Politics
Out of context: Reply #19301
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- GeorgesII-6
Article from the journalist that went to the border town, I find kinda sad that anything just critical of yhe status quo gets downvoted for absolutlely no reason, whats the point in pretending you are for an open exchange of ideas when you downvote the obvious,
what will it take to wake you up?
I'm so saddened that I've been saying this for months, the only reason Trump will win, is not because of the pseudo racism you attribute to his followers, but for those like me who are just tired of having to police their thoughr because you still can't accept that we now live in an extremely volatile world and silencing and ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away
here's the article
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TRUMP IS RIGHT. We must build the Wall.
I say this as a classic liberal journalist, flanked by my awards from Planned Parenthood and the pro-labor Sidney Hillman Foundation. Like most liberals, my first reaction to the Wall was disgust. How un-American!
Then I went to the border.
For seven days and seven nights I wandered the desert, speaking to the people of the border towns. I crossed the international line and went to the places where the dead are found. All that time, the Wall was a prion in my brain.
Even in draft form, the Wall was already disrupting alliances and unsettling old assumptions. Was it sparked by globalism? Free trade? Capitalism? Racism? Prescription narcotics? Fox News? Would the Republican party survive? Would NATO survive? Would Breitbart survive? What were the blogs saying?
But the more I traveled, the less sense anything made.
And finally, on the seventh day, blasting down the 10 into Texas at 75 miles an hour with the windows open and Pat Benatar on the radio, clarity and that kick-ass chorus arrived at the exact same moment:
Why don’t you hit me with your best shot,
Hit me with your best shot,
Fire away!And so I entered the Spirit of the Wall, and saw that the Wall is good.
BEGIN AT the border towns, approaching people at random to reduce the selectivity bias that blindfolds so many in these partisan times.
Here’s Mike Pommerenke, an old guy power walking on the shoulder of the road in Amado, Arizona, just thirty miles from the Mexican border. His answer bursts out of him like something under pressure:
“I say build the wall! They should not be checking them to see if they’re criminals and then letting ’em go—that’s bullshit. They’re a criminal being here. I don’t see what the discussion is. Put the wall up, send ’em all back.”“I’m a Trump man,” Pommerenke adds unnecessarily. “If he don’t win, I’m not voting.”
The woman walking with him is his aunt, Kathy Kingsrud. She looks like a retired schoolteacher except for the Air Force bomber jacket. “We gotta stop this mess,” she agrees. “I don’t like them being on our welfare system and getting all the benefits that we have a hard time getting.”
Two hundred and sixty miles east in Columbus, New Mexico, bitter feelings about the border go back to Pancho Villa’s raid in 1916. At the old train depot, a grizzled man called Jack mans the counter of the local historical society, wisps of hair floating out from under his floppy Western hat. In the next room there is a safe with Mexican bullet holes and a diorama of the ruined town. “Am I in favor of Donald Trump? I am, all right. I’m a Trumper. I think he will be very good for the country.”
The existing fence is a joke, Jack says. “The El Paso sector is an open door. I don’t care what Rick Perry says, he’s allowed it. They all have, same with Ted Cruz. There’s places you can just walk across.”
He goes on: Catch and release must end. Border crossers should be taken right back to the border, sanctuary cities should stop subverting the law, illegals should be denied medical care and education and food stamps. “They should be denied all of that. They’re not citizens—they’re not entitled to the benefit of being one.”
But these are old white people. What about someone with deeper roots in the area? Perhaps even, who knows, someone brown?
“A wall is better than fencing, and it’s much more powerful,” Trump has said. “It’s more secure. It’s taller.”
I head to Nogales, Arizona, a cozy little town tumbling over the rolling desert hills at the border, where the road ends in an eighteen-foot fence and a gate that recalls the glory days of Soviet architecture in Africa. The fence climbs up and down the jagged hillsides like a Dr. Seuss drawing if Dr. Seuss were a sad morbid man who had been traumatized as a child by Stalin. And here’s Chris Jimenez, who has lived on the American side all his life: born here, young, scruffy, and casual, a Bernie bro for sure. His opinion of the border crossers?
