Up Against the Wall

Peter Laufer

Description

A step-by-step blueprint offering radical proposals to ease restrictions on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The book offers a step-by-step blueprint of radical proposals for the U.S.-Mexican border that go far beyond traditional initiatives to ease restrictions on immigration. Up Against the Wall provides the background to understanding how the border has become a fraud, resulting in nothing more than the criminalization of Mexican and other migrants. The book argues that the border with Mexico should be completely open for Mexicans wishing to travel north.

Preface, Bienvenidos, Amigos; Foreword, by Former President of Mexico Vicente Fox; Chapter 1, Up Against the Wall, (Expletive); Chapter 2, Illegal Alien or Clever New American; Chapter 3, Still Life on the Border; Chapter 4, On Guard; Chapter 5, Death along for the Ride; Chapter 6, A Weary Lawyer’s View; Chapter 7, What Is a Border?; Chapter 8, Failed Borders; Chapter 9, U.S. Annexation of Half of Mexico; Chapter 10, Early Border Control; Chapter 11, The Historical Failure of Border Control; Chapter 12, The Vigilante Movement; Chapter 13, Americans Party South, Mexicans Struggle North; Chapter 14, The Porous, Shifting Border; Chapter 15, Illegal Americans; Chapter 16, On the Kentucky-Mexican Border; Chapter 17, Deportation Made Easier; Chapter 18, One Farmer Working by the Rules; Chapter 19, Who Wants the Border Closed?; Chapter 20, Burden or Benefit?; Chapter 21, The Long Road North from Chiapas and Chihuahua; Chapter 22, No Amigos in the White House; Epilogue, A Practical Blueprint for Normalizing the U.S.-Mexico Border; Index.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Ethnic studies
• Social sciences
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 14 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785275265
• Langue: English

