THE 'GREAT WALL OF AMERICA'

Between cynicism and hypocrisy lies the 2,000-mile U.S.- Mexico
border. America is raising a wall in the desert to separate Mexican
drug exporters from American drug consumers, to separate Latin
American peasants who will work for low wages from the Americans who
would hire them.

The Great Wall of America, straddling less than half the length of
the border, descends into canyons and across the desert floor. For
the Mexican, it represents a high hurdle. For the American, it is an
attempt to stop the Roadrunner's progress with an Acme Border Sealing Kit.

In some places the wall is made of tennis-court-style cyclone fencing
or dark mesh of the sort used for barbeque grills in public parks. In
other places the wall is a palisade of 20-foot-tall bars that make a
cage of both sides. The most emphatic segments are constructed of
graffiti-ready slabs of steel.

On the Mexican side, if you stand with your back to the wall, you
will see the poorest neighborhoods, built right up to the line. These
frayed, weedy streets have become the killing fields in an
international drug war; they are more daunting than the dangers of
climbing the wall.

The traditional Mexican accommodation to moral failure -- the bribed
policeman -- has degenerated to lawlessness in places such as Juarez
and Tijuana, where police kill federal soldiers who kill police who
kill drug gangsters who kill other gangsters of the sort who did
kill, apparently with impunity, at least 15 teenagers celebrating a
soccer victory. Punch 911 and you get the devil.

On the American side, if you stand with your back to the wall, you
will see distance, as the United States recedes from the border.
There is a shopping mall with big-box stores half a mile away. There
is a highway that eventually leads to suburban streets laid out in
uniform blocks, and cul-de-sacs where Mexican gardeners are the only
ambulatory human life.

The suburban grid belies America's disorder. Grandma's knockoff Louis
Vuitton handbag is so full of meds it sounds like a snake rattle.
Grandma shares a secret addiction with her drug-addled dude of a
grandson, whose dad prowls the Home Depot parking lot in his Japanese
pickup, looking to hire a couple of Mexicans to clear out some dry scrub.

From a distant height, America's wall might seem a wonderful stunt,
like Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Running Fence" of 1976 -- a
24-mile-long curtain that ran over the Northern California foothills
to the sea. Before it was dismantled, "Running Fence" rippled and
swelled with breezes off the Pacific.

David Tomb, an artist known for his studio portrait paintings, has
for several years been hiking the Southwestern borderlands, drawing
the birds of the region. Tomb tells me he has noticed how often the
American wall interferes with the movement of the many animals that
inhabit the desert and canyons -- wolves, coyotes, mountain lions,
even snakes. His bird subjects are able to fly over the wall, as are
butterflies, as are Piper Cub cocaine consignments.

In the remotest regions of northern Mexico, the terrain is so
treacherous that nature itself forms the wall against America.
Desperation moves migrants to attempt ever-more-treacherous terrain
to achieve U.S. soil.

In recession America 2010, the lament most often heard is that the
middle class is losing its grip on the American dream. (We have
redefined the American dream as the ability of a succeeding
generation to earn more than its preceding generation.)

On patriotism-for-profit talk radio and television, the illegal
immigrant is, by definition, criminal. She comes to steal the
American dream. But in my understanding, the dream belongs to the
desperation of the poor and always has. The goddess of liberty in New
York harbor still advertises for the tired and the poor, the wretched
refuse. I tell you, there is an unlucky man in the Sonoran Desert
today who will die for a chance to pluck dead chickens in Georgia or
change diapers in a rest home in Nevada.

Great empires expand beyond their own borders. Empires in decline build walls.

As it stands, the Great Wall of America is a fraction of the length
of the Great Wall of China. China's dragon-spined ramparts, once a
wonder of isolation, are now a draw for tourists, even while China
trespasses its own borders to forge the Chinese century. The dragon
flies to Africa and to Latin America. While American soldiers die in
Afghanistan, the Chinese venture to Kabul to negotiate mineral rights.

The nearer precedent to the American Wall may be Israel's wall in the
West Bank. More than 400 miles long, the Israeli "barrier" -- in some
places a fence, in others a concrete mass nearly twice the height of
the Berlin Wall -- was constructed, according to Israeli officials,
to deter terrorists. After Sept. 11, the fear one heard in America
was that agents of violence from the Middle East might easily
disguise themselves as Latin American peasants and trespass into our midst.

What more obvious reason is there for a wall than protection? Any
nation should police those who come and go across its borders. But in
the United States, as in Israel, the wall has created a new anxiety.
Once the wall is in place, anxiety about the coming outsider changes
to an anxiety about who belongs within.

The question that has lately been debated in the Knesset is bluntly
stated: Who is a Jew? In Israel, the answer to the question concerns
religion and citizenship. But it entails further practical
considerations. Israel has decided to rid itself of 400 children of
illegal foreign workers (some of whom built the West Bank wall),
children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew as their mother tongue
and know no other country.

The question that has lately been taken up by U.S. senators is
bluntly stated: Who is an American? Republicans have proposed
excising the part of the 14th Amendment that guarantees citizenship
to anyone born on U.S. soil. GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina refers to foreign women who come to this country to "drop"
their babies. Graham chooses diction that describes inhuman beasts of burden.

I cannot guess whether this new nativism -- though it overrules
nativity -- is serious business or merely a play for reelection. The
irony remains: The land of the free that the wall was built to
protect -- the literal "homeland," soil so infused with sacred legend
it was deemed by the makers of the Constitution more important than
blood in determining citizenship -- is threatened from within. And
the wall that is supposed to proscribe the beginning of America
becomes the place where America ends.