The Wall!
And the Crazed Context of Immigration Politics
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…
“Good fences make good neighbors.”
Robert Frost, Mending Wall
There is China’s Great Wall; the Berlin Wall of the Cold War era; the Western Wall in Jerusalem, a sacred site in Judaism; the concrete slab of a wall that separates Israelis from Palestinians on the West Bank. And there are walls and fences along the U.S.-Mexico border that now measure some 741 miles.
Walls are symbols of division. For more than fifty years, each presidential administration has added to the barriers along the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico frontier, mostly without controversy.
With the belligerent launch of his presidential campaign in June 2015, Donald Trump turned immigration and the wall into a core component of his candidacy, denouncing immigrants and pledging to construct a “big, beautiful” wall that Mexico would pay for.
In many polls about the 2024 election, immigration has emerged as the top issue for voters ahead of all others, such as the economy and national security.
Amid the uproar, disputes in Congress over immigration held up funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia and Israel’s conflict in Gaza for months. Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, was improbably impeached over his supposedly lax enforcement of immigration laws (and immediately acquitted). A New York Times headline declared, “Who Could Sway the Outcome of the U.S.President Election? Mexico’s, as though the U.S. contest will be determined by whether President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is committed to using whatever means he had to turn migrants away from the border.
So, a visit to the southernmost corner of California and the imposing border station at Tijuana, where upwards of 150,000 people cross each day, including tens of thousands of Mexicans who work in the San Diego area and line up before dawn each morning, is startling.
Coming from New York, a visitor’s expectation has been shaped by the imagery of desperation with streams of families arriving to face unknown consequences after an arduous and dangerous journey. Walls are meant to have grandeur, menace, or social impact on both sides. The reality is more complicated.
There is no doubt that the massive stream of migrants – the Custom and Border Protection number of encounters in 2023 were more than 2.4 million – pose a profound challenge with drug smuggling, human trafficking and economic stress on cities is a serious problem.
Tijuana, a city of more than two million people, is and always has been notable for urban disarray, violence, corruption, and as a gateway to Baja California, where tourists travel for the vineyards and sunny recreation. The daily melee at the border has long lines of legal migrants waiting to cross into the United States, few of whom seem to qualify for the SENTRI pass, which would enable speedy entry.
Barely more than a half mile inside the United States – and a stone’s throw from Tijuana’s frenetic vibe – is the Camino Real district, a vast array of retail outlets – that symbolizes how close the migrants can get to their vision of a better life in America.
Then there is the strip of wall at San Judas, a short distance away, where as recently as February hundreds of people a day lifted the coils over the steel stanchions and entered the United States illegally. That scene was vividly described in another New York Times story headlined “A Makeshift Camp for Weary Migrants.”
The wall at San Judas is in scrub land among the hills, the landscape littered with the detritus of migrants awaiting the Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans that collect them. ICE processes them over two days or so and then drops them at bus stations in San Diego, where they will make their way to destinations across the country to await asylum hearings or simply to blend into the population of about eleven million undocumented people now in the country.
But a close-up glimpse of the issue, especially at what became known as the San Judas break and was featured on 60 Minutes this winter, reduces the scale to something much smaller. On the day we were there, the arrivals were a cluster of Chinese, mainly young men who had traveled seven thousand miles by air and land to squeeze around the steel slats. Indians, Afghans, and Central Asians also come to the place, encouraged, we were told, by TikTok videos.
The daily numbers are way down now because a small contingent of Mexican National Guard have been posted there, after the break in the wall appeared on prime-time television. Peering through the steel, the soldiers seemed to be doing what bored soldiers do everywhere – very little.
Three Californians -- Sam Schultz; his wife, Gabrielle; and their son John -- are the organizers of a volunteer effort to provide basic necessities to the migrants as they await the arrival of the border vans. In the nearby village of Jacumba Hot Springs, they have a ramshackle warehouse of staples to share. They make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a symbol for the migrants of arriving in a very different place from where they started.
Schultz, who is sixty-eight, spent years in Indonesia with his family and is experienced in aid work and assistance and now lives in the area. He defies easy characterization. He says his journalism idol was Hunter S. Thompson. The chaos of the immigration issue and its place in American politics is “bonkers,” he says. He just wants the arrivals at San Judas to know they are welcome.
The United States in 2024 is overwhelmed in so many ways by our divisions – red, blue, Black, white, pro-and anti-vaxxers, pro-Palestinians and supporters of Israel. There is a sense that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are destined to battle to a finish that will be decided by a fraction of the electorate, even if there is a criminal conviction of the former president.
No matter what happens with the scale of the border wall, the fences, and the mighty Rio Grande, they will not stop migrants willing to risk all for the journey. There is no dispute that the immigration situation is a mess.
At the San Diego International Airport, returning to New York, we saw some young Chinese men, perhaps the same ones who had made it through on the day of our visit to San Judas. They were holding boarding passes and clutching backpacks. I considered asking them their plans and decided they’d been through enough.
My guess is they just want to get on with their lives.
