January 2019 asked Congress for $5.7 billion to build it. When those funds were withheld, the President promptly declared a formal national emergency to find funding for the wall. Resistance to Trump’s wall also comes from many in Congress who have said that open borders are best.

As I write this, it is far from evident what will be the outcome of the lawsuit filed in February by sixteen states to prevent the President from using that declared national emergency to access funds to build the wall. Meantime, on March 11, it was announced that the President wants $8.6 billion from Congress for “the wall,” as part of his proposed $4.7 trillion 2020 budget.

Since the presidential campaign of 2015, however, the sound bite “to build a wall” – repeated endlessly in the news media, blogosphere, social media, and on talk radio – has been a misnomer, if not misleading. Personally, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I never paid much attention to happenings along our southern border until the 2015 campaign. My excuse is that my work on foreign policy and diplomacy focused on U.S. – Middle East relations; migrants coming into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America were not part of that geography.

When I heard Donald Trump’s frequent take on “building a wall,” and with that sound bite becoming ubiquitous in the media, I got the impression that there was no wall. So I was surprised when, after doing a little research, I learned that a total of approximately 650 miles of wall already existed. I felt misled by candidate Trump’s repeated refrain about building a wall. It would have been more honest, I thought, if he had talked about repairing existing barriers and building additional sections.

Vertical barriers (various kinds of fencing) began to be built in 1994 during the Bill Clinton administration. Twelve years later, during the George W. Bush administration, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which authorized construction of 700 miles of fencing along the southern border. President Bush announced that the Act would make the border more secure and that it was “an important step toward immigration reform.” Twenty-six Democratic senators, including notables such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, and Christopher Dodd voted for the Act. As did the then Senator Barack Obama, who said on the Senate flood that the bill “will certainly do some good.” It will provide “better fences and better security along our borders” and “help stem some of the tide of illegal immigration in this country.”

If Congress had authorized the $5.7 billion the President wanted “to build the wall,” and if he had used the funds strictly for that, the respected Office of Management and Budget estimated the he would have been able to build 230 miles. In February 2019, Congress did approve $1.4 billion to add more vertical barriers, which would finance about 60 more miles. That puts the price at roughly $24 million per mile, not including cost overruns.

The dollar figures, then, are all over the map, as are the locations of the barriers. And the President’s material proposals (concrete or steel) have shifted over time and may shift again. The U.S. government has commissioned numerous prototypes (typically about thirty feet high) for testing and evaluation. So questions about what kind of barriers and their costs remain. In short, Congressional purse strings dictate how many miles of barriers get built. If past history is any indication, even if Donald Trump were elected to a second term it is unlikely his promised wall becomes reality by 2024.

Further, the refrain to “Build the wall! Build the wall!” lends itself to disassociating human beings (immigrants) from their humanness and moving them into the abstract, as if the crucial problems of immigration control were equations of math or physics awaiting to be solved. This subtle but significant shift of perspective has dire consequences on how we think, talk, debate, and propose solutions to a problem in which human beings and their treatment is the fundamental reality of the big picture of immigration control.

ECOLOGY AND WILDLIFE
Harmful consequences to wildlife and biological life have arisen around sections of border wall built during past White House administrations. Along the approximately 650 miles of pedestrian and vehicle barriers of various lengths and compositions that currently exist along the 2,000 mile border, six eco-regions support abundant biological life and wildlife. As more sections go up, studies suggest the negative impact on animal life and natural ecosystems will continue unless the current and future Administrations take steps to reduce that.

Reporting on the adverse effect of the borderland’s fence, steel, and concrete barriers has been largely neglected by the national news media, downplayed by many politicians, and brushed aside by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS – the government agency tasked with building the barriers). But the negative consequences have not been ignored by science.

In 2018, the journal BioScience published a paper signed by more than 2,500 scientists from the U.S., Mexico, and forty-one other countries urging President Trump to think twice about the wall and the infrastructures that will be supporting it. The report documents how previous and current building of barriers bypasses environmental laws, harms wildlife populations, and devalues conservation investment and scientific research. The report concludes with practical advice for moving ahead more wisely.

