With blatant disregard for fragile ecosystems, the Bush administration is trampling environmental protection laws to complete the racist anti-immigrant border wall.
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“The Bush administration’s latest waiver of environmental and other federal laws threatens the livelihoods and ecology of the entire U.S.-Mexico border region,” said Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club. “Secretary Chertoff chose to bypass stakeholders and push through this unpopular project on April Fool’s Day. We don’t think the destruction of the borderlands region is a laughing matter.”
According to the Defenders of Wildlife organization, “Including this most recent instance, the waiver authority, granted by the REAL ID Act of 2005, has been exercised on four occasions to clear the way for wall construction. Thus far, two environmentally sensitive public lands have been trampled by the waivers.”
“[T]he Bush administration is now waiving laws across hundreds of miles in four states,” continues the Defenders of Wildlife statement. “This week’s action by Secretary Chertoff marks a new low, sweeping nearly 500 miles of proposed border wall construction out of the public eye and under one blanket waiver.”
The anti-immigrant wall will run from the Colorado river to the remote Peloncillo mountains on the New Mexico border, crossing national parks, monuments, wildlife refuges, forests and wilderness areas. It will divide Native American land and properties which held by the same families since the Spanish colonial era. Soon, these lands will be torn up by bulldozers and construction teams. The fence will include banks of floodlights to light up the night sky.
Environmentalists point out that the wall will disrupt butterfly migration and impact on two endangered wildcat species: the ocelot and the jaguarundi. The wall will keep these wildcats from swimming across the Rio Grande in order to mate. Other species that will be directly impacted include Sonoran pronghorns and burrowing owls.
This environmental destruction will be wrought to erect a wall that will increase suffering and death for humans who attempt to cross the border from Mexico. Thousands of immigrants have died from dehydration and other problems while attempting to cross the border. The wall will make it even more dangerous for immigrants who are forced to leave their countries as neo-colonial “free trade” agreements continue to devastate the economies of Latin America.
The capitalist class does not want to stop super-exploiting undocumented immigrants. Because these workers are vulnerable to being deported, the capitalists use their “undocumented” status as a club to terrorize them and keep them silent as their rights are stripped away.
The wall is part of the overall capitalist effort to criminalize immigrants and deepen anti-immigrant racism within the general population. The capitalists are trying to pit citizens and permanent residents against undocumented workers, demonizing them as “illegals” who “steal” jobs and social services—these are racist lies.
Having a wall built by “Homeland Security” creates a false impression that the immigrants who attempt to cross are a danger to society. The opposite is true: Immigrants, many of them undocumented, represent 4.9 percent of the civilian labor force and make up a large percentage of workers in agriculture, cleaning, meat packing, construction and other low-wage industries where work is difficult.
The capitalists and their government do not care about the lives of immigrants. They do not care about the environment or endangered species, and they certainly do not care about the border communities that have actively opposed the construction of the border wall. Homeland Security has had to go to court against more than 50 property owners just to survey land for the wall.
Though the congressional waivers will not affect legal battles between Homeland Security and private landowners, they will make it extremely difficult for future legal challenges based on environmental or cultural claims to succeed. Should it be completed, the border wall will stand as a monument to the Bush administration’s legacy of racism and environmental destruction and the crimes perpetrated by the capitalist system.
