Editorial, 05/01/2006 -- Why not seek way to erase border?

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By THE NEW MEXICAN
May 1, 2006
With all the anti-immigrant nonsense being spewn about good fences making good neighbors, we can’t help thinking about someone else’s notion of boundaries: Longtime Latin-American heartthrob Leo Dan, in a song called Toquen, Mariachis, Canten, posed the rhetorical question: ¿Fronteras, porque fronteras ?
To which we in his amen corner ask why, indeed, borders ? If the cantante and his music had their way, only God would put up such things.
And from our vantage point in a land where the Spanish Empire, far from being fenced off, merely petered out in the vastness of the Rocky Mountains, we can’t help wondering why gringolandia must end or begin at Naco or El Paso and why official Mexico makes its abrupt appearance right across the river. Sure — the war, the purchase, Winfield Scott, Santa Anna and all that. But despite sporadic political hostility, personal friendships run deep between many on both sides of the border. So do business partnerships and academic-andcultural exchanges, not to mention the flow of tourists back and forth. That country’s culture reaches far into ours — and ours pervades theirs.
So instead of more border, as our demagogues are demanding, how about less of it?
Twenty-five years ago, Joel Garreau and some of his Washington Post colleagues came up with the notion of MexAmerica. It included New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California and some of Texas, as well as most of Mexico. That land, as Garreau went on to explain in a pipe-dreaming bestseller, would be one of The Nine Nations of North America — which, he imagined, made more sense than the 90-odd states and provinces making up today’s Canada, Mexico and United States.
He wasn’t talking secession; he was merely pointing out that the needs and desires of people might better be met by facing up to geo-anthropological facts that transcend today’s line-in-the-sand borders.
His line would be so vague that the crossing from MexAmerica into Colorado, for example, would recognize what New Mexicans have long known — that the arbitrary state-border sign up near Costilla is just that. Up the Rockies — and down the Sierra Madres — the airwaves are increasingly dominated by Spanish.
So why not embrace that reality instead of forcibly rejecting it? And why not do what we can to reduce the need for a border wall — or even what passes for a border fence out in the remote stretches of the 1,933-mile U.S.-Mexico boundary?
Why doesn’t our nation, which barely blinks at blowing hundreds of billions of dollars destroying faraway Iraq, spend even a fraction of that amount on a Mexico from which millions don’t feel the need to flee?
Contrary to nucaroja notions that it’s just jobs the illegal immigrants are trying to take from some readywilling-and-able work force they imagine, those pouring across our border are attracted at least as much by our abundance of cheap goods. The North American Free Trade Agreement has helped put many consumer items in Mexican households, but much more could be done.
Steven Hill of the New America Foundation, in a recent commentary for The Washington Post, suggests massive subsidies from the United States to Mexico, “a Tex-Mex Marshall Plan,” aimed at decreasing disparities on the Mexican side of the border and, in the process, fostering a climate riper for investment. This, he says, would create more jobs in Mexico and a lifestyle few would want to leave.
He takes as a model the European Union, which has brought in some less-developed nations from the oncecommunist world. The economic and political integration going on across the Atlantic could be carried out here, he contends.
It wouldn’t be easy. Nationalism, both real and hokedup by demagogues on both sides of the line, would be a major obstacle. It would call for kid-gloves diplomacy, but the commercial advantages to our side, and the material ones to still-poor Mexico, would aid the effort. Education — especially the bilingual/bicultural kind — could accomplish wonders.