Extrait

Up Against the Wall
Also by Peter Laufer

Dreaming in Turtle: A Journey through the Passion, Profit, and Peril of Our Most Coveted Prehistoric Creatures
Organic: A Journalist’s Quest to Discover the Truth behind Food Labeling
The Elusive State of Jefferson: A Journey through the 51st State
Interviewing: The Oregon Method (editor)
Slow News: A Manifesto for the Critical News Consumer
No Animals Were Harmed: The Controversial Line between Entertainment and Abuse
Forbidden Creatures: Inside the World of Animal Smuggling and Exotic Pets
The Dangerous World of Butterflies: The Startling Subculture of Criminals, Collectors and Conservationists
Neon Nevada (with Sheila Swan Laufer)
¡Calexico! True Lives of the Borderlands
Hope Is a Tattered Flag (with Markos Kounalakis)
Mission Rejected: U.S. Soldiers Who Say No to Iraq
Exodus to Berlin: The Return of the Jews to Germany
Highlights of a Lowlife: The Autobiography of Milan Melvin (editor)
Shock and Awe: Responses to War (editor)
¡See You Later, Amigo! An American Border Tale (illustrated by Susan L. Roth)
Made in Mexico/Hecho en México (illustrated by Susan L. Roth)
Wireless Etiquette: A Guide to the Changing World of Instant Communication
Safety and Security for Women Who Travel (with Sheila Swan Laufer)
Inside Talk Radio: America’s Voice or Just Hot Air
A Question of Consent: Innocence and Complicity in the Glen Ridge Rape Case
Nightmare Abroad: Stories of Americans Imprisoned in Foreign Lands
Iron Curtain Rising: A Personal Journey through the Changing Landscape of Eastern Europe
Up Against the Wall
THE CASE FOR OPENING THE MEXICAN-AMERICAN BORDER
PETER LAUFER, PhD
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Peter Laufer 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940396
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-524-1 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-524-0 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Photographs and maps by the author.
para Sheila
con aprecio profundamente
y amor infinito
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface: Bienvenidos, Amigos
Foreword by former President of Mexico, Vicente Fox
Chapter 1. Up against the Wall (Expletive)
Chapter 2. Illegal Alien or Clever New American
Chapter 3. Still Life on the Border
Chapter 4. On Guard
Chapter 5. Death along for the Ride
Chapter 6. A Weary Lawyer’s View
Chapter 7. What Is a Border?
Chapter 8. Failed Borders
Chapter 9. U.S. Annexation of Half of Mexico
Chapter 10. Early Border Control
Chapter 11. The Historical Failure of Border Control
Chapter 12. The Vigilante Movement
Chapter 13. Americans Party South, Mexicans Struggle North
Chapter 14. The Porous, Shifting Border
Chapter 15. Illegal Americans
Chapter 16. On the Kentucky-Mexico Border
Chapter 17. Deportation Made Easier
Chapter 18. One Farmer Working by the Rules
Chapter 19. Who Wants the Border Closed?
Chapter 20. Burden or Benefit?
Chapter 21. The Long Road North from Chiapas and Chihuahua
Chapter 22. No Amigos in the White House
Epilogue: A Practical Blueprint for Normalizing the Border
Notes
Acknowledgment
About the Author
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 A bleak winter scene along the failed Maginot Line where upended rails were placed along the border with Germany to stop Hitler’s invading tanks. The Panzers simply went around the blockade.
1.2 Modern life can be as quotidian as a bus ride alongside a two-millennia-old Roman wall in Rimini—a wall designed to protect the city from invaders that now attracts tourists.
1.3 Making do—friends and family visit through the border wall at Friendship Park under the ever-watching eyes of the Border Patrol.
4.1 Marking division from sea to shining sea, the starkly differentiated Mexican-American borderline drops into the Pacific between San Diego and Tijuana.
7.1 In Rosario, Argentina, this smiling convenience store owner protects himself and his stock against bandits by doing business from inside the walls of his cage.
8.1 Portugal’s Guimarães Castle, built over a thousand years ago, needed no panic room. It is a panic room: windowless. All walls.
8.2 The cover sheet for the author’s Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Stasi) file.
8.3 The abandoned Green Zone in Nicosia, keeping the Turkish Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots apart in the last walled city of Europe.
8.4 The Cyprus Green Line is a ghost-town swath across the island, a scar leaving echoes of emptiness since 1974.
8.5 A police dummy at work on the highway outside Addis Ababa, alongside a makeshift wall of corrugated metal.
9.1 The wall of one of the “slave castles” on the Ghana coast. Through holes in the walls like this one captive Africans bound for slavery were loaded on ships headed for the Americas.
12.1 Along even the most fraught borderlines in the world—such as Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall—barriers eventually become routine stops for tourists’ smiles at the camera.
12.2 The Virgin of Guadalupe provides comfort—faded, peeling and sharing a sun-bleached wall with graffiti tags in El Centro, California.
14.1 Sound walls keep much of the roar of traffic confined to the Autostrada without blocking the view at Arno in Tuscany.
14.2 The pragmatic use of a Portland, Oregon, wall: advertising.
19.1 A retaining wall north of the border in California on Highway 101 holding back a hillside threatening to slide a blockade of mud across the crucial coastal corridor.
19.2 The border as business. Modest lodgings like this Calexico motel greet travelers coming across the border from cosmopolitan Mexicali.
21.1 A smoke break up against a wall in Varadero, Cuba.
22.1 The severe and serpentine borderline wall separating Fortress America from the Global South at Tijuana.
22.2 With prototypes for Trump’s wall as a backdrop, a family walks along the borderline on the Tijuana side. Note the little girl riding on the bike: Her angelic face illustrates the front cover of Up Against the Wall .
PREFACE: BIENVENIDOS, AMIGOS
I am prejudiced to favor immigrants. How can I not be? My father came through Ellis Island. I have the page from the logbook where his arrival was recorded by the immigration officer on duty. He answered all the questions to the satisfaction of the inspector.

“Whether a polygamist?”
“No.”
“Whether an anarchist?”
“No.”
And Question 24:

Whether a person believes in or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law, or who disbelieves in or is opposed to organized government, or who advocates the assassination of public officials, or who advocates or teaches the unlawful destruction of property, or is a member of or affiliated with any organization entertaining and teaching disbelief in or opposition to organized government or which teaches the unlawful destruction of property, or who advocates or teaches the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers, either of specific individuals or of officers in general, of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government because of his or their official character?
“No,” my father answered. It was 1923 and America was still more worried about immigrating anarchists from Middle Europe than Mexicans coming north.
“You’re an American by birth,” my father repeatedly reminded me. “I’m an American by choice.”
Years ago, my wife Sheila and I spent days searching the bowels of the La Porte County courthouse in Indiana, finally finding her grandfather’s naturalization papers.
“It is my bona fide intention,” he swore to the clerk of the La Porte County Court in 1913, “to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and Apostolic King of Hungary.”
We secured the address of the house in what used to be called the Poletown section of La Porte where her mother lived before immigrating to California. Poletown was still on the wrong side of the tracks. The railroad bisects La Porte. South of the ornate courthouse, gracious Victorian mansions line Michigan Avenue under a canopy of well-established trees. But east of downtown and north across the tracks the boxy houses are humble, packed into the rusting factory and wareh