Hold the Line

You can try to tell people that certain issues are inherently complex, but they generally won't listen.

Instead they'll just look at the two main polarities on offer and pick one to sign-up to. Whether it's the War on Terror or Immigration, if you want to be heard, you have to be either for it or against it...or you are nowhere.

Except perhaps when it comes to humour. A good gag will often expose the ironies that people would otherwise avoid confronting. The Onion had a great one last week − a week that began in the US with the Day without an Immigrant protests:

"As dozens of major American corporations continue to move their manufacturing operations to Mexico, waves of job-seeking Mexican immigrants to the United States have begun making the deadly journey back across the border in search of better-paying Mexican-based American jobs."

There were boycott activities in 70 US cities with sympathy stoppages in Guatemala and other primary sources of the 11m indocumentados in the States. "The flower and produce markets in downtown Los Angeles stood largely and eerily empty." noted the New York Times the next day.

At the same time, Nuestro Himno, a Spanish-language version of the Star-Spangled Banner performed by Wyclef Jean and the rehabilitated Gloria Trevi, was forcing an opinion out of George W. Bush: "I think the National Anthem ought to be sung in English".

In terms of geography and international law the sourthern border between the US and Latin America is a long thin line. Yet in almost every other sense, historical, cultural, economic etc. it is a far more complex intersection.

Part of the problem would seem to be that the United States of Mexico and the United States of America have conflicting mythologies of origin underlying their political sense of self. North of the Rio Grande displacement of the 'natives' was a crucial step in the formation of this ideal commonwealth of nations. By way of contrast it used to said that in post-revolutionary Mexico there was only one known statue of Hernan Cortes; and that was in a 4-star hotel. Mexico's heroes are indians not cowboys.

Which may be one reason why certain sectors of the American Right view the Hispanisization of their country as a kind of redskin Reconquista. These are the sort of people anyway inclined to imagine their nation as a homestead surrounded by ululating savages; and some of them have been deliberately muddling the issues of immigration and national security by fuelling persistent rumours that maras like the Salvatrucha are being actively encouraged Al Qaeda.

The irony here is that these ultra-violent, transnational gangs resulted from America's post Cold War policy of mass-deportations of Central American offenders from its own inner cities. This gave rise to a multi-country organised crime structure which is far more dangerous than the crack-crazed street gangs originally sent packing southwards.

It's hard to be sympathetic to the border is an inviolable line point-of-view when US government is so energetic about re-modelling its neighbours in ways that favour US business. At the same time that the FTA would establish the free movement of goods, Congress debates legislation which would harden restrictions against the free movement of people. However hard you fortify the frontier, the boundary between the First and Third Worlds is likely to remain at its most nebulous across this hemisphere.