Walls
Walls can serve to protect, to keep undesirables and aliens out, but they can also serve to isolate, constrain thinking, limit horizons and imprison. And walls designed to keep people out almost always fail if the conditions that lead people to move aren’t addressed. That’s the point of Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez in the August 16 Washington Post op ed.
He is writing with reference to the designation of $465 million in U.S. aid to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America. While welcome, he points out, this is a disappointingly small step, and doesn’t begin to get at the source of the problem, namely the enormous demand for drugs in the U.S. But beyond this, it reflects a tendency to view our relations with our Latin American neighbors as one of us vs. them – they, one way or another, are out to undermine our way of life, either through narco-trafficking or through illegal immigration. But, the author points out, the root cause of both, simply put, is poverty. It is, he argues, “poverty that creates fertile ground for drug trafficking. It is poverty that sends so many legal and illegal immigrants over U.S. borders. Poverty . . . . cannot be detained by walls.”