The paper is not limp on national security, nor does is call for abandoning barriers. It does, however, argue for “forgoing physical barriers in places with high ecological sensitivity, such as cross-border corridors [for animal populations] or critical habitats for endangered species.” The scientists also call for Congress, the DHS, the EPA, the Mexican government, and relevant others to “recognize and give high priority to conserving the ecological, economic, political, and cultural value of the US-Mexico borderlands. National security can and must be pursued with an approach that preserves our natural heritage.”

One of the wildest areas of Texas is a particular case in point. Big Bend National Park lies in the jagged U-bend in the middle of the Texas-Mexico border. Covering more than 800,000 acres, it holds some of the most treasured conservation areas on the continent. The massive 1,125 square mile park protects 1,200 species of plants, 450 species of birds, 56 species of reptiles, and 75 species of mammals. Its archeological history dates back 10,000 years and includes sea fossils, dinosaur bones, and volcanic rocks. Business Insider reports that the park, which has no manmade barriers, “is home to several highly precarious ecosystems that have undergone intense conservation efforts in recent years…. [And] river, mountain, and desert ecosystems … sustain fragile populations of black bears and other large mammals, which are slowly recovering from an over-hunting epidemic that began back in the 1950s.”

(Numerous credible reports and articles can be found on the Web documenting why barriers can have negative impacts on the borderland’s animal life and biodiversity. To comment further on this here would take us too far afield. Here is an article that I found illuminating.)

CHOKE POINTS
Besides the other exigencies about building the wall that are being introduced in this article, “choke points” is another. A choke point (so-called: the strategy comes from the military) narrows down the distance that you or your group must pass through to reach a destination. Consider the 370-mile long Arizona-Mexico border for instance. Sans any kind of barrier, border guards, or surveillance anyone could cross that border whenever he or she wished.

But if you don’t want anyone to be that free, you could build a tall solid 370-mile long wall, and then no one could walk or drive across the border. That wall would of course play havoc with vital concerns such as tourism, commerce, and the ecology. It would also impose travel restrictions on family members and others who are living in, say, Phoenix or Tucson who needed to go by car to, say, Nogales, Mexico, just the other side of the Arizona state line. They would need to make long detours. A long detour would also be necessary for folk in Nogales, Mexico who had to get next-door to its “twin” city, Nogales, Arizona.

Knowing all this, you still have good and sufficient reasons to manage the flow of people across the border. So instead of building one long wall, you build sections of wall to funnel would-be crossers to choke points, which in theory would control the flow of people by forcing them to a check point where their identity and other relevant information can be discovered.

Arizona’s total of nine vehicle and pedestrian crossings act in principle as choke, or check, points. There are a total of forty other legal points of entry in California, Nevada, and Texas. For every new one that is added along the 2,000 mile border comes construction costs as well as ongoing costs for additional personnel and equipment and its maintenance, 24/7/365.

ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE
Federal and state governments have long recognized that physical barriers alone are not sufficient along the southern border. Underground sensors, infrared cameras, radar blimps, unmanned drones, tethered aerostats, laser illuminators, microwave transmitters, sensor towers, and other high tech surveillance tools have been deployed to help border patrol agents and law enforcement officials monitor illegal crossings and locate drug smugglers – all of which must be manned and maintained at a cost of billions of dollars each year.

And new tools continue to emerge. It was recently reported in the news that a new mobile video surveillance system is being deployed. Mounted on trucks that roam the roads and open areas, it can look into the mountains with infrared scopes from several miles distance in the day and at night to help locate smugglers.

It seems unlikely, however, that electronic surveillance will ever render the need for some physical barriers obsolete. One costly experiment seems to bear this out. Begun in 2006 under the George W. Bush administration and run by Boeing Co., the $1 billion SBInet program was meant to link and integrate existing video cameras, radar, and sensors along the highly traveled southwest border in order to provide U.S. patrol agencies quicker response times to locate and arrest illegal crossers.

