Inhumanity compounding inhumanity: the monumental price of “homeland security”
Trump’s border wall, an embodiment of cruel immigration policies, is inhumane to people to a degree that is criminal—if not according to written law, then according to moral laws we grasp by intuition. Even many of those whose job it is to enforce draconian immigration policies intuit those laws—it’s just that they don’t obey them.*
There’s another, less visible, less publicized inhumanity, that is not so plainly criminal. But in the long run it may be just as devastating to the living world as to refugees and asylum seekers. That’s the way a continuous wall carves up vital, often fragile habitat, puts up barriers to creatures who have neither understanding of, nor use for, political boundaries, and robs the environment of resiliency. We know how habitat fragmentation has diminished the capability of living things to cope with such additional man-made injuries as climate change. However, some things that fragment and destroy habitat have at least the excuse of some utility: roads, farms, power lines, airports, wind farms, solar energy arrays, etc. But this ugly artifice has little purpose besides division for division’s sake. It is a monument to human vanity, and especially the vanity of one corrupt, depraved individual, U.S. President Donald Trump.
So many wildlife refuges and sanctuaries are already under assault by the Wall or are soon to be, that I gave up trying to list them here. Just do a search on a string such as “threatened wildlife refuge border wall,” or similar keywords, and you’ll find enough of them to make you seethe, or weep. One particular lovely and imminently jeopardized landscape can be seen at Lower Rio Grande Valley Wildlife Refuge
The horrific and potentially irreparable damage resulting from extensions of a continuous border wall would spread well beyond wildlife refuges, as described in a paper in the journal Bioscience and summarized last summer in an article in Cosmos. (I referred to this same piece in a post last year; it’s even more urgent today.) The article had 16 co-authors and was endorsed by 2,500 scientists worldwide.