North of San Diego along the I-5 freeway are large yellow signs with the outline of a string of three people running: a woman holding the hands of two small children. These warn drivers that migrants might suddenly dash in front of vehicles in an attempt to evade authorities. A few miles out of town, traffic slows as vehicles heading north fan out among what look like toll booths. There are no tolls, but those with brown faces or who look suspicious are checked carefully. Drivers with white faces are sometimes asked if anyone else is in the vehicle; more often they are simply waved through. This is another reminder of Life Conditions faced by Mexican immigrants struggling to find a foothold in California and the US, and of the crisis facing the USA.
The immigration reform debate is stirring the Americas. Attention to ‘homeland security’ with emphasis on 'us' over here versus 'them' over there fuel it. From this perspective, good fences make better neighbors in the age of global terrorism when danger in the world is a prevailing perspective. Minutemen organize because they believe the federal government is failing to fulfill its constitutional role of securing the nation's borders. Harsh and intrusive legislation proposed by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (HR 4437) and others is aimed squarely at undocumented immigrants and those who support them. It has roused a sleeping giant of social activism on the other side to protest what many consider a flawed and disrespectful immigration system and even to demand amnesty. There have already been record outpourings in support of broadening immigration rights, not narrowing them. At the same time, there is also opposition to greater tolerance for 'illegal aliens' and support of a crack-down to enforce the existing laws rather than buying into a propaganda effort to overturn the status quo, much less to grant amnesty to law-breakers. Feelings are running higher on all sides.
may day
May 1 - International Workers' Day - is a day for record-setting demonstrations, celebrations, and immigrant boycotts this year. The California State Senate voted to support a simultaneous 'Day Without Immigrants' for Monday during which workers and students will stay away from their jobs and classes. While many educators object to the walkouts as counterproductive and would prefer it be used as a learning opportunity, this 'take back May Day for the workers' initiative has broad support. Many businesses are closing in solidarity with the demonstrations, though some are doing so in fear of repercussions if they remain open. If the nationwide boycotts and marches come off as planned, the event will impact both the economy and the national consciousness. Its implications will inform other countries attempting to absorb immigrants and cope with growing populations and diversities of values and views. The activity is invigorating politics in Mexico where a ‘Nothing Gringo Day’ is proposed to coincide on May 1 as a symbolic economic counter-shot from south of the border.
On the other hand is a people's convergence. Part of it is simple: support for relatives and friends in the face of threats to their honor and worse. Part of it is celebration of ordinary workers - documented or not - as important contributive members of society - a backlash to the elitism that rules so many nations, as well as the classism and racism dividing rich and poor. And it is also a recognition that all of us must share a fragile planet and begin to close expanding gaps between contrived nation states which tolerate genocide, and between Homo sapiens and the plant and animal life that share our interconnected environment.
Although all immigrants are potentially impacted, this event concentrates especially on Mexicans, Latinos, and people crossing the southern border extra-legally. Illegal Asian immigration is also extensive, and the Canadian border gets little attention, but it is the porous line atop Mexico which is the prime focus. (To get a feel for some of the human concerns behind this, read T.C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, a novel about suburban California which conveys the desperation of the undocumented worker struggling to make some money and support a family as an outlander in the land of his ancestors.) When they find jobs, many workers can make $10 per hour in the U.S., whereas they are very lucky to get $10 a day in Mexico, a nation where Spanish immigration and the hacienda model produced the two-tier, haves and have-nots economy many campesinos are trying to escape. Today's corporatized haciendas built under NAFTA rules instead of Spanish land grants have only made matters worse, sucking millions more into poverty than in pre-NAFTA days. Opportunity to build a better future is siren call that’s hard to resist when fifth level thinking is on the rise, when loved ones go hungry, when their own homeland is racked with violence, and when there is so little hope of progress in one’s own country.
timing
Whether this energy is peaking too early - legislation is still in the formative talking stages - or the timing is right is an open question. Some argue that premature activism risks triggering a backlash by turning many citizens off to easing immigration restrictions and smoothing the path to citizenship because they will see it as a pressure tactic akin to blackmail - legislation in the streets, not the congress. For them, large demonstrations are in-your-face evidence of the problem already in their midst. The view is first to enforce existing laws, then talk about changing them. So rather than bridging gaps with these people, a day of protests with waving Mexican flags on US streets might widen them; violence will surely do so. Others believe that awakening the general public to the benefits of immigrants and more efficient immigration policy is essential now, not down the road. This is the time to get immigration policy right rather than drag on with a dysfunctional system.
