The US is scheduled to complete a 650 miles/$1.2 billion fence along part of its border with Mexico (total border is about 1,950 miles) this year. Time magazine recently published an article on this border fence. It is amazing how desperately some Mexicans try (and risk their lives) to get into the US illegally. Based on this, one of my desi acquaintances concluded that we Indians are keen law-abiding citizens when compared to Mexicans!
I think he was not comparing apples to apples. I say, put Bihar, Orissa, and Jharkhand along the US border, and then start making comparisons on illegal entries into the US. A majority of desis who enter the US are financially well-off, and in spite of that, we try to enter the US as desperately as Mexicans. It is pretty easy for us to cry foul on these poor Mexicans, while sitting comfortably in climate-controlled rooms. I don't blame the US either in aggressively defending its borders - I think it should. Here are a couple of excerpts from the article on border fence that I mentioned above.
Osmosis explains why concentrations of water seek equilibrium across a barrier. Something similar applies to money. The difference in per capita income between the U.S. and Mexico is among the greatest cross-border contrasts in the world, according to David Kennedy, a noted historian at Stanford. As long as that remains true, the border fence will be under extreme pressure. People will climb over it; they'll tunnel under it; they'll hack through it; they'll float around it.
Poverty makes people desperate. We got a glimpse of that when we watched a family boost their 10-year-old boy over a 12-ft fence, where a slip could easily mean a broken leg, miles from the nearest doctor. Or when we stood at the rusty steel barrier between the U.S. town of Calexico and the Mexican city of Mexicali in California's Imperial Valley. Through a gap in this wall flows the New River, perhaps the most polluted waterway in North America--a foamy, green mix of industrial waste, farm runoff and untreated human sewage. This river has been found to carry the germs of tuberculosis, encephalitis, polio, cholera, hepatitis and typhoid. We'd heard stories about people entering the U.S. by floating along this nightmare stream with white plastic bags on their heads to blend into the hideous foam. A CBP agent in a Jeep sat overlooking the spot. We asked him, Does that really happen?
"Every day."
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