No Border Control

Renee Downing, who normally writes for the Tucson Weekly, had an interesting column in the Washington Post a couple of days ago. She presented an unusual and enlightening perspective on border control, illegal immigration, and related problems in southern Arizona. I'm sure her perspective isn't unusual for folks who live there, but it's valuable for the rest of us. She began by praising

...the few dozen vigilantes calling themselves Minutemen who set up camp along the Arizona-Mexico border last month. ... We were just thrilled by the publicity. We've been trying to get the rest of the country to notice what's going on down here for years.

However, she quickly transitions to a devastating critique of the federal government's actions to control the border between Arizona and Mexico, including a thoughtful review of some issues associated with illegal immigration from Mexico that aren't often heard.

U.S. immigration policy has turned the Arizona desert between Tucson and the border into a nightmare zone of suffering, death, destruction and terrible ironies, and the people who live here are sick to death of it. Human beings, fragile desert and a whole way of life are perishing, and no one out there seems to care. ...

And so we who love this beautiful, dying region now live in a sort of occupied zone within our own nation, pinioned by politicians' indifference and officials' lack of imagination. We expect another bad summer.

I've spent a lot of time exploring the beautiful country of southern Arizona. It's a wild mountainous desert area that you either love or hate. I love it, and it's sad to think of it as a place of death for so many unfortunate human beings and a place being despoiled by ill-conceived actions of the federal government.