Either way, in the past few weeks young people have become active at a level not seen since the Vietnam war in response to proposals to crack down on illegal immigrants and those who aid them, and to hermetically seal the US borders. Students who were largely apathetic three years ago when President Bush led the US to attack Iraq and who couldn't care less about corporate globalization are now texting about policy and politics like mad. This issue has grabbed their attention. While it's unfortunate that a war of aggression didn't get their attention (the US military is an immigrant-rich organization which offers an expedited route to citizenship through service), at least something has.
When kith and kin are involved, we tend to take things more personally. The activists are speaking out from personal experience on behalf of their families and friends; it’s about ‘us’ right here, not ‘them’ over there. It’s not about far-away Iraqis and Afghans; it’s about here-and-now relatives and people on the everyday streets doing everyday jobs. Familiar faces and names in the usual places; nothing exotic or far away. The immigration question taps ethnic identities and extended family, power ethics and exploitation, law-and-order, economic opportunity and the entrepreneurism, communitarian spirit and human rights, hemispheric relations, and how an evolving human spiral can manage itself in a time of instant communications and mobility despite skyrocketing gasoline prices. It is a Humergence® issue.
golden door
Medieval walls stretching from sea to sea and militarized borders watched from satellite guard towers appear to contrast with the final words of Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Yet the golden door is not a wide-open passage without constraints; it never was. This is not a 'come one, come all' invitation flung wide. In an era of drug cartels and terrorist cells, overpopulation, declining resources, exportation of employment to lower cost areas of the world, etc., there must be some limits to immigration.
Ellis Island was a filter for Europeans as San Francisco's Angel Island was the gateway for Chinese. The 700 mile southern border will have a hard time blocking other Americans already sharing a continent. Except for Cuba, the teeming shore is now full of border towns on a land bridge. And the yearning tired, poor, huddled masses are already part of the Americas, not an ocean away. Both immigration and deportation mean crossing an arbitrary line where waves of people constantly have surged back and forth; paperwork in a different, unknown language is an arbitrary legality, not a fact of nature. As the proposals bouncing around the US congress and among immigrant rights interest groups demonstrate, managing the keys to today's golden door is both complex and complicated and not always compassionate.
Compassion goes many ways. Just as the desperate migrant deserves respect and a chance for a better life, so does the person whose once-quiet ranch has become a pass-through for trespassers, or the teenager who paid her dues in school only to find the entry-level jobs full with the military being the only option. The quest for security and well-being cannot be at the cost of someone else. The immigration challenge is to shift from 'or' logic to 'and' thinking so the interests of the most disadvantaged citizens are reconciled with the interests of undocumented immigrants.
motivations
Many people see the US as the closest thing to the Promised Land. Despite some flaws in policy, it stands for hope and opportunity for the individual. American popular media and programs like the very popular TV soap opera in Brazil, America, play on this desire and project an image that appeals to the aspiring. The culture memes of Orange are a powerful global force and a magnet for those who align with the dream.
The issue resonates with recent immigrants (both legal and undocumented) for obvious reasons, and those who empathize with the desire of humans to improve their lives. In their view, this is a matter of human rights and dignity. It is a matter of reuniting families. Eleven million people are directly involved, plus their millions of friends, relatives, employers, and supporters. They have good reason to be ego involved.
One view is that to receive immigrants willing to work and contribute is a responsibility of a civilized nation. No human being can be ‘illegal.’ There is very little 'alien' about Mexicans or Mexican culture, especially to people living in the American southwest where the divisions go back less than 200 years. The extreme of this position is that borders are artificial and should be dismantled so that every person can move freely through the commons that are earth as humans have for most of history before nation states created borders.
However, many US citizens, mostly immigrants or the descendants of immigrants themselves, take a different view and favor tightening the borders to curb extra-legal immigration from now on. It is not the eleven million undocumented workers already in the US who concern them so much as the next eleven million and what they might do to the country. The position is that responsible and regulated immigration is an asset; but some limits are necessary to preserve jobs, security, and national sovereignty.
