This Land Is Our Land An Immigrant s

Manifesto Suketu Mehta

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 SUKETU MEHTA
This Land is Our Land
An Immigrant’s Manifesto
 Contents

Preface
PART I: THE MIGRANTS ARE COMING
1. A Planet on the Move
2. The Fence: Amargo y Dulce
3. Ordinary Heroes
4. Two Sides of a Strait
PART II: WHY THEY’RE COMING
5. Colonialism
6. The New Colonialism
7. War
8. Climate Change
PART III: WHY THEY’RE FEARED
9. The Populists’ False Narrative
10. A Brief History of Fear
11. Culture: Shitholes Versus Nordics
12. The Colour of Hate
13. The Alliance between the Mob and Capital
14. The Refugee as Pariah
PART IV: WHY THEY SHOULD BE WELCOMED
15. Jaikisan Heights
16. Jobs, Crime and Culture: The Threats That Aren’t
17. We Do Not Come Empty-Handed
18. Immigration as Reparations
Epilogue: Family, Reunified – and Expanded
Notes on Sources
Acknowledgements
Index
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suketu Mehta is the author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and

Found, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won the
Kiriyama Prize and the Hutch Crossword Award. His work has been
published in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, National
Geographic, Granta, Harper’s, Time, and GQ. He has won a
Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and an O.
Henry Prize. He was born in Calcutta and lives in New York City,
where he is an associate professor of journalism at New York
University.
 Also by Suketu Mehta

Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

For Ramesh and Usha Mehta
There is no happiness for him who does not
travel, Rohita! Thus we have heard. Living in
the society of men, the best man becomes a
sinner … Therefore, wander!
The feet of the wanderer are like the
flower, his soul is growing and reaping the
fruit, and all his sins are destroyed by his
fatigues in wandering. Therefore, wander!
The fortune of he who is sitting, sits; it
rises when he rises; it sleeps when he
sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore,
wander!

—Indra, protector of travellers, in the

Aitareya Brāhmana
 PREFACE

This is a book about people leaving their homes and moving across
the planet: why they move, why they’re feared, and why they should
be welcomed. Although much of it deals with American immigration,
the issue has never been more global. From Finland to France, from
Sweden to Slovakia, there’s a populist resistance to immigration,
built on fear and prejudice, which this book hopes to dispel.
In the book, I use the term ‘rich countries’ to refer to the US,
Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. I realise that
there are countries which don’t comfortably fit in these categories;
they may have been ‘poor’ early in the twentieth century, like China
and India, but are less so now. But rather than get into the
semantics of which countries are ‘developing’ or ‘developed’, I’ve
chosen to use ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries as shorthand, and I trust my
readers to know the difference.
The complexities of global migration are personal for me. The
reason my family immigrated to America is not because Americans
colonised India; it’s because Britain did so, and my grandfather was
compelled to leave his village for Kenya. It set off a chain of
migration that led to my moving to New York in 1977. Other
members of my family moved to the UK, Australia and Dubai – and
are still moving.
Migration today is a global issue, and needs global solutions.
Colonialism, inequality, war and climate change affect us all, rich or
poor, wherever we may dwell. Whether you believe in open borders,
closed borders, or something in between, I hope that this book will
generate empathy and understanding for those who have to cross
them. The heart should have no borders.
 PART I
The Migrants Are Coming
 1

A Planet on the Move

One day in the 1980s, my maternal grandfather was sitting in a park

in suburban London. An elderly British man came up to him and
wagged a finger in his face. ‘Why are you here?’ the man demanded.
‘Why are you in my country?’
‘Because we are the creditors,’ responded my grandfather, who
was born in India, worked all his life in colonial Kenya, and was now
retired in London. ‘You took all our wealth, our diamonds. Now we
have come to collect.’ We are here, my grandfather was saying,
because you were there.

These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain

loudly about migration from the poor ones. But as the migrants see
it, the game was rigged: First, the rich countries colonized us and
stole our treasure and prevented us from building our industries.
After plundering us for centuries, they left, having drawn up maps in
ways that ensured permanent strife between our communities. Then
they brought us to their countries as ‘guest workers’ – as if they
knew what the word ‘guest’ meant in our cultures – but discouraged
us from bringing our families.
Having built up their economies with our raw materials and our
labour, they asked us to go back and were surprised when we did
not. They stole our minerals and corrupted our governments so that
their corporations could continue stealing our resources; they fouled
the air above us and the waters around us, making our farms
barren, our oceans lifeless; and they were aghast when the poorest
among us arrived at their borders, not to steal but to work, to clean
their shit, and to fuck their men.
Still, they needed us. They needed us to fix their computers and
heal their sick and teach their kids, so they took our best and
brightest, those who had been educated at the greatest expense of
the struggling states they came from, and seduced us again to work
for them. Now, again they ask us not to come, desperate and
starving though they have rendered us, because the richest among
them need a scapegoat. This is how the game is rigged today.
My family has moved all over the earth, from India to Kenya to
England to the United States and back again – and is still moving.
One of my grandfathers left rural Gujarat for Calcutta in the salad
days of the twentieth century; my other grandfather, living half a
day’s bullock-cart ride away, left soon after for Nairobi. In Calcutta,
my paternal grandfather joined his older brother in the jewellery
business; in Nairobi, my maternal grandfather began his career, at
sixteen, sweeping the floors of his uncle’s accounting office. Thus
began my family’s journey from the village to the city. It was, I now
realize, less than a hundred years ago.
I am now among the quarter of a billion people living in a country
other than the one they were born in.1 I’m one of the lucky ones; in
surveys, nearly three-quarters of a billion people want to live in a
country other than the one they were born in,2 and will do so as
soon as they see a chance. Why do we move? Why do we keep
moving?

