Is the U.S. wall on the Mexican border (such as it exists and might exist) a unique case among the world’s borders ?

Not at all, says Canadian columnist Gwynne Dyer , who, in a recent article[The Good Fences Epidemic Gwynne Dyer Jerusalem Post Feb. 14th, 2007 ], provides a handy summary of various countries building security fences to keep out unwanted intruders.

Thailand is walling off Malaysia, India is fencing off both Bangladesh and Pakistan, Pakistan is putting up a fence on its border with Afghanistan, China is walling off North Korea, Uzbekistan is fencing off Tajikistan, The United Arab Emirates is building a fence on its border with Oman, Kuwait has one on its border with Iraq, Spain has fenced off Morocco, and Morocco has fenced off Algeria, Saudi Arabia has been fencing off Yemen, and Israel has set up security barriers on its borders with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria and has been walling off the Palestinians. Dyer indicates that the most sophisticated security barrier is the one Saudi Arabia is setting up to wall off Iraq:

“The new wall will include buried movement sensors, ultraviolet night-vision cameras, face- recognition software and quite probably automated weapons in addition to the usual electrified fences, concertina wire, dry moats and mines.”

“By comparison, the apparently endless debate about building a relatively low-tech fence along the 3,360-km. US border with Mexico to cut illegal immigration seems like an echo from an innocent past.”

As for why we can’t build a better one on the Mexican border, Dyer hits the nail on the head:

” The reason that the United States is incapable of controlling its Mexican border is political, not financial or technological: powerful domestic lobbies work to ensure a steady supply of ‘undocumented’ Mexican workers who will accept very low wages because they are in the US illegally. President George W. Bush has now been authorized by Congress to build a fence along about 1,125 km. of the Mexican border, but he will stall as long as he can while experimenting with a so-called ‘virtual fence.’”

The Associated Press writes in the International Herald Tribune:

The work force at International Business Machines Corp. grew 8 percent in 2006, with most of the rise coming in India, where the technology company has been on a hiring binge in recent years.

The figures were disclosed Tuesday in IBM’s annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission. IBM noted that at the end of 2006 it employed 355,766 people, up from 329,373 one year earlier.

Its base in India was 52,000 people — up from 36,000 one year earlier

……

That makes India the second-largest center for IBM, trailing only the United States, where IBM’s work force rose slightly to 127,000. India is so key to IBM that Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano held his annual analysts’ briefing there last June rather than in the traditional location of New York.

Now, what this means is that IBM is dumping its American work force–particularly its American technical work force. The SEC doesn’t require reporting on the immigration status of employees, but I think if we could get figures on the number of H-1b/L-1 guest workers, green card holders and naturalized citizens being employed by IBM in recent years, it would be a safe bet that the number of Americans born in the USA that have been employed by IBM in recent years has gone down significantly. I would seriously question the ability of IBM management to get key information at this point without relying heavily on sources of data that may be skewed by ethnic and national nepotism. Can IBM really guarentee the security of software systems developed in India?

The thing is, IBM is major US government contractor–and a major corporate welfare recipient. Does it really make sense for the American people to do that kind of business with what is essentially a foreign company?

In the long run, I think we need to revisit the entire issue of intellectual property-which is a major mechanism that has helped create economic dinosaurs like IBM, Intel, HP, Oracle and Microsoft. Reputable economists like Lester Thurow at MIT have suggested that right of eminent domain be used more aggressively to acquire key patents and technologies and place them in the public domain. If there were done appropriately, a lot of the niche for companies like IBM could be greatly reduced.

Schlesinger was a New Deal and New Frontier liberal, which actually put him to the right of, or perhaps on the more patriotic side of, the modern multiculturalists.

Here are a couple of excerpts from his New York Times obit, Arthur Schlesinger, Historian of Power, Dies at 89 [By Douglas Martin, February 28, 2007]

However liberal, he was not a slave to what came to be called political correctness. He spiritedly defended the old-fashioned American melting pot against proponents of multiculturalism, the idea that ethnicities should retain separate identities and even celebrate them. He elicited tides of criticism by comparing Afrocentrism to the Ku Klux Klan.

And later in the obit, we see this:

In 1991, Mr. Schlesinger provoked a backlash with “The Disuniting of America,” an attack on the emergent “multicultural society” in which he said Afrocentrists claimed superiority and demanded that their separate identity be honored by schools and other institutions.

The novelist Ishmael Reed denounced Mr. Schlesinger as a “follower of David Duke,” the former Ku Klux Klan leader. The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. caricatured Mr. Schlesinger’s arguments as a demand for “cultural white-face.”

Mr. Schlesinger was nonplussed. He frequently described himself as an unreconstructed New Dealer whose basic thinking had changed little in a half century.

“What the hell,” he answered when questioned by The Washington Post about his attack on multiculturalism. “You have to call them as you see them. This too shall pass.”

Little Mexico in Suburban Los Angeles: Southern California has an enormous number of municipalities, some of which increasingly resemble Cicero, Illinois in Al Capone’s day. Here’s an LA Weekly article about a town I’d never heard of, but is home to 28,000 unfortunate people.

The Town the Law Forgot
An L.A. ’burb is mired in gangs, cartels and south-of-the-border-style politics
By Jeffrey Anderson

Cudahy resembles a Mexican border town more than it does a Los Angeles suburb. Entrenched gangs and Mexican drug trafficking have trapped working-class legal and illegal immigrants in a cycle of violence and fear, in a city where less than a quarter of the 28,000 residents are eligible to vote. An uneducated city council, a deeply troubled police force imported from Maywood two towns over, and the raw power of the 18th Street Gang — a complex criminal organization with a knack for setting up business fronts and obscuring underground drug activity — make Cudahy residents seem like hostages in their own city…

With its narrow, deep lots — the result of an agricultural past that is long gone — its glut of rundown apartment buildings and its lack of economic growth, Cudahy offers a good example of how Mexican drug cartels, the prison-based Mexican mafia and gangs like 18th Street are attracted to the Los Angeles–adjacent industrial sprawl populated by poor immigrants. Do these criminal elements influence Cudahy’s leaders, with city officials answering to someone other than the public or the rule of law, in a town policed by another town’s troubled police force? [More]