A few go a step further and favor aggressively rounding up then driving out any and all the people who have slipped into the US illegally, whenever they arrived for whatever reason. The belief is that these are law-breakers and they must pay for it. There are compromises - registration, pay a fine, go home and enter through the system on its timeline. In other words, remorse and repentance and submit to punishment to come back into the good graces of the law. People on this side are just as serious in their position. They rewrite "don't fence me in" to "fence them out!"
Extra-legal immigration impacts the lower end of the American economic scale most directly. The claim that "they do jobs no American wants" is not a proven fact. Many unemployed and needy citizens might well do the work, but at a living wage. So long as undocumented immigrants are willing to accept sub-standard pay and live in sub-standard conditions reminiscent of the 1930's Depression era, many niches will remain filled because many employers focus on economic survival if not profit above principles. This becomes especially troubling for African Americans who have struggled for generations to move up the social scale and now see the entry-level niches once open to teenagers and the under-educated filled by undocumented immigrants from other countries.
There's another group involved in this fracas. Native Americans’ lands extend across the US/Mexico border, so this largely bi-national political dispute spills onto their sacred grounds and interferes with the easy passage that has been their right through the region for many generations. Native peoples moved through these lands long before Europeans thought about dividing them up. With the confluence of ancestral ways, political realities and property rights, as well as empathy for indigenous peoples and their rights to live together on Turtle Island, this is yet another aspect which has gotten relatively little attention.
Other governments in the Americas and watching from afar see a combination of revenue and brain drain. Mexico is very tough on illegal immigrants arriving in that country while turning an impaired though not blind eye to the steady departure of Mexicans north into the US. For many Americans, this is an invasion. To many Mexicans, it is a reclamation. Neither view is sufficient. There are no quick fixes.
reactions from the spiral's value systems
Reactions range from roundups and mighty walls reminiscent of the Cold War line between the former East and West Germany to a general amnesty and essentially wide open borders for a united hemisphere of the Americas. The energies of three vMEMEs are most visible.
blue
Related factors: security, dangerous “other”, justice, law-and-order, charity, punishment for 'criminal' behavior, compliance and obedience
Many immigrants flow north out of Mexico from a sense of duty and obligation. They are responsible for providing for a family. Their migration is not one of ambition but necessity and desperation. In some cases, it is now a family custom and a norm. Yet this is a sacrificial journey; it entails great risks to live away from loved ones as strangers. This is a strange and often soulless land that treats them as alien beings. For many, their choice is painful and not one of selfishness but of selflessness. They’d much prefer to stay home close to loved ones and extended family, but the realities of hemispheric and global trade make that nearly impossible. So they end up doing hard work, often in toxic environments, with few benefits and protections, sharing in the fears that law enforcement will pick them up and ship them out, or strangers will harm them.
Even so, most are diligent and manage to contribute to their families and their communities. They sacrifice a lot to send part of their pay back home, as the growth of money-transfer businesses demonstrates. The coping skills and resilience exemplified by many of the undocumented are truly amazing. The vast majority of these people are hard-working and law-abiding - with the glaring exception of their immigration status.
Yet another version of the Blue-based worldview, common among but not exclusive to American conservatives, wants to secure the national borders with an impenetrable Star Wars-like barrier while tracking down all ‘illegal’ immigrants to punish and ultimately purge them from the country. This "whatever it takes" attitude was reinforced by the catch-all excuse for increased authoritarianism, 9/11. It is rooted in a perspective that sees human nature as fundamentally flawed; therefore, it must be controlled to check corruption and natural evil. Law breakers are evil doers.
One draconian proposal defines all undocumented immigrants as felons, pure and simple. Illegal entry means illegal status, subject to capture and prosecution. 'Round 'em up at the demonstrations, lock 'em up, then ship 'em out' is the sentiment. This approach would require a massive police state operation that will fuel the prison-industrial complex mightily, much to the benefit of communities with economies built around the incarceration of strangers, but to the detriment of society as a whole. It also plays into the dangerous world perspective so common in Blue as it aims to keep ‘the enemy’ from running amuck in the homeland by creating a national database and identity cards for ‘us’ so our defenders can recognize ‘them’ more readily. The presence of Mexican flags, talk of reclaiming Aztlan, and even a Spanish language version that co-opts the national anthem (Nuestro Himno) are calls to action, not understanding.