On 1 October 1977, my parents, my two sisters and I boarded a

Lufthansa plane in the dead of night in Bombay. We were dressed in
new, heavy, uncomfortable clothes and had been seen off by our
entire extended family, who had come to the airport with garlands
and lamps; our foreheads were anointed with vermilion. We were
going to America.
 To get the cheapest tickets, our travel agent had arranged a
circuitous journey in which we disembarked in Frankfurt, where we
were to take an internal flight to Cologne, and then onward to New
York. In Frankfurt, the German border officer scrutinized the Indian
passports belonging to my father, my sisters and me, and stamped
them. Then he held up my mother’s passport with distaste. ‘You are
not allowed to enter Germany,’ he said.
It was a British passport, given to citizens of Indian origin who
had been born in Kenya before independence, like my mother. But
the British did not want them. Nine years earlier, Parliament had
passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act,3 summarily depriving
hundreds of thousands of British passport holders in East Africa of
their right to live in the country that had conferred their nationality.
The passport was literally not worth the paper it was printed on.
The German officer decided that because of her uncertain status,
my mother might somehow desert her husband and three small
children to make a break for it and live in Germany by herself. So we
had to leave directly from Frankfurt. Seven hours and many
airsickness bags later, we stepped out into the international arrivals
lounge at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A graceful orange-
and-black-and-yellow Alexander Calder mobile twirled above us
against the backdrop of a huge American flag, and multicoloured
helium balloons dotted the ceiling, souvenirs of past greetings. As
each arrival was welcomed to the new land by their relatives, the
balloons rose to the ceiling to make way for the newer ones. They
provided hope to the newcomers: look, in a few years, with luck and
hard work, you, too, can rise here. All the way to the ceiling.
It was 2 October – Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. We made our way
in a convoy of cars carrying our eighteen bags and steamer trunks to
a studio apartment in Jackson Heights where The Six Million Dollar
Man was playing on the television. On the first night, the building
super cut off the electricity because there were too many people in
one room. I stepped out and looked at the rusting elevated train
tracks above Roosevelt Avenue and wondered: where was the
Statue of Liberty?
At McClancy, the brutal all-boys’ Catholic high school where my
parents enrolled me in Queens, my chief tormentor was a boy
named Tschinkel. He had blond hair, piercing blue eyes and a
sadistic smile. He coined a name for me: Mouse. As I walked
through the hallways, this word followed me: ‘Mouse! Mouse!’ A
small brown rodent, scurrying furtively this way and that. I was
fourteen years old.
One Spanish class, Tschinkel put his leg out to trip me as I was
walking in; I kicked hard at it as the entire class whooped. ‘Mouse!
Mouse!’
As I left the class and walked to the stairwell, I felt a hand shoving
me forward. I flew straight down the small flight of stairs and landed
on my feet, clutching my books; I could as easily have not, and
broken my neck. When I complained to the principal, I was told that
such things happen. It was within the normal order of the McClancy
day.
Four decades later, another German-American bully from Queens
became the most powerful man on the planet. The 2016 election
particularly struck home for me. Trump is typical of the fathers of the
boys I went to high school with. He grew up in Jamaica Estates,
then a gated white island in the middle of the most diverse county in
the United States.4 That explains everything about him, his fear and
hatred of people different from him.
According to Trump, Haitians ‘all have AIDS’. If Nigerians were
allowed into the United States, they would never ‘go back to their
huts’. Mexicans? ‘They’re bringing drugs; they’re bringing crime;
they’re rapists.’ About immigrants in general: ‘Everything’s coming
across the border: the illegals, the cars, and the whole thing. It’s like
a big mess. Blah. It’s like vomit.’ All this was shocking to many
people, but familiar to me, because I’d heard it from the McClancy
boys – and some of the teachers.
When my family moved to the almost all-white suburb of
Ridgewood, New Jersey, from Jackson Heights to find better schools
for my sisters, I found that the hatred wasn’t confined to McClancy.
One morning we awoke to find that someone had painted across our
car ‘SMEGSMA’. I can only guess that the semi-literate vandal had
intended to write, but couldn’t spell, ‘smegma’, the biological term
for the crud that gathers under an uncircumcised penis’s foreskin.
My parents and sisters and I gathered around the car, trying to
divine the point of the vandal’s imprecation and whether it was in
some way connected to our ethnicity.

I have been in America for forty-two years. For thirty of those years
I have been an American citizen. Every year, my confidence in my
position in the country grew. When I went abroad – a summer in
London, nine months in Paris, even when I went back to India for a
couple of years – I would return to America with relief, because
there I could be American. I couldn’t be English in England, or
French in France; even when I went back to India, I wasn’t wholly
‘Indian’; I was an ‘NRI’, a ‘non-resident Indian’. And so, each time I
saw the Long Island beachfront from the window as my plane
approached JFK, I felt a gladness. America was my home. There I
belonged, because everyone else belonged.
Or so I felt until the first Tuesday of November 2016. The morning
after, knots of people were weeping on the streets all over Lower
Manhattan. My undergraduate students at New York University
asked me, ‘What are we supposed to do now?’ I had no answer
because I didn’t know, myself, what I would do now. The white
racists who had been hiding under rocks since the 1960s slithered
out after Trump’s victory and joined his battle. Is this their last roar
before America becomes a majority-minority nation? Or will they
succeed in their aim of stopping or greatly reducing immigration, of
forcing immigrants to leave America?
Immigrants have endured tough, and sometimes cruel, policies for
decades. But each month of Trump’s presidency has escalated the
attack. He got elected by stoking fear of migrants. Then he stoked
fear of everyone else: the press, non-whites, women, Democrats,
the NFL. And the people who voted for him out of fear of migrants
rode the wave of fear all the way with him, and now Americans are
at each other’s throats. Trump will try to hold on to power and win
re-election by continuing to stoke it: build that wall, shoot anyone
who tries to climb over it. The evidence, so far, shows that his tactic
works. Because it’s not Trump alone. Ninety per cent of
Republicans,5 as of summer 2018, support this man. A third of the
country, more or less.
My home is in the other two-thirds.

