So build it already

From Front Page Magazine:

Both the previous Mexican president, Vicente Fox, and the new one, Felipe Calderon, have compared the U.S. decision to construct an additional 700 miles of border fencing—authorized in October by a Senate bill signed by President George W. Bush—to the decision to build the Berlin Wall. Fox called the move an “embarrassment for the United States,” and Calderon dubbed the decision “deplorable.”

Actually, the analogy to the Berlin Wall is embarrassing and deplorable. The words “Berlin Wall” and “U.S.-Mexico border fence” should not be used in the same sentence, especially by educated men like Fox and Calderon, who ought to know better.

[. . .]

The Berlin Wall was built for the purpose of holding captive a population of East Germans suffering under Soviet communism. Communism was so stifling that those who lived under it naturally tried to escape. The human drain was so constant that communist authorities built a wall, on top of which they placed barbwire, and along which they posted soldiers. Innocent, unarmed civilians who dared to try to leave—there was no such thing as “love it or leave it”—were simply arrested or shot, and hundreds were in fact killed.

The guards that patrolled this wall never needed to look westward for outsiders seeking to enter, since no foreigners wanted to sign up for life in the Communist Bloc, despite ongoing assurances from leftists in American universities who insisted that the people behind the Iron Curtain were just as happy as we Americans, and how dare we be so arrogant as to think our system was superior.

Needless to say, then, the Berlin Wall was quite different from the U.S. border with Mexico. The U.S. border is patrolled not to prevent, say, Texans from escaping a tyrannical America for the sunlight of freedom in Mexico, but, rather, because U.S. policymakers have concluded that America cannot accommodate all of those yearning to live here.

In short, a U.S. border fence with Mexico is a symbol of the freedom and desirability of our country. To the contrary, the Berlin Wall was a symbol of the lack of freedom and desirability of the communist world. The Berlin Wall was a cold, gray tombstone to human freedom, whereas America remains a beacon to human freedom.

The analogy by Fox and Calderon would only work if the Mexican government was building a wall to hold its citizens captive, to patrol them, to shoot them. Maybe Fox and Calderon should be careful with the comparison.

[. . .]

As for Mexico, however, nearly all of its recent presidents are the product of American Ivy League colleges, principally Harvard, where they got their news from The New York Times. Shouldn’t they know better?

If Mexico’s leaders cannot grasp the simple difference between their border with America and the Berlin Wall, then their citizens have worse problems than I had thought.

Great essay, but I don't see all that much difference between going to Harvard and getting your news from The New York Times and going to Moscow University in the 1940's and getting your news from Pravda. After all in neither case would you get anything like a true picture of what the world was really like.