This is not a baseless view, either. Farmers and ranchers along the border have experienced threats, theft, and damage to property. There are criminals and predators scattered on the immigrant tide; that is undeniable, whether rolling in from Mexico, Cuba, Europe, Africa, or Asia. Thus, some of the arguments coming from the Minutemen movement, the hard-nosed Sensenbrenner legislation in the House of Representatives, and proposals to eliminate the birthright citizenship for babies born in the US reflect both fear of other and a response to threatening conditions. From this perspective, if the government isn’t capable of protecting the people and their property from this invading mass, then it’s up to the people themselves to be vigilant and defend their own rights and property, to secure their own borders, and to protect their families from an invasion.
This is the ‘us’/’them’ hard line mindset of the law-and-order- at- any- price crowd that produces vigilantes and Berlin Walls. Aiding and abetting – charity, kindness, and understanding in other eyes – are to be in cahoots with criminals making the enabler as guilty as the ‘perpetrators.’ Many border towns - once pleasant fusions of Mexican charm and American entrepreneurism - have become dangerous and threatening places where murder and kidnapping are routine. With the increased market for illegal drugs in the US, they have become crime-ravaged pass-throughs for contraband, both material and human. Corruption is rampant because temptations are huge. Both the demand and the supply are the problem, and that's an undercurrent which cannot be ignored.
Crime is high in many parts of Mexico, not just the border. Soldiers guard the exits from freeways and travelers must pay them bribes to safely pass and visit relatives without fear of bandits. That's a far cry from an occasional California Highway Patrol officer checking for speeders, and a lifestyle north Americans justifiably don't want to see imported into the border states. Since Blue increases in response to a surge of Red, no wonder the confrontations increase. Add to that the fear of terrorists crossing the borders, and the emotional load on immigration is huge.
Give the Blue a strong Red back-up and we find resentment of jobs going overseas or competition from ‘lesser’ people invading their own back yards. There’s no small dose of racism in this one and a propensity to find aggressive solutions in the name of defense. There's a sense of purity beneath the protection - as if outside agents somehow contaminate the fictitious essence of an ethnically pure America. A similar Blue approach looks for law-abiding immigrants who have played by the rules, jumped through the hoops, and promise to obey the law and fit in. It would be best if they conformed to the political and religious norms of the community so as to blend seamlessly into the status quo.
A contrary Blue-based perspective is a sympathetic one which ‘feels the pain’ of the struggling immigrant and takes a position that it is right to help rather than oppose. There is a close connection with Mexican immigrants as co-workers, relatives, friends, or diligent employees that assimilates them into the ‘us’ side of an us/them dichotomy. This charitable approach, common in the sanctuary movement, is not from a Green perspective, but rooted in the obligation to care for others in trouble which is part of the core teaching of most religions.
orange
Related factors: competition, development, growth, opportunity to change, upliftment, ambition, profitability
One view from Orange sees the immigrants as willing hands anxious to be hired or a group of budding entrepreneurs anxious to better themselves and their families. For some, the risks they take to get into the U.S. are laudable, in a sense, and demonstrate their chutzpah and game-playing skills. For others, they are unfair competitors for limited niches, and they are low wage workers providing a service in competitive markets that can be exploited because of their vulnerability. Why pay $14 per hour with benefits when you can pay someone $2.50 to pick mushrooms without benefits?
Employers and corporations who hire undocumented workers know their vulnerability and their relative helplessness to fight exploitation. To turn off this magnet, employers must feel consequences for hiring and abusing low wage workers. Just as the illicit drug trade exists because there are anxious buyers at the receiving end, likewise the illicit trade in human labor exists because there are companies addicted to cheap hired hands and consumers hooked on the lower priced services that undocumented workers provide.
From the Orange-oriented immigrants' perspective, the American Dream is a siren call of possibilities. When surging Orange is short-circuited or even punished where they live, and they don't see much chance of change in the status quo, then risks are well worth taking. There is little to lose and a lot to gain. The odds of finding a better life - or at least more income to support a family - are good. There is an element of excitement in traveling to a new land. The hurry-up aspect of Orange also recognizes the incredible difficulty of legal immigration, how lethargic the process is, and how restrictive the legal route can be. Wading through the process or gambling on a lottery are unacceptable. These people are proactive and impatient. Since the odds of getting caught as an illegal are relatively small, and the consequences inconsequential, the rush is on.