This book is being written in sorrow and rage – as well as hope. I

am angry: about the staggering global hypocrisy of the rich nations,
having robbed the poor ones of their future, now arguing against a
reverse movement of peoples – not to invade and conquer and steal,
but to work. Angry at the ecological devastation that has been
visited upon the planet by the West, and which now demands that
the poor nations stop emitting carbon dioxide. Angry at the depiction
of people like my family and the other families that have continued
in my family’s path, because they had no other choice, as
freeloaders, drug dealers and rapists. I’m tired of apologizing for
moving. These walls, these borders, between the peoples of the
Earth: they are of recent vintage, and they are flimsy.
People are not plants. Migration is a constant of human history.
But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we started
travelling greater distances in shorter times on trains, steamships,
cars and jet planes. And in recent years, as the legacies of
colonialism, inequality, war and climate change have made it close to
impossible for people in the poor countries to live a decent life,
we’ve become a planet on the move. Between 1960 and 2017, the
overall number of migrants tripled.6 Today, 3.4 per cent of the world
population, or one out of every twenty-nine humans, lives in a
country different from the one they were born in. If all the migrants
were a nation by themselves, we would constitute the fourth-largest
country in the world, equal to the size of Indonesia. By mid-century,
migration will account for 72 per cent of the population growth in
the USA,7 and up to 78 per cent in Australia and the UK. This is
changing elections, culture, cities – everything. Mass migration is the
defining human phenomenon of the twenty-first century.
 Never before has there been so much human movement. And
never before has there been so much organized resistance to human
movement. All over the world, countries are building high walls and
fences against this movement: in Hungary, in Israel, in India and, if
Trump has his way, in the United States. They’re moving their armies
and navies to their borders to intercept – and in some cases shoot at
– desperate caravans and boats of migrant men, women and
children.
It’s not just white fear that’s putting up the walls. In South Africa
it’s fear of Zimbabweans; in India it’s fear of Bangladeshis. Another
effect of mass migration is the withdrawal of countries from
multilateral institutions and treaties, like the European Union and the
North American Free Trade Agreement, and into narrow nationalism,
a pinched vision of the country’s role in the world that has the effect
of impoverishing it, economically and culturally.
Pretty much anyone who was not Asian could get on a boat to
America, until the Immigration Act of 1924, which set racial limits
based on the ethnic composition of the United States in 1890. Today,
among the rich countries,8 the United States ranks nineteenth in
terms of how many immigrants per capita it takes in annually. For
every thousand residents, New Zealand welcomes 11.7 immigrants
per year. Germany takes in 12.6. The United States suffers 3.6; only
five Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
countries are less welcoming. America long ago stopped lifting its
lamp beside the golden door.
Increasingly, Europe is the same story. The population of African
cities is slated to triple,9 from half a billion today to one and a half
billion by 2050. By then, the working-age population of sub-Saharan
Africa is projected to increase by 800 million. Many of them will head
north, to Europe: the number of immigrants in the larger European
countries is set to increase threefold in this period. But in many of
them, politics today is defined by a competition to see which party
can prevent immigration most effectively, not by which one has the
best strategy for dealing with the inevitable and integrating the new
arrivals most successfully.
 Meanwhile, the world grows ever more horrific for human beings
caught in conflicts, internal or international. In 2012, there were
930,000 newly registered asylum seekers driven out from their
countries.10 Three years later, there were 2.3 million. Not since the
end of World War II have there been more refugees and displaced
people all around the world.11

The rich countries have always claimed the freedom to move around
the planet, not just to sightsee or seek employment, but to invade,
to conquer. At airports around the world, the holders of Indian and
African passports line up miserably in queues hours long while their
fellow passengers holding American and European passports, gilded
passports, swan through immigration.
In Abu Dhabi I noticed that the brown people, usually working in
menial or service jobs, were called ‘migrants’, while the white
people, employed as executives or professionals, got to call
themselves ‘expats’, a much more glamorous term than ‘migrant’,
implying wealth, long afternoons at the club, fat housing allowances.
Above all, it implies that your movement has been voluntary,
unforced by historical or economic circumstances.
Today’s migrants are rarely so fortunate. Half are women,12 a
recent phenomenon, and they are raped and molested and harassed
all over the world in vastly greater numbers than native-born
women. Eight out of ten undocumented Central American women
who migrate to the United States are raped en route,13 according to
an investigation by the cable channel Fusion. Before they set off,
they equip themselves with contraceptives. When you move
countries, your greatest – sometimes only – asset is your body,
which also becomes your greatest vulnerability. Sex becomes
currency, to be exchanged for protection from the smugglers, the
coyotes, or the police. The arrangement is called cuerpomátic – after
the Central American credit-card processor Credomatic – because it
involves using your body, cuerpo, as currency.
The bodies of children are also at stake. It used to be that parents
went abroad and sent back money for their children. But now the
parents watch the children grow up, get attacked on the way to
school, get recruited into gangs; and say to the children, ‘Go – go
north, because you won’t be able to live here. There is no life here.’

