A pastor in Tijuana told me that our U.S. midterm election year was “going to be the year of immigration.” I thought he was underestimating the war issue, but look at what we are now seeing in streets and schools!

 “Politics, a weighing of dreams against fears is a civilization’s dialogue with itself.”

Politically, we are polarized from left to right while the society itself is ordered from top to bottom; and the immigration issue is clearly about the top to bottom structure. The language left to right and top to bottom suggests the orthogonal axes of a Cartesian graph. Orthogonal axes have the character that changing position along one axis makes no change at all along the other. I think, sadly, that our record of dealing with top to bottom issues shows no difference between republicans or democrats, left or right. Axes with a little more tilt to them are hard and soft, or hawk and dove.

So they talk about a fence along the border. I looked at the Mexican side of the fence in Tijuana and it looked just like this photo of the Mexican side in Nogales. It’s metal, about 12 feet high, and to save weight and costs, we presume, has these holes that serve perfectly as hand and footholds. The white crosses are placed on the wall by the families of those that have died on the other side, they are the same white crosses wherever there is a wall between Tijuana and Nogales, and there are too many of them.