by Nicholas Johnson
El Paso Newspaper Tree
"The Rio Grande, for [El Pasoans], is the dividing line between the ancient hell of corruption and injustice and the modern, liberal state where our fellow man decides issues of justice. Thank heavens the river is there." -Official Minuteman Blog
''Once you accept the premise of separation, you come up with ideas that to ordinary people seem insane, but here begin to seem logical. It is now no longer horizontal division, but vertical as well. Part Arab and part Israeli. And eventually, it will create its own reality.'' -Meron Benvenisti, Former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, New York Times, 1 January 2006
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For more than half of the 1,915 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, the dividing line between the two nations is defined by the Rio Grande. For much of the year and for much of its course, the river is shallow, thick with muck, or dry. In urban areas such as El Paso, where the river could otherwise easily be crossed on foot, an array of chain-link fences, cameras, and concertina wire guards the line. Human reinforcements, in the form of the Border Patrol and now the National Guard, patrol the zone with high-powered rifles and night-vision goggles. Those who wish to cross in El Paso thus have a strong incentive to do so through the international bridges, territories which subject the traveler to the control of immigration and customs authorities. The bridges, strictly organized into lines and under total surveillance, are classic examples of a category of architectural theory known as "striated space."
As anyone even distantly aware of the rising immigration debate in the United States knows, the situation beyond and between the border cities is very different. In the thousands of miles of undeveloped desert along Mexico's northern border, enormous stretches of land have few patrols and no fence. Halfhearted posts mark the line, sometimes connected with a line or two of wire, but often not. Even where private landowners, the government, or Minutemen have built more substantial fences out of corrugated tin or razor wire, gaping holes can be found, to say nothing of the vast void that exists on either side of each fence. A space frequently characterized by emptiness and fluidity of movement, where the precise line of the border is often difficult to discern, the desert could be considered a "smooth space."
Estimates of the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States range from 9 million to 12 million. Reliable numbers do not exist which distinguish the number who made illegal crossings at official points of entry, such as the El Paso bridges, from those who cross under the river or across the desert into the United States. The emphasis on a U.S.-Mexico fence, whether in the rhetoric of the Minutemen or in the House of Representatives, judiciary committee, and Senate debates on immigration, is less focused on empirical data showing a cost-benefit analysis - it would be a very expensive fence, stopping an uncertain and uncountable number of crossings - than on the idea of a fence. Citizens and members of Congress, seeking to be patriotic and responsible stewards of their country, are outraged that "the border is undefended," and the ubiquitous fear of foreign terrorism in post-September 11th America helps to crystallize support for closing the gap.....
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