The year was 1978; the president was Jimmy Carter, and Houston’s own Leonel Castillo was head of Immigration.
History has given us a Great Wall of China, a Maginot Line in France, a McNamara Line in Vietnam and a lesson about man-made barriers:
Most of them don’t work, as long as there are human beings intent on going from one side to the other.
On that backdrop, the United States and Mexico are embroiled in a dispute over what has come to be known as the Tortilla Curtain, a fence along about 27 miles of their 1,950-mile common border.
… No one, least of all the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which will build the fence, pretends that the barrier will stop the flood tide of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico into the United States.
The idea behind the new improved fence is to slow the flow at the most popular crossing points and to force border jumpers out of urban areas and into open areas where they can be detected more readily.
The most popular crossing places are at El Paso, Tex., and San Diego. U.S. Board Patrol officers made half a million arrest of illegal entrants at those two points last year. Existing chain-link fences have been torn apart, making passage easier. Source
It seems that those border problems have been here forever, or at least since the United States took half of Mexico by force.
Hitler built a fence with 2,000 volts, not to keep people out, but to keep people in. Trump suggested building such a fence. The Dutch referred to it as “The wire of death.”
Who knows what the real intent of the wall is as they work to keep people in and keep people out, a la “Berlin Wall.”