Review of The Fence

By Claire Shin & Linghan Wang


On Thursday, July 16, we watched an HBO documentary called The Fence. On October 2006, President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act of 2006 that started a project to build a fence hundreds of miles along the US-Mexico border. According to the documentary, the project utilized 12 designs, hired 19 construction companies, 350 engineers and more than 7,000 construction workers.


So what project was this exactly? Was it an economic stimulus plan that created new jobs through construction of the fence? Aside from any economic function that the construction might serve, the fence was primarily built with the goal to prevent terrorism, drug smuggling and illegal immigration from entering into the United States from the US-Mexico border.


Quoted during the documentary, President Kennedy once proudly said, “we [had] yet to build a wall” to impede free human migration within and across the United States and other countries; now the US government decided to build a wall due to concerns that immigrants that crossed the border illegally posed a threat to the national security.


However, the fence project was not properly equipped with the technical capacity to perform the designated function. The U.S. government had spent 30 years at Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge building an inhabitable and vital living space for wildlife animals. Despite reiterating several times that it would try its best to protect wildlife, the U.S. government ate its words by building the fence right through the refuge, separating many animals from their sources of food and water.

It was unsurprising that damages were incurred not just to animals. During the rainy season, a portion of the fence in Arizona became a virtual dam that withheld water on the Mexican side and impeded the water flow into U.S. territory. With 20 feet of water drowning the town, compared to only 6 inches on the U.S. side, many family businesses were destroyed or forced to relocate to other areas.

Compared to the insurmountable costs of construction of the fence, was it adequately executing the task of preventing terrorism, narcotics or illegal immigration? In actuality, the government might be aiming at a false target. Of the 29 people who committed terrorist acts in the United States in the last quarter of century, 24 arrived through plane and 5 were born on native soil. Sadly the fence was unable to effectively prevent either drug smuggling or illegal immigration, as the criminal groups were always able to find new ways to respond to the barriers positioned to stop them.

On August 8, the staff and interns will be visiting Stewart Detention Center at Lumpkin, GA, where many undocumented immigrants and many people who overstayed their visas are detained. We will be able to meet the detainees in person and might also be able to provide them with language assistance. Many Mexicans attempted to cross the border into this country carrying the hope for better living conditions and more optimal occupational opportunities. Though many have lived in the detention center for years, each and every one of them deserved proper human dignity as a birthright, and Asian American Advancing Justice -Atlanta is determined to help them preserve that right.