Migration is like the weather: people will move from areas of high
pressure to those of low pressure. Like the weather, this movement
is equally hard to fight. Well over half of all undocumented
immigrants come into America not through the borders but by flying
in and overstaying their visas.14 A wall will do nothing to stop them.
And so they will keep coming, on foot or in boats, on planes or on
bicycles, whether you want them or not – because they are the
creditors – whether you realize it or not.
In 2015, a group of immigrants, mostly Syrian refugees,15 found
themselves stopped at the Norwegian border with Russia. They had
obtained Russian visas in Damascus or Beirut, flown to Moscow, and
taken a train to Murmansk, which is 130 miles from the Norwegian
border. The Russians would not allow people to walk across the
border; the Norwegians would not allow people to drive across the
border.
So the refugees bicycled across the border. Five hundred a week.
Thousands of migrants, pedalling on rickety bikes, across the magic
line to Europe. The bureaucrats had not thought of banning bicycles.

Ever since the invention of passports, the right to a home, to a

nation, has existed in conflict with the right to move freely, to leave
home and to find another home. Article 13 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights states,16 ‘Everyone has the right to
freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each
State. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his
own, and to return to his country.’ It says nothing about what
happens when someone leaves his country, or whether or not he has
a right to reside in another country. Article 14, though, gives
everyone the right to political asylum in another country, and Article
15 gives everyone the right to a nationality and the right to change
that nationality. These contradictions are what the world is grappling
with today.

During the Great Depression, an Okie named Woody Guthrie began

travelling around the country, listening and gathering stories and
songs. In 1944, he recorded a song that, after the Weavers
popularized it, has become America’s alternative national anthem.
Most Americans are familiar with the opening and closing lines of
‘This Land Is Your Land’. But what is less known is that in other
variants there are three extra verses, which make it a protest
anthem and a prophetic one at that. One of the verses was
handwritten by Guthrie in 1940:
Was a big high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing–
This land was made for you and me

There are also two other verses in a longer version of the song:
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

With those last three verses, the Guthrie song becomes not just the
American anthem, but a universal migrants’ anthem, wherever in the
world they come from, and wherever they are going. This land is
their land; this land is our land.
 2

The Fence: Amargo y Dulce

For years, if you didn’t have papers or lacked the authorization to

leave the United States without the right to come back, the only
place along the 2,000-mile US–Mexican border where you could
meet your family face-to-face was at the end of the line: a small
patch of land adjoining the Pacific Ocean between San Diego and
Tijuana. It was inaugurated by First Lady Pat Nixon in 1971 as a
‘friendship park’ between the two nations and originally did not have
a fence.1 Families on both sides could meet and have picnics
together without hindrance. ‘May there never be a wall between
these two great nations,’ Nixon said. ‘Only friendship.’
In 1994, as part of Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton
administration decided that ‘only friendship’ was no longer the case;
it would erect a barrier – a fence – between these two great nations.
Families could meet across the barrier of twelve-foot-high steel
bollards and pass food back and forth. In 2009, the Obama
administration shut down the American side of Friendship Park and
put up a second fence behind the first one. After protests, Friendship
Park reopened in 2012, but with a thick double mesh; if a child
wanted to touch her mother, for instance, she could stick her little
finger inside the fence, and her mother could do the same on the
opposite side, and the tips could touch: the dance of the fingers, the
‘pinkie kiss’. ‘Amargo y dulce’ is how the migrants describe the
experience. Bittersweet.
 Every once in a while, in its magnanimity, the government opened
a door adjoining Friendship Park, and people could actually hug their
family members – for no more than three minutes. This wasn’t done
often; the door was opened only six times after 2013.2 On one of
those occasions, in November 2017, a couple showed up on opposite
sides of the border wearing wedding clothes, got married under the
watchful eye of the Border Patrol, and then went back, separated
again. The groom on the American side, as the newspapers later
found out, was awaiting sentencing for a drug conviction. Ten
months earlier, a customs search of his Volkswagen Jetta at the
nearby port of San Ysidro had uncovered forty-three pounds of
heroin, forty-seven pounds of methamphetamine and forty-three
pounds of cocaine. The newspapers called it the ‘cartel wedding’,
and the Border Patrol had egg all over its face. It had, unwittingly,
provided armed security for the drug dealer.
The next month, a Border Patrol officer named Rodney Scott took
over the San Diego sector and shut the Door of Hope for good. The
Border Angels, a local non-profit organization, had been working on
a seventh opening of the gate, so that parents whose children were
disabled, but were on the other side, could hug them for a few
minutes. Scott declared that this gate would no longer open for
human beings. ‘It’s a maintenance gate … to be used for
maintenance purposes only.’
Scott also came out with a list of new restrictions on families
visiting Friendship Park:3 they could meet from only 10 a.m. to 2
p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays for ten to thirty minutes at a time.
And only ten people at a time would be allowed in, down from
twenty-five previously. And they couldn’t take any photos or videos
or even record their family members’ voices on a tape recorder. The
government’s explanation? ‘The US Border Patrol is committed to
ensuring the safety and security of those who visit Friendship Circle.’
How taking a photo of a family member, with armed guards
watching, compromises anyone’s safety or security was not in the
explanation.
The fence is a heavily rusted mesh structure, ugly, industrial,
foreboding. It snakes down the hillsides and all the way into the sea.
People on horseback trot on to the American beach from the dude
ranches that line the road to the park. On the Mexican side, there is
liveliness, food, crowds. ‘Música, música, música,’ offer the strolling
men dressed in cowboy hats, carrying accordions or guitars, to
serenade the reunions.
The Border Patrol doesn’t check the papers of most people
entering the park. It’s not an official policy to tolerate those they
suspect of being illegal aliens at Friendship Park; but of the
thousands of visitors in 2017, only one or two were arrested for
being undocumented.
Two little girls on either side of the fence run off from their
families for a bit, and the older one bends down to touch the
younger one’s finger. She is so young that even her index finger fits
through the mesh. The girl on the Mexican side is eating from a bag
of fried food; she tries to push some through to the girl on the
American side, but the yellow lump of food is too big to go through
the hole, and it falls to the ground.
The girl’s mother, who has been talking to a man on the other
side, turns to look for her daughter; her eyes are red from crying.
Another family shows up from Colorado Springs. Their mother has
come from Ciudad Juárez. The little ones are lifted up to peer at
their abuela. They all try to touch fingers.

