Plessner Chronicle Blog

 For more than a dozen years I owned a retail business in El Centro, California, a city of more than 40,000 people. El Centro is located about 17 miles North of the United States-Mexican border. At the border, the smaller city of Calexico sits across the border from Mexicali, a city of more than a million people.
The 15-foot fence defines the border over the full width of the city of Calexico. It was constructed well before the current effort to complete a fence along the entire border.
Much of the border in California is under 24-hour surveillance by television and infra-red cameras. In the city of Calexico, the fence is also under 24-hour surveillance by Border Patrol agents sitting in their vehicles, each in sight of the agent in front of
them watching the next sector.
My company provided wheelchairs, beds and other home medical equipment to the public. On one autumn afternoon I was in a home on First Avenue in Calexico with Rene, an associate and friend. We were delivering a new wheelchair to a teenage girl
who required it for all her activities.
On the other side of First Avenue one is confronted by — you guessed it — the 15-foot fence!
As I sat on the floor adjusting the chair, someone knocked on the house’s back door. It was a Border Patrol supervisor asking if anyone had seen or heard someone run through the back yard. An agent saw a man dash across First Avenue and they thought he might be hiding in the now-darkening backyard.
The girl’s grandmother said that she had neither seen nor heard anyone but if she did she would call the Border Patrol. (She was irritated by strangers running through her yard at all hours.) The agent thanked her and left.
After finishing the adjustment to the wheelchair, I got up,
gathered my signed documents and opened the front door to leave.
In the front yard I found a young and obviously new Border Patrol
agent shining a flashlight up into the tree looking for you-know-
who!
After we got into our van it dawned on me that if a man can
jump a 15-foot fence in mid-afternoon in downtown Calexico —
which is under 24-hour human, television and infra-red
surveillance — and get away with it, just how effective will a
15-foot high fence be in the middle of the Arizona desert?
Obviously any fence would provide a degree of deterrence to
illegal border crossings, but will it really solve the problem?
Of course not!
The fence is just the beginning of the effort to secure our
Southern border. But beyond the quick-fix benefit of placating
opponents to immigration in general, is it really worth the
costs, financial, social and environmental?
Every nation has the right to establish and defend firm
boundaries and every nation has an obligation to police those
border areas and protect its citizens. But the issue of
immigration is a lot more complex than fence building or
surveillance. And when you live in the borderland it is a big
part of your everyday life.
The borderland can be a complex and fascinating place,
especially for a nosy city slicker like me. And the issues now
before us are a lot more complex than most people understand.
Over the next few months I will share some of my other
experiences and impressions of life on the border. Like the time
I saw a Mexicali street kid jump the fence, run off into a
parking lot and disappear.

In the meantime tell us what you think by writing on our BLOG!

I am fed up to here with all the nativistic bigotry spewing forth over immigration. Critics of the congressional proposal on immigration reform need to understand one immutable fact: It’s the economy, stupid!”America is a wonderful and amazing country. Because of the American ethics of hard work and innovation, we are the most productive job creation machine in world history. And that has been the case since those first German immigrants began landing in Philadelphia and other colonial towns in the 1790s. Even to the consternation of Benjamin Franklin, they were just not English enough.

Immigrants have always been vital to our nation’s growth and they have almost always begun at the bottom of the economic ladder. New arrivals in cities have always done the most menial jobs, working in dangerous factories and as domestic servants. And over the years, many male immigrants’ first American jobs were as hired farm hands. Sound familiar? Read the rest of this entry »