Security, Decency, and Broken Bodies at the Border
Security, Decency, and Broken Bodies at the Border
Paul Wise, a pediatrician devoted to conflict resolution for children around the world, writes in this commentary that the human limits of deterrent policies on our southern border lie in the boundaries of acceptance and decency of the American people.
Paul Wise, MD, MPH, writes in this JAMA Open Network commentary that migrants are so desperate for what they believe will be better and safer lives in the United States that they’ll risk the broken bones and fatal falls as they climb the southern border wall.
“A former, veteran Border Patrol agent told me recently, `Border walls alone never stop anybody’” writes Wise, a core faculty member at Stanford Health Policy and the Richard E. Behrman Professor of Child Health and Safety. “People desperate to cross will go over, under, or around.” Migrants arriving at the US-Mexican border have likely invested their life savings, often taking out rapacious loans, in order to finance their journey north. Many migrants have trekked through the treacherous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama, and all have endured the risk of corruption, sexual assault, extortion, and murder that menaces migrant travel through Guatemala and Mexico. After all this they reach the US border and are met with the wall’s steel bollards or, in some parts of Texas, a twirl of barbed wire. None turn around and go home. They go over, under, or around.
“Many decide to go over. Inevitably, of the thousands who make this choice every year, some will fall and some will be injured, and some attempting to climb over the 30 foot sections will die."
“We need the rule of law at the border as we do everywhere else in the US. While the wall itself does not stop migrant crossings, it does, nevertheless, have its uses for border security. It certainly has political utility, emerging first as a rhetorical metaphor but subsequently reified as steel and cement. Most border security professionals support physical barriers at the border, but concentrated in strategic locations. This is because the primary deterrent function of obstacles at the border is diversion, which uses risk and hardship to shift migrant flows to locations more easily patrolled or surveilled. In urban areas, the wall can also buy time for Border Patrol agents to apprehend migrants before they can blend into local communities."
