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| Frost |
“Good fences,” Robert Frost wrote, “make good neighbors.”
By “fences,” Frost, a hearty New Englander, meant fieldstone
fences or walls. The fences, stones gathered by farmers in new fields and used
to mark the boundaries of their property, may still be seen in Connecticut
coursing through forested areas.
President Joe Biden has decided, surprisingly, to supply funds
to Texas that will be used to reinforce former President Donald Trump’s “border
wall” because, he has said, he was forced to do so by law.
The law to which he has referred is the presence of funds
made available by a congressional order. Some Biden critics have averred it was
the presence in the United States of millions of foreign citizens who have not
been processed properly at a southern border overrun by illegal immigrants, not
a spending bill, that converted Biden on the matter of Trump’s wall.
Many people in the country tend to take things said by Biden
during an election campaign with – quoting Mark Twain here – “a ton of salt.”
We all know that the near presence of a political campaign
does tend to make ambitious politicians deploy what Twain called “stretchers,”
first cousins to “lies,” but this particular Biden stretcher appears to be a
rude attempt to recover quickly from the disastrous consequences of a border
policy that has destructively left the border door open to illegal immigrants
now flooding New York City’s posh hotels, the tab being picked up by state and
federal taxpayers.
Resentment in the Big Apple is running hot. Republicans have
promised to make border insecurity a plank with which to thump Democrats in the
upcoming 2024 campaigns, and polls universally show Biden’s support on the
issue of border safety dipping dangerously low. Naturally, some Democrats are
beginning to boil over.
Since Biden methodically began to dismember Trump’s border
protocols, President of Mexico López Obrador has showered Biden with plaudits.
Obrador regards the Biden policy reversal as a setback.
“It is a setback,” Obrador said recently, “because it does
not resolve the problem.”
In the past, one report tells us, “Obrador had frequently
praised Biden because ‘he is the first U.S. president in a long time who has
not built any walls.’”
In Frostian terms, the absence of a reliable border has made
Mexico’s president a bad neighbor.
Biden’s turnabout – the administration’s decision to waive
26 federal laws restricting construction of the wall -- will facilitate in
South Texas the building of roughly 20 miles of additional border wall, at the
risk of incurring the displeasure of Obrador and Jonathan Blazer, director of border
strategies at the American Civil Liberties Union, who commented, “The Biden
administration’s decision to rush into border wall construction marks a
profound failure.”
No one yet has asked Blazer whether he regards the construction
of 20 miles of additional border wall a greater or lesser failure than a Biden
policy that has allowed the unauthorized entry into the United States of
upwards of five million border jumpers?
An
AllSides report notes,
“Approximately 5 million people from over 150 countries have entered the U.S.
illegally during Joe Biden's presidency, according to U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol [CBP] data.
“The 5 million figure includes 3.4 million people who were
apprehended at the southern border and at least 900,000 ‘gotaways,’ a term used
to describe people who evaded law enforcement and didn't make asylum or
immigration claims. The CBP had less than 200,000 encounters along the
Southwest border in July, which marks the second month in a row of decreased
encounters. So far in fiscal year 2022, which ended on Sept. 30, CBP has
apprehended more migrants than in all of fiscal year 2022.
“The [CBP] report was predominantly covered by right-and
center-rated outlets. Some reports highlighted how the 5 million figure is
greater than the individual populations of 25 states.”
While CBP collects "gotaway" data, it does not
report that information publicly.
Here in Connecticut, members of the all-Democrat U.S.
Congressional Delegation appear to have retreated behind a safe, campaign
proof, rhetorical wall, carefully scripted responses to impertinent questions.
Why has Biden reversed himself on border wall construction?
Answer: Because Biden is not “above the law.” He was forced
by the U.S. Congress to finance what he regards as a failed project – the
building of a fence to insure right relations between neighbors. To put it
briefly, Congress made Biden do it. The executive branch is constitutionally
obligated to enforce laws created by Congress rather than relying on whimsical
“executive orders.”
Perhaps all the members of the executive branch, the
legislative branch, and the judicial branch should be forced to re-read Frost’s
poem, Mending Wall.
The tension in the poem is created by its author who
asserts, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or
walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.”
Watching his neighbor in shadow on a distant hill ploddingly
building a fieldstone fence – “Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top/In
each hand, like an old-stone savage armed” – he seems to hear the voice of his
neighbor, who “will not go behind his father's saying,/And he likes having
thought of it so well/He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”
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