Alfredo Varela walks into the enclosure. He is from Irvine, California,

he tells me, and hasn’t seen his brother for twenty years. He came
over at thirteen with his mother, who later returned to Mexico and
can’t come back. He is a facilities technician and is on ‘something
like DACA’, which allows him to stay in the country but not cross this
fence to hug his only brother.
Alfredo, who grew up in Tijuana, is a keen amateur photographer;
he likes to take photos of sunsets on the ocean. He points to the sea
and says, ‘We used to ride our bikes on that beach’ – back and forth
beyond the two countries, when he was a kid. Nobody bothered
them. They would carry their passports with them in case anyone
asked. His brother was more adventurous and would go farther out
into San Diego; Alfredo stayed on the beach.
His brother finally arrives, and Alfredo walks towards the barrier.
He is standing a little apart from the fence, smiling. Then he leans
in. He takes off his sunglasses and his cap, showing his closely
cropped head, his face. There is laughter from the other side. He
leans forward and puts his hand up to the metal. So does his
brother.
Alfredo comes back the next day, on the Sunday, to speak to his
brother some more before he goes back to Guadalajara, a two-and-
a-half-hour flight away. ‘I did the math and realized it was actually
twenty-five years since I’d seen him,’ he tells me, wonderingly. He’s
been putting pressure on his brother to get a passport so that he
can get a tourist visa to come and visit him.
In a way, Alfredo is glad they could only talk through the mesh,
because it felt less than satisfactory to his brother: ‘He feels like he’s
visiting me in jail.’ Now his brother will feel motivated to visit him,
even though it’s a risk. It costs $160 to even apply for a tourist visa,
which is a lot of money in Mexico, and the application could well be
rejected.
There was an unexpected family bonus on this trip for Alfredo. He
was looking through Facebook to see if he knew anyone in San
Diego and happened to come across his uncle, his father’s brother,
whom he hadn’t seen since he’d been in the United States because
the uncle is undocumented and won’t risk taking the highway out of
the city, where there are multiple Border Patrol checkpoints. So
Alfredo met his uncle, met his nephews, in their house. It made him
feel good, meeting the only other family he has in this country, and
they made plans to meet again soon.
Alfredo has a work authorization, which he has to renew every
two years but doesn’t allow him to go out of the country. If there’s
an emergency, like a funeral or the impending death of a close
relative, he could apply for a waiver. But he misses his family at
Christmas time. ‘All I want for Christmas is to give my mother a hug,’
he says.
 A lesbian couple, a schoolteacher and her partner who are moving
from southern California to Seattle, have come to the park with their
two puppies, pugs named Guinness and Modelo, after the beers.
One of them hasn’t had his rabies shot, so they can’t take him to
Mexico. So they’ve come to show their ‘children’ to the
schoolteacher’s mother across the fence. The puppies put their legs
up at the fence; the mother tries to touch them.
A man and a woman walk out of the meeting point. The woman is
sobbing, and the man has his arm around her. They turn out to be a
brother and sister who are Dreamers. They came here aged eleven
and twelve. They’ve just met their parents for the first time in ten
years. ‘I could smell them,’ he says with happiness.
For two days straight, I have been speaking to children, parents,
siblings, and best friends, moments after they’ve seen their loved
ones after years and years. Most of them end up weeping. I’ve never
seen so many people break down in such a short amount of time; it
is the Park of Tears. If you’ve ever stopped speaking to someone in
your family, go to this park and watch the families separated by a
government trying to talk to one another through the wire mesh,
trying to force their fingers into the little holes to touch their
mother’s or their grandmother’s finger. Friendship Park is at once a
monument to bureaucratic stupidity and the absurd rules that
lawyers make, as well as to the power of love and family to surpass
them. It is the cruellest and the most hopeful place I have ever
seen.