By 2010, that “virtual fence” program had become untenable due to cost overruns, missed deadlines, accumulating red tape, and other setbacks. It was cancelled in 2011 by President Obama and replaced by a strategy “tailored to the unique needs of each border region.” This strategy would deploy “commercially available surveillance systems, unmanned aerial drones, thermal imaging, and other equipment” to provide “faster deployment of technology, better coverage, and a more effective balance between cost and effectivity” (Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Secretary, 2011). (In 2010, President Obama authorized $600 million to pay for two more unmanned drones and 1,500 new customs inspectors, patrol agents, and law enforce officials along the border.

THE FUTURE?
Drama surrounding “the wall” from the political right and conservative media creates the impression that every immigrant at the southern border is an enemy. Drama surrounding “the wall” from the political left and liberal media creates the impression that anyone and everyone may immigrate. Both views serve the absolutized ideological politics behind each drama and ill-serve the strangers arriving at our southern border. Some are even dying in our deserts.

While working on this article I spoke by phone with Steve Johnstone, who has worked with No More Deaths (NMD), an advocacy group in southern Arizona founded by Catholic, Presbyterian, and Jewish leaders. NMD maintains a year-round humanitarian presence in the deserts of southwestern Arizona, where migrants often get lost and die. NMD volunteers hike the trails and leave water, food, socks, blankets, and if possible they provide emergency first-aid treatment. Earlier this year four of NMD’s volunteer aid workers were arrested while searching for three migrants who were lost in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The workers, who were trying to find the migrants and get water and canned food to them, were convicted of misdemeanor charges and fined. Two of the migrants were found.

A large percentage of those rescued are mothers with their children and they often have similar stories. Their husbands were displaced from small farms in Mexico when NAFTA began to benefit U.S. agribusiness in ways that put countless small Mexican farmers out of business and their husbands out of work. In order to feed their families, the men crossed the border seeking farm work in the U.S. while their families remained in Mexico, but the government has made it increasingly difficult for these men to visit their families back in Mexico.

If more walls, tougher policies, and tighter border security did not deter these undocumented wives from trying to enter the U.S., the feds assumed that large hot deserts would. But the government did not consider the grief and determination of these wives and mothers. Out of desperation, many are willing to risk walking up to eighty miles in the Arizona desert in hopes of reuniting their families. An increasing number, however, are dying from dehydration, heatstroke, or hypothermia, having lost their way and run out of food and water.

Johnstone, who has worked with NMD to rescue lost migrants, told me that before the 9/11 security sanctions emerged hardly anyone died in the Arizona desert, but afterward the deaths increased. “Just in the three-county area around Tucson,” he said, “the number of bodies that we know about is around 200, and that is a low estimate. The remains are taken to the medical examiner’s office, declared homeless, and buried without caskets.”

So maybe you thought it was all about the wall. It isn’t. More than 2,500 human remains have been found in the deserts of southern Arizona since 2000, and as a friend recently reminded me, leadership usually begins by defining reality. There are many aspects to immigration control reality, but relentless political focus on “the wall” is diminishing our capacity as responsible Americans to see that the human person is at the heart of the reality.

A deeply Christian culture shows hospitality to strangers. The book of Hebrews, in a subtle dig at one of Sodom’s sins, exhorts us not to neglect showing hospitality to strangers (13:2). And there is this:

“Listen also to the immigrant who isn’t from your people Israel but who comes from a distant country because of your reputation, because they will hear of your great reputation, your great power, and your outstretched arm” (1 Kings 8:41-42).

We also have the words of Jesus himself, the archetypal alien in this world: “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 7:12).

This article has touched on only a number of aspects of the immigration big picture, but I hope that it has offered enough background to show that problems of immigration control are systemic, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. I hope that it has helped to bring the reality from the abstract into the human. It will not be easy to repair all that is wrong to everyone’s satisfaction, but we will be greater as a nation when we pull together in that direction.

©2019 by Charles Strohmer

Charles Strohmer is a researcher, freelance writer, and author of eight books.

Images: Washington Post/Carolyn van Houten; John Morre/Ghetty Images; Conde Nast Traaveler; CNN.

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