A World of Barbed Wire: Walls and Immigration

We live in an age of walls. More specifically, we live in an aged of barbed wire. Sharp, piercing metal thread designed to stab, gash, and separate.

Here's a picture* of barbed wire on border wall that divides Nogales, Arizona, in the United States from Nogales, Sonora, in Mexico...

And this is barbed wire on the wall that divides Palestine and Israel...

And this is a drawing of the barbed wire that holds migrants in a detention camp in Libya...

I'm taking part in the 17th Annual Santa Cruz Valley Border Issues Fair and Common Ground on the Border Music Festival in Sahuarita, Arzona. The universality of barbed wire has gabbed my attention.

The drawing of the barbed wire in Libya shows the wire, not just on the top of the fence, but working its way up the legs and arms of the migrant.

And it's not just the wire that binds and chokes us. Border security has become an international economic engine. Thousands, maybe millions of people, work in the "homeland security" industry. Their jobs depend on trapping and separating other people. Multinational companies build surveillance towers that are used in Israel and on the United States border. Technology companies are paying creative minds to build drones that can fly silently overhead to film travelers and journeyers and then -- armed with weapons -- dive bomb into groups of people. The United States government is training other countries on how to trap people in camps and prisons all around the world.**

On several occasions, presenters at this conference have commented about the various detention camps and dividing walls -- along the US border and around the Mediterranean -- are reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps.

Here's a photo of barbed wire at the Plaszow, Poland, concentration camp...

  

Barbed wire seems to have been invented in the mid-1800s. The first US patent for the painful product was taken out in 1867. In 1874, mass production of barbed wire came about. By 1890, barbed wire fences had virtually replaced the open range in the western United States.

I'm writing this on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, thinking of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," where he describes the dehumanization of African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Barbed wire -- invented to corral cows -- now divides the world, corrals groups, and dehumanizes people.

King wrote, "Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity." That now is still now.

* Photo credits:

• The photo of the US/Mexico border was taken by a participant in this border conference.
• The photo of barbed wire in Palestine/Israel was taken by my colleague Alec Davis.
• The drawing of barbed wire ensnaring the immigrant in the Mediterranean is by Francesco Piobbichi, an artist/activist who works with the Federation of Protestant Churches in Italy. He was a speaker at this border issues fair.
• The photo of the Plaszow camp is from the US Holocaust Museum online archives.

** For more information about the global "homeland security industrial complex," see the book "Empire of Borders" by Todd Miller. Miller was one of the speakers at this conference. 

This blog is one of a series of reflections that I am writing while taking part in the Santa Cruz Valley Border Issues Fair and Common Ground on the Border. The Border Issues Fair is one the causes supported by the Briggs Center for Faith and Action, where I serve as the Executive Director.