Some Republicans are saying we need to wall off the 5,500 mile Canadian border, too.
In the 1980s, many Texans were alarmed that hordes of
immigrants were fleeing Rust Belt states and pouring across the Red River to
take our jobs. So my friend Steve Fromholz recommended a big beautiful wall
across our northern border to keep them
out.
They must be stopped!
Fromholz, a popular singer-songwriter and renowned
political sprite, was ahead of his time in the political sport of wall
building.
Instead of steel barriers and miles of nasty razor wire,
Steve proposed preventing Yankee refugees from entering the Lone Star State by
planting a 10-foot high, 10-foot thick wall of jalapeño peppers along the
length of the Red River. Eat your way through and you’d be accepted as a
naturalized Texan.
I thought of Steve’s impishness when I read that Nikki
Haley, Ron DeSantis, and other Republicans were concocting a whole new
xenophobic bugaboo to goose up their anti-immigrant demagoguery.
We can’t just fear the “invasion” coming across our Southern border, they cry! Indeed, Haley wailed: “It’s the northern border, too.” She added ominously that we must “do whatever it takes to keep people out.” DeSantis piled on, saying we should wall off America’s Canadian border.
Meanwhile, nearly all residents living along that 5,500-mile boundary fear the political wall-mongers more than the imaginary threat of foreigners surging across illegally.
“People have always been coming
through Canada,” says a clerk at a general store in far-north New Hampshire.
Scoffing at the silly political hype, she says: “I don’t think the residents
are really worried.”
But Chicken Little politicos won’t be shooed off by
reality. After all, they still have the east, west, and Gulf coasts to shut off
— so expect them to propose razor wire for the entire U.S. shoreline. Their
ridiculousness makes Fromholz’s satire seem rational!