THOUGHTS ON SHUTTING DOWN
by Danielle Gallo
I
haven’t paid much attention to
national politics over the past couple
of years, preferring instead to focus
on my own sphere of influence—the
things I can affect with my time and
attention and energy, rather than wasting
those resources on situations I can’t
affect.
But one thing that has affected me is
the current debate over our border with
Mexico, and the government shutdowns
that occurred in an effort to force a bor-
der wall.
Having been a government employee
with both the National Forest Service
and the National Park Service, it hurt to
see our parks shut down and their
employees left stranded, many of them
forced to work without pay. It hurt to
think of the damage that was done to our
parks both physically and financially, and
how that damage will reverberate into
the future. Mostly it hurt to think that a
tactic similar to what my four-year-old
uses to get her way was used against both
the public and our government employ-
ees. It was worse than your garden-vari-
ety blackmail; it was more like, ‘give me
what I want, or I’ll force these low-wage
workers to hold THEIR breaths until
they pass out.’
The worst of it, for me at least, was
the source of these tantrums. By this I
mean the desire to encase our country in
steel and barbed-wire. I mean the fearful
nationalism that has crept into our dis-
course, our politics, and our policies
periodically throughout our history,
which is now enjoying a bloated resur-
gence.
We recall the result of that creeping
chauvinism in the past: our refusal to
allow hundreds of thousands of Jewish
immigrants seeking asylum into the U.S.
during Hitler’s reign of terror; the border
policies that caused us to douse Mexican
day workers with gasoline, DDT and
Zyklon B on a daily basis until the mid-
1950s; our treatment of immigrant
waves from the Chinese to the Central
Europeans to the Irish since the incep-
tion of the United States as a nation.
Every one of these periodic fevers
against the ‘others’ seeking to destroy our
precious American way of life has in the
end resulted in an episode of our history
that must be taught with regretful hind-
sight. No immigrant wave has ever
destroyed the fabric of our civilization,
our national health or our economy. On
the contrary: every wave has added its
many threads to our national tapestry,
making it richer, stronger, and more
beautiful. Yet, every time we are faced
with a fresh batch of otherness at our
doorstep, we react as though we’re being
attacked.
This is not to say that I don’t see ille-
gal immigration as a problem in our
country. I do believe, however, that the
problem of illegal immigration can be
solved very handily without building a
massive physical or technological barrier
on our border. It can be solved econom-
ically, by helping those countries to have
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stable, uncorrupted governments with
good economies. That solution would
likely cost a great deal less than the $26-
million-per-mile wall. It can be solved by
actively and rationally addressing the war
on drugs—the demand for drugs in the
United States being the leading cause of
the violence in countries like Honduras,
whose people are fleeing to the U.S. in a
desperate attempt to escape the horror.
Most of all, it can be solved by opening,
rather than closing, our minds, hearts,
borders, policies, hopes and dreams.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re
thinking I’m a hippie, or a Pollyanna, or
a bleeding-heart liberal with no experi-
ence of the complexities of border issues.
But I was here when they closed our soft
crossings in 2002, and I lived in
Boquillas during the closure. I saw the
devastation those small closings had on
our wider community. There was no
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