“They’re taking our jobs,” he says.
But, um, don’t migrants just take the crappy jobs Americans don’t want?
“Down here in Nogales, we have produce,” Jimenez says. “And when they send the fruit or vegetables from across the border, they repack everything here. So there’s a lot of people from across the border, and they get a visa but they don’t have a permit to work, and the packers hire them. And they pay half, like four bucks an hour. So if I go there and I try to get a job, they’re like, ‘Oh, no, we don’t need people right now.’”
People in his community are angry about it, for sure. “Like, everybody,” he says. But surely Jimenez is an anomaly.
Here’s another Hispanic dude just outside the border gate, Javier Velez. He’s in his fifties and has also lived here his whole life, but he just became a naturalized citizen ten years ago. He must understand the plight of the undocumented. What does he think of Trump’s Wall?“It would be a good thing,” he says. “You can divide both countries—you know where the United States is and where Mexico is.”
The threat to jobs is real, Velez says. “It’s not fair,” he says. “I think it’s not fair.”He even likes Trump, kind of. “I don’t know, he speaks a lot of truth.”
This was a constant theme all along the border. Anglos were more sympathetic to the border crossers and often spoke of compassion, but seven out of ten Hispanics wanted strict enforcement—even the ones who didn’t speak English. Here’s Arturo Vargas, a fifty-year-old American citizen who listens with a puzzled expression to my high school Spanish. Finally, he gets it. “Sí, la barda.”
Meaning “Yes, a wall.”
“Qué piensa usted?”
With a gentle, musing expression on his face, Vargas says the idea does sound un poco media racista and he certainly gets that, but the fact is you’ve got to stop the illegals. He’s quite firm on that point. “No me gusta que pasan sin papeles porque cuando nosotros estamos aquí bien con papeles, ellos vienen muchas veces y hacen cosas que no deben de hacer. Y por ellos la llevamos nosotros que somos de desendencia mexicana.”Which means, in rough translation, Fuck those people without papers—let ’em get in line.
WHAT KIND of wall could relieve these frustrations? As Javier Velez pointed out, the existing fence here in Nogales—which cost $4.21 million a mile—is easy to climb. It’s made out of metal tubes eighteen feet tall, so people can just grab the tubes and scoot up. There’s five feet of cement underneath that’s pretty easy to tunnel under—the Border Patrol has already discovered about fifty tunnels, some with roads and railroad tracks. In Tijuana, people cross in a vast complex of storm drains.
For decades, even this kind of fencing has been a struggle. They started in 1990 with fourteen miles along the California coast. That helped in California but pushed a 600 percent rise of migrants in the badlands of Arizona, causing an alarming increase in migrant deaths. George W. Bush promised seven hundred miles of super-duper double-layer fence in the Secure Fence Act of 2006, waiving the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act—which gives a sense of the regulatory hurdles any serious waller faces. Bush ended up with just thirty-two miles of his fence by the time he left office, much of it around Yuma. Still the people stream through to work the vegetable fields, and some keep going.
For many people these days, even trying to imagine the Wall is morally wrong. When an architecture group called for a design competition recently, people protested, saying even rough sketches would get the site into Albert Speer territory. “It was just as if they were trying to design a guillotine, like in the French Revolution,” one says. “We can’t be your co-conspirators.” The woman who built Trump Tower—Barbara Res, the first female skyscraper construction supervisor in New York—refused to even speculate. “The whole thing is foolish,” she told me. “He knows it’s ridiculous, it’s environmentally impossible, but he still says it.”
The border fence extends 300 feet into the Pacific Ocean between Tijuana and San Diego; 652 miles of the fence has been completed.
