Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

The speaker in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall said “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” While his neighbor in the poem is emphatic that, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

I wonder what they would have thought if someone told them the fence would be 700 miles long and cost $1.2 billion to build. That’s what our government would like to build along 1/3 of the U.S. - Mexico border. A matter of national security (stops terrorists from picking our apples), of course, that will save the country billions of dollars (or $5 million-bazillion pesos) in education, health care and public safety.

56 percent of all Americans support the building of the fence, while only 31 percent are against it. It makes me wonder how many of this majority would be willing to do the jobs done by our illegal immigrants.

What? Ours? Americans may be using illegal immigrant labor? Say it ain’t so, Jose?

Uno momento por favor, I need to step outside and tell the upper-middle class, white, college-educated gentleman picking my tomatoes that he is no longer needed, but I will tell him that I hear there may be some work down South Carolina way and that his wife can join him after my kids start back to school. He may even protest in his eloquently spoken native tongue, but I’ll toss him a cold micro-brew, a Cuban cigar and wish him the best of luck. Republican migrants – can’t live with ‘em, can’t turn a profit without ‘em.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” That something should be the United States of America. A country built and defended by immigrants. Why don’t we just forget the stupid fence and put up a new Statue of Liberty on the banks of the Rio Grande with the same greeting from Ellis Island written in plain English:

“Deme su cansado, su pobre,

Sus masa apiñadas que anhelan para respirar libre…