I drive out with Rae Ocampo, a genial young Filipino Border Patrol
officer, for a tour of the entire fourteen-mile border fence that starts
in the mountains and winds down to Friendship Park, just before it
ends in the sea. The residents of the slums abutting the wall in
Mexico have thrown heaps of garbage over the fence into the United
States. Ocampo spends most of his days driving up and down the
fence line, peering into Tijuana. He has never been there. ‘I might
run into someone I’ve arrested. It’s not safe.’
Ocampo shows me a whole series of patches on the bottom of the
outer fence, covering openings that the coyotes have made with
wire cutters. It is these openings that Trump had viewed on a visit
here, as he demanded his big, beautiful wall. Eight prototypes for
that wall are now set up, some solid concrete, some nine-foot pillars.
They are monstrous and inhuman, meant to be not just
insurmountable but intimidating – deliberately brutalist. A signal to
America’s southern neighbours: keep out.
It remains to be seen if a wall, no matter how high, will deter
desperate migrants who have no other option but to cross. The
Border Patrol regularly finds tunnels emerging in the warehouses
near the border, though they are too expensive to dig solely for
human cargo and are mostly used for drug smuggling. As the
number of people crossing illegally drops, the amount of drugs
coming across increases. In 2017, 782 pounds of fentanyl,4 enough
for 200 million lethal doses, was intercepted at the San Diego border
– up six times from the previous year. No wall is going to stop these
drugs from coming, because the cartels are increasingly smuggling
their shipments through the official border crossings; they’re hidden
inside trucks or even disguised to look like parts of the trucks
themselves.
We drive past a spanking new private airport in Tijuana,5 which is
connected to the other side of the border by a land bridge. From
America, you can pay sixteen dollars to cross the bridge and take a
flight from the airport to anywhere in Mexico and many Latin
American destinations. The flights cost considerably less than you
would pay at San Diego International, a twenty-minute drive north.
When you return, you will be greeted with welcoming smiles by US
customs officers, who are paid by the owners of the airport. So there
is one system of entry into the United States for the rich coming
from the airport and another for the not-so-rich pedestrians who
often have to line up for hours for the free crossings nearby. Just like
you can pay for a business-class air fare, you can now pay for
business-class immigration counters.

I am standing in Friendship Park when Rodney Scott, the San Diego

sector chief, comes by. He points out a white pillar beyond the fence.
It indicates the actual demarcation of the border, but it is on the
Mexican side, surrounded by families, food vendors, and mariachi
bands. He wants to move the fence to the boundary.
There are around 20,000 Border Patrol agents now,6 compared
with nine thousand in 2000, and the agency’s budget has
quadrupled. (Its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, is
the largest law enforcement agency in the country, with over 60,000
employees.) The Border Patrol’s territory is divided into twenty
sectors. Each is a fiefdom in which the sector chief has absolute
authority.
Scott is a white man in his forties, speaks with a Midwestern
accent, and has the air of a viceroy. He has decided that there is to
be no hugging. He alone decides. The families do not decide; they
have no voice. He decides that the Friendship Garden shouldn’t have
painted tyres buried in the ground to mark the perimeter. He doesn’t
like the look – it’s too Mexican – and so it has to go.
I have a simple question for him: Why won’t he let families hug?
Why won’t he let Alfredo give his mother and his brother a hug for
Christmas?
‘I understand that the people want to hug through the border
fence. It’s really not the purpose, though. We won’t be doing that,’
he says with finality. He says he’s had evidence that, in areas close
to the border, ‘sensitive information for the United States was being
passed through the fence on thumb drives’.
There will be no hugging through the fence now or in the future,
Scott says, because the people who want to do so are usually
criminals. ‘There are 320 ports of entry in the country where you can
cross the border pretty easily. The only reason that people couldn’t –
not the only reason, but the majority of people – they can’t cross the
border to actually physically meet their relatives, there’s some kind
of crime they’ve committed that put them into that situation. The
normal American and/or the normal Mexican can actually get a
border-crosser card, or actually just cross very easily.’
I bring up the case of people who have work authorizations that
don’t allow them to leave the country, like Alfredo, or the Dreamers.
 The Dreamers are here illegally, Scott says. He compares them to
queue jumpers at public events. ‘Pick any amusement park that you
want, or any movie, or even Black Friday, the day after
Thanksgiving, where people line up for hours or days in advance to
get into the event, right? So, in any one of those events, if you’re
standing in line and a family cuts in front of you in that line to get in,
you’re gonna be a little bit angry about it … Now, you complain, and
security walks up and grabs the parents and says, “You can’t do this,
but it’s not your kids’ fault that you cut in line, so we’re gonna let the
kids go in.” Ahead of your family, ahead of all the people that’ve
been waiting in this line – that’s for years in some cases, but in my
analogy, overnight. Is that fair? So that’s why it’s so complicated. It’s
not a simple “Oh yeah, it’s not the kids’ fault”.’
When the fence was open, people were passing ‘stored-value
cards’, among other things, to their relatives, according to Scott.
‘That’s actually currency smuggling.’ He now wants the relatives to
move even farther apart. He’s planning a bollard-style fence, which
would allow people to see their families better than the current mesh
does but would move them four feet apart. ‘So you still won’t be
able to pass things through it, you still won’t be able to hug through
it, or shake hands, but you’d be able to actually see the person that
you are talking to.’ Not even a pinkie could kiss under Scott’s plans
for his fence.
Scott is a devout Christian and thinks of his profession in Christian
terms. ‘I believe that my job is my calling. I ended up here for a
reason somehow.’
‘What happens when you have to separate a child from its
mother?’ I ask, bringing up the Trump administration’s recently
announced policy of forcibly separating migrant children from their
parents. ‘How do you reconcile that with your biblical principles of
giving hospitality to a stranger?’
‘I don’t see the conflict that some others see,’ Scott responds. ‘I
go back to the original sin, to the Garden of Eden. There were
consequences: they got deported out of the Garden of Eden, and
God created a border around it.’
Another random document with
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 Exercise care in laying down a bit; it is easily dulled. Do not use a
good auger bit where there is any danger of its striking nails or other
metal.
Auger bits are easily sharpened, a small file being used, but they
are more easily spoiled by improper filing, and no student should
attempt to sharpen one without having personal direction from his
instructor.
39. The Drill Bit; The Gimlet Bit.—The drill bit, Fig. 77, is quite
hard and may be used for boring
in metal as well as wood. It is easily broken and especial care must
be taken to hold the brace firmly. Do not try to change the direction
of the boring by inclining the brace after the bit has started into the
wood.