This is how Trump always worked, she said, selling the sizzle when he literally didn’t have a steak—he got Trump Steaks from real meatpackers and rebranded them. When he was building the Trump SoHo, he blew so much smoke about how fabulous it was and how many thousands of buyers he had lined up, which pumped up the price even though it was not true, he ended up getting sued by his buyers for “fraudulent enticement.”
But Trump has gotten pretty specific about the Wall. He said it would be made of concrete panels “probably thirty-five to forty feet,” maybe as high as ninety, and he ruled out fencing altogether. “A wall is better than fencing, and it’s much more powerful. It’s more secure. It’s taller.” He said he would only build about a thousand miles of it because of the mountains and littoral areas. It’s not clear whether he would tear down the existing fence, or try to wall the most difficult and remote areas.
“Would it be thin?” Res asked. Concrete panels, like the ones they use as sound barriers on highways, are generally just a few inches thick. “They’d just put ladders over it. You’d have to have a road in the middle like the Great Wall of China.”
- 3 down-votes within 1/10th of the time it would take to read this entire post.
lolzmoldero - post a link instead of cutting and pasting all this long shit - noone will read this on here.fadein11
- Sorry but that article is so bad, badly written and argued. Terrible.fadein11
- If its going to contradict beliefs regardless if factual. 99% it wont be readyurimon
- and the idea of the world being more volatile is myth - thought you knew better Georges. I'd rather be alive now than in 1939 say or 1911... nonsense.fadein11
- fade in, volatile doesn't mean you have to compare it to a worst time, it just means that things may implode anytime, in the span of 2 weeks, in the small townGeorgesII
- of Dusseldorf there was two attack by refugees, how long do you think it's going to take for people to start identifying all brown people as culprits, stopGeorgesII
- you had more wilderness nature space. keeping your word was more of a virtue. idk. pros n cons.yurimon
- ignoring the big phat elephant in the room ,the entire world is going extreme right and instead of trying to understand why, you're playing a dumb semantic gameGeorgesII
- "we now live in an extremely volatile world"
it's a myth they feed us to make us consume :)
Took that from you guys ;)fadein11 - whole world going extreme right? Simply not true. Sorry I will have to disagree with you again. The UK had had often had flirtations with the far right - manyfadein11
- times - but nothing came of it. Why do you think today is so special? Solve the migrant crisis by stopping intervention and bloodshed in the middle east - andfadein11
- you think the far right are gonna do that!??? dream on :)fadein11
- Since when was Dusseldorf a small town?
2 attacks... wow - sounds like a crisis going down. Stop reading shit newspapers.fadein11 - France, belgium, italy, austria, germany, ukraine, sweden, spain, poland, hungary, switzerland, basically countries affected by the flow of refugees are movingGeorgesII
- right, G.B is an island and is hard to reach by refugees, if G.B was at the level of italy then you'd see a massive move, just wait and seeGeorgesII
- Yeah Britain doesn't have a lot of migrants - don't make statements about stuff you know nothing about. Do some research on the UK.fadein11
- Anyway what is your point if countries are moving to the right (which has happened numerous times before in the last 50 years anyway)? what are you saying?fadein11
- you always make statements but never a point... just like Drake and Yurimon. Like soundbites. Too much internet!fadein11
- Refugee crisis in Europe, caused by Syrian war, has nothing to do with migrant workers in the U.S. which has been going on for decades and has actually declinedyuekit
- recently. Trying to roll everything into one anti-immigrant hysteria is not fact based or honest look at issues.yuekit
- yep.fadein11
- Georges, do you have links to those attacks ?d_gitale
- One thing is for certain, the UK press has gone far more right in the last 10 years. And not all Murdoch papers.fadein11
- its more about practical security and drain on resource through the welfare state in the us.yurimon
- HAHAdrake-von-drake
- That was worded badly. I mean links to articles about the attacks of course lold_gitale
- 3 down-votes within 1/10th of the time it would take to read this entire post.