The domestic Orange policy approach is to look for two kinds of people. First are the willing laborers prepared to do grunt work who will be grateful for what they get and not challenge the system as they free up Americans to develop themselves and their service economy. The second category is cost-effective and clever folks who bring intelligences and skills which are compatible with developing world-class business. They’re welcome to compete and work their way up, so long as they don’t get pushy and try to take over. Under the current system the process of legal immigration is lengthy and it is nearly impossible to get into the US legally - it’s not really a simple matter of jumping through a few hoops.
Either way, they are potentially hirable hands who will work for low wages and scant benefits, attenuating some of the great sucking sound predicted by Ross Perot as NAFTA was being organized. The rationale, at some level, is that they initially do work no self-respecting American wants (at least at the minimum wage and below typically offered). Yet the fields around us in America’s Salad Bowl are populated almost entirely with Latinos – some are U.S. citizens, many undocumented. They live in overcrowded garages, tents, and in their cars. Some live in the fields where they do the back breaking work of picking strawberries. Quite a few lawmakers recall their own roots and the stories of their parents and grandparents who jumped into the melting pot in this way, sometimes extra-legally and often with ambition and family as their only assets.
This is where the bracero and proposed guest worker programs fit so nicely. The assumption is that the balance will be toward cost-effective ad hoc labor whose roots remain firmly planted elsewhere. The challenge is to transform these immigrants from a social cost into an asset quickly. This would not be a wide open borders plan, but one that relies on calculated controls to select the aspiring cream that comes with useful skills and thinking abilities, then devising growth strategies to churn them eventually into useful, self-interested consumers and, perhaps, citizens. Those immigrants who contribute costs – elderly, sick, unskilled, violent criminals – would be excluded. This survival of the useful model sounds a bit cold blooded, but it’s the pragmatic approach to domestic nation-building.
Add some Blue and seniority joins the mix. Those who have been in-country longest get certain advantages. Those who have been here a shorter time have a few more hoops to jump through. The junior immigrant, being least settled in, gets the worst treatment and the focus of emigration pressure.
green
Related factors: compassion, egalitarianism, human rights, economic justice, reparations, communalism, environmental quality
The Green view of immigration is more compassion-oriented. It's different from charity. There are needy people and the wasteful U.S. has surplus that can help them; some redistribution is in order. The idea of being an ‘illegal’ person is anathema (‘undocumented’ sounds much better to the FS ear). How can one group pass laws to exclude another from the opportunity to develop? What sort of thuggery is it which would criminalize people for self-improvement or for rendering services to needy people on that track?
Exclusionary laws are injustice and exploitation by elites who claim prerogatives they neither deserve nor have except by force of arms and hubris. It is oppression and greed that have driven people from their homes elsewhere, and which refuse to welcome them back to the homelands of their ancestors in the back-and-forth borderlands which constitute the American southwest. This is an area with a unique history of highly mobile lines and a population that has ambled back and forth for two centuries in the protracted land swap. This is not immigration, but repatriation into homelands taken over by Europeans plus Africans and Asians long ago across contrived borders built on oppression of indigenous peoples. Amnesty and forgiveness for any transgressions are the least a humane society should offer. Draconian punishments get us nowhere. And it is also important to reconcile the interests of the economically disadvantaged citizens with the aspirations of immigrants.
The Green model is to facilitate social justice and to help equalize both opportunities and human services here and at the root of the problem. Because the details of people’s legal status are less important when relativism is high and human rights and needs paramount, there is a dream to open the borders to all in need, though practicalities stop even Green from promoting unrestricted entry by neighbors. The relatively easy transit of workers across European borders suggest that solutions are possible when the neighboring nations are not at vastly different economic levels. While some argue that good fences make good neighbors, the easy transit of workers in the current EU model belies that. It is time for a more collaborative working relationship among the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Why are Canadians seen as OK and Mexicans aren’t? Canadians can get a driver’s license in California, but Mexicans who are neither Americans or Green Card holders cannot without specific visa requirements being met.
what to do
There is no simple solution. A mix of approaches is needed because a mix of vMEMEs and value systems is in play. The challenge is meeting needs of each without doing harm to others and serving the whole in the process. All these factors are components of a bigger living system which involves treating immigration as a truly pan-American problem which will require collaborative solutions rather than one unique to the USA. How can Life Conditons be transformed to improve lives and job opportunities in all countries. Isn’t it understandable that people want to leave war-torn, economically destitute areas?
The private property of the nation, as a whole, is something to consider as the historic “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine” approach that’s characterized American relations with Mexico comes back to bite the country’s south-side. While much of the US southwest was either bought or captured in the nineteenth century, the southern frontier is an ambiguous line based on surveys, not societies. The zone of overlap – borderlands – is wide and growing wider as transport and communications become easier. Living bi-nationally is easy, and many Mexicans can reside in the U.S. but keep their feet planted in Mexico while more and more Americans are finding ways to set up housekeeping in Mexico.
A more secure border is essential to restore some peace of mind for those living along the southern frontier. In addition to Border Patrol agents being attacked, many landowners and ranchers have been shot at, stolen from and had their families and property threatened. The attitudes of people have changed as more aggressive Red and Orange rise to replace the customary deep-seated Purple, rancho Red, and Christian Blue which have characterized the border areas. Private property rights are a basic of the U.S. model. Providing a sense of security is essential to keep Blue existential problems in check, especially in a time when 'enemy' consciousness is pervasive.
Defending the borders is a requirement the Constitution lays out for the executive branch. Whether that is better achieved by constructing a 21st century version of China’s Great Wall extending from Brownsville to San Diego or addressing the causes that make people’s lives unsustainable in large parts of the hemisphere, thus driving them to relocate stateside at great risk is the question, though not a difficult one. The border has been a gentle one for two hundred years; toughening it below the zone of overlap will be nearly impossible despite the symbolism of national resolve. Nationalist thinking is on the wane; more people think transnationally and move more easily than ever before.
Thus, rather than investing too much in a physical barricade to keep 'them' out, we would do well to invest more in building psychological and economic reasons to stay home because home is a better place, or at least sufficient. That means being a partner with other nations in the Americas instead of their feudal lord. Weakening the magnet is far easier than pulling people off of it. If the have-not nations of the hemisphere became more hospitable for their citizens, the tide would diminish as the magnets of home grew stronger. The down-side of such a plan is that corporations which benefit from acquiring the resources – farmland, minerals, even water – would suffer in the short term by repatriating rights and property to indigenous peoples. This is not just an issue for the American magnet, it is crucial for urban magnets that draw the young from rural areas into cities stretching beyond capacity, but not beyond the hopes of aspiring Orange. Neither rampant urbanization nor concentration into the US is sustainable.
One argument for that concentration is that the Orange-based “American way of life” meme is irresistible. It’s a winner. For those whose lives have been dominated by Purple, Red, and Blue, it teases things that would be hard to pass up: abundance, opportunity, material goods, and mobility. While this is an illusory dream for many who live in tents, garages, and multiple-families in a single room, the deplorable US conditions are no worse than what they would have at home, and the promise is greater. Although the American Dream turns out to be a mirage for many, immigrants, both legal and extra-legal, do improve their lives within the U.S. borders. What they sacrifice is a sense of place, of community, and close contact with family which is incredibly important to many who have more communal tendencies; they dream of going home and feel stuck once they arrive in the US and make their way – entire families in Mexico depend on the monthly checks sent back home. So long as there is a magnet of jobs orders of magnitude more lucrative than those available at home and a quality of life that makes home seem primitive by any measure except socially, people will choose options that make sense. Building up those options and opportunities throughout Mexico, Central and South America is the best fix to the US immigration crisis - for now. Ultimately, Orange is not sustainable. But that's for another paper.
More on this as it develops.
Photos by Chris Cowan & Natasha Todorovic from the Santa Barbara, May 1 march and rally.
Useful article and a great example how SD provides a framework for analysis that covers so many bases. I agree with the conclusions - support local economies to develop so as to reduce the pull of the magnet.
How about using an osmosis metaphor for the US/Mex border - a semi-permeable membrane through which the direction and rate of flow is determined by the relative potency of the economies on either side?
All the best
Posted by: Andy Langford | May 03, 2006 at 01:40 PM
Andy,
Thanks so much for your comment.
I like your osmosis metaphor. It seems that the "barriers" become what we collectively make them. The nature of the "barrier" reflects the nature of the people who construct it. So, this human "osmosis" is relavant to the theories constructed by Clare W. Graves, because he shows us why we construct these barriers in the way that we do, and why we change them the way that we do over time.
Posted by: Sam Rose | May 31, 2006 at 11:30 AM