Fig. 77.

Fig. 78.

Fig. 79.

In boring hard wood or metal, make a “seat” for the point with an
awl or, in metal with a center punch. Otherwise it is difficult to start
the bit in the exact place.
The gimlet bit, Fig. 78, is used mainly for boring holes for screws.
40. Countersink Bit.—Fig. 79 is an illustration of a rosehead
countersink. This tool is used for enlarging
screw holes made with the gimlet so that the heads of the screws
may sink into the wood even with or below the surface.
41. The Screw-driver Bit.—The screwdriver bit, Fig. 80, is not a
boring tool, but as it is used in
connection with the brace it is inserted here. It will be found
convenient where large screws are to be inserted. Where a large
number of screws are to be inserted it will permit of very rapid work.

Fig. 80.

In using the screwdriver bit, especially in driving screws into hard

wood, the bit will tend to jump out of the groove in the head of the
screw. To avoid its jumping entirely out and marring the wood, take
but half a revolution at a time, then move the brace backward slightly
before proceeding again. This allows the bit which has partly worked
its way out of the groove to drop back again.
The manner in which a screwdriver bit is sharpened has much to
do with its working properly. It should be sharpened like the
screwdriver.
42. The Brad-awl.—The brad-awl is used for boring very small
holes. Unlike most boring tools it does not
remove the material from the opening it makes.
 Fig. 81.

The cutting edge of the brad awl should be placed across the grain
in starting, and the tool turned half way around and back again,
repeating until the proper depth has been bored. It is withdrawn with
similar turnings. Fig. 81.
Patent spiral screwdrivers and automatic drills have come into
quite common use in recent years. They are used mainly upon light
work; their advantage being the rapidity with which they do their
work.
43. Positions while Boring.—Fig. 82 illustrates the position to be
taken in horizontal boring. The head
of the brace is held steady by bracing the body against the hand
which holds it.

Fig. 82. Fig. 83.

To tell whether a bit is boring a hole in the direction which is

wanted, it is necessary to sight the bit and brace from two directions
at right angles to each other. In horizontal boring, the first sight
should be made while in the position shown in the illustration. The
second position for sighting would be obtained by inclining the upper
part of the body until the eye is on a level with the bit. In vertical
boring, Fig. 83, the sighting of the bit would be done across the
piece, then along it.
Changing from one position to the other can be done easily and
without interfering with the boring and should be done quite often,
until the bit has entered well within the wood.
Fig. 84 illustrates a position which is frequently taken when boring
in hard wood, or when using the screwdriver bit on large screws. The
chin, resting upon the left hand, steadies the tool in the first case,
and can be made to give additional pressure in the second.
 Fig. 84.

44. Thru Boring.—To avoid splitting the wood around the edge of
the hole when it is desired to make a hole
entirely thru a piece, bore from the face side until the point of the
spur can be felt on the back. Then reverse the position of the board
and, inserting the point of the spur in the hole just made, finish the
boring from the back side. The bit must be held perpendicular to the
surface while boring from the second side, as well as the first, or
some of the edge of the hole will be broken from the first side as the
bit is forced thru.
45. Boring to Depth.—When it is desired to bore to a given depth,
turn the crank of the brace until the lips of the
auger are just ready to cut the surface. With the rule, measure the
distance from the surface of the piece to the grip of the brace. Fig.
85. The brace may then be turned until this distance is diminished by
the amount which represents the desired depth of the hole.

Fig. 85. Fig. 86.

Where many holes of the same depth are to be bored much time
will be saved by cutting a block the length of the exposed part of the
bit when the hole is to the required depth. This can be placed beside
the bit so that the grip will strike it. Fig. 86.
 CHAPTER V.
Chisels and Chiseling.

46. Chisels.—Chisels are usually divided into two classes, the

framing chisel, which is heavy and strong, and the
firmer chisel, which is lighter. The framing chisel, Fig. 87, is used on
heavy work such as the frames of buildings. Its handle is usually
fitted into a socket and the top is tipped with leather or banded with
iron to prevent its splitting when pounded with the mallet. The firmer
chisel, Fig. 88, is used for lighter work without the mallet, such as
paring, and its handle is usually fitted upon a tang.

Fig. 87.

Fig. 88.

The size of a chisel is indicated by the width of the cutting edge

and varies from one-eighth of an inch to two inches.
To do good work a chisel must be kept very sharp, and special
care must be taken in handling it. Both hands should, at all times, be
kept back of the cutting edge.
 Fig. 89.

The action of a chisel driven into the wood with a mallet is

somewhat similar to that of a wedge. This must be taken into
account when cutting dadoes, mortises, etc., where it is desired to
cut away the waste exactly to a given line. If the chisel were beveled
on two sides the action would be the same as that of a wedge; that
is, the wood would be pushed to either side equally. Since the bevel
is on one side only, beginners are prone to think that the wedging
takes place on one side only, the bevel side. Most of the wedging
does take place on the wood at the bevel side, but there is enough
pressure against the bevel to force the flat side of the chisel over the
line slightly onto the part which it is not desired to cut. To overcome
this action, chisel a line parallel to the given line, about one thirty-
second of an inch away from it, on the waste. When the opening has
been cut to depth, the chisel may be set exactly in the given line and
driven to depth. The narrow margin of waste wood breaks off; the
pressure against the bevel is therefore almost nothing. Fig. 89.
 Fig. 90.

47. Horizontal Paring Across the Grain.—In horizontal chiseling

the work should be
fastened so as to leave both hands free to guide the chisel. Fig. 90
shows the manner of holding the chisel. The left hand rests against
the piece of wood and the chisel is kept from cutting too far by the
pressure of the thumb and fingers of this hand. With the bevel side of
the blade up, move the handle from right to left carefully while
pushing it forwards; pare off pieces about one-sixteenth of an inch
thick half way across from edge to edge. Fig. 91. When within a
thirty-second of an inch from the gage line hold the chisel so that its
cutting edge shall move obliquely across the grain and pare just to
the gage line. The direction of the grain will determine which corner
of the chisel is to cut ahead. In starting the last cut place the chisel
squarely in the gage line.
The piece should be reversed and the cut finished by cutting in a
similar manner from the second side.
 Fig. 91. Fig. 92.

Fig. 92 illustrates a second method of horizontal paring. It differs

from the first in that the chisel is turned while in the horizontal
position so that one of the edges is free of the wood. By cutting first
with one edge free, then the other, the surface may be lowered until
only a low ridge extends across the piece from edge to edge. This
ridge may then be removed by cutting to the gage line in the usual
manner.
If the chisel is properly sharpened the surface may be left as
smooth and as level as if planed.
48. Vertical Paring.—In vertical paring hold the chisel as shown in
Fig. 93. The left hand resting upon the wood,
holds the wood in place, while the index finger and thumb of the left
hand assist in placing and guiding the chisel. Only a small portion of
the cutting edge can be used in vertical paring; the amount will
depend upon the hardness of the wood and the strength of the
student. Ordinarily, not more than one-quarter of an inch of the chisel
width can be used for very soft woods and not more than one-eighth
for hard woods. That part of the blade which is not used for cutting
purposes is used as a guide to insure each cut’s being in the same
plane as the last. The chisel should be inclined toward the worker,
the unused part of the blade pressed firmly against the part of the
surface already cut. To make the cut, apply the needed pressure, at
the same time moving the handle forward until the chisel shall have
a vertical position as shown by the dotted lines in Fig. 94. Care must
be taken to keep the broad surface of the chisel at right angles to the
surface of the work at all times. The worker should so stand that he
may look along the line as he cuts it. Otherwise he is in no position
for sighting the chisel plumb.

Fig. 93. Fig. 94.

49. Oblique and Curved Line Paring.—Whether cutting with the

grain or across the grain,
care must be taken in oblique and curved line paring to cut from the
straight grain toward the end grain. Fig. 95.
 A, B—Right.
C, D—Wrong.

Fig. 95.

50. Paring Chamfers.—Fig. 96 illustrates two ways of holding the

chisel in cutting chamfers. In one, the bevel
side of the chisel is down and the cutting edge held at right angles to
the grain. In the other, the flat side of the chisel is down and the
cutting edge is worked obliquely to the grain.
Fig. 96.
 Fig. 97.

Frequently, it is desired to chamfer or bevel the end of a piece of

wood with the chisel. To do this hold the cutting edge obliquely to the
grain, the flat side of the chisel down. Fig. 97. The use of the framing
chisel is described in connection with the making of the mortise. Part
II.

Fig. 98.

51. The Firmer Gouge.—Fig. 98. The gouge is curved in section

and may have its bevel on either side. It is
used for cutting grooves and hollowing out surfaces. The size of the
gouge is determined by measuring the straight distance between the
corners of the cutting edge.
When roughing out where rather thick shavings may be taken, the
gouge should be held as in Fig. 99, the blade being held firmly in the
left hand. When taking off thin shavings and in finishing, the tool
should be held as shown in Fig. 100. In using the gouge avoid short
strokes. Try to take as long and as even shavings as the nature of
the work and the wood will allow. The thinner the shaving, the easier
it will be to cut smoothly. A circular movement imparted to the cutting
edge will enable the tool to cut more easily the end grain of wood, as
is necessary in cutting the ends of grooves in pen-trays, etc.

Fig. 99. Fig. 100.

52. Grinding Beveled Edge Tools.—When edged tools become

rounded over by repeated
whettings or when they are nicked too deeply for the oilstone to
remove the nicks, the grindstone is needed to cut the metal to the
proper angle. Fig. 101 shows the manner of holding the chisel upon
the stone. The tool must be held firmly and at the same angle. This
angle will depend upon the temper of the tool and the kind of wood
to be cut, whether hard or soft, soft wood allowing the use of a
sharper angle. On plane-irons the length of bevel or grind should be
three-sixteenths or one-fourth of an inch; on the chisels, three-
eighths or one-half an inch. The tool should not be kept in the middle
of the stone but should be moved from right to left and vice versa
across it as the grinding proceeds, that the surface of the stone may
be worn as evenly as possible.
 20° to 25°

Fig. 101.

The pressure of the left hand should be so applied that the stone
shall cut straight across the blade. Examine the tool often, being
careful to replace it each time as nearly as possible at the same
angle. Fig. 102 shows the flat bevel which is to be obtained, also the
rounded effect caused by frequent changing of the angle at which
the tool is held.
 Angle
20° to 25°

Fig. 102.

Grindstones are usually turned towards the tool because in doing

so they will cut faster.
Water is caused to flow on the stone for two reasons: To keep the
edge of the tool from being burned or softened by the heat which
friction would generate, and to wash off the particles of steel and
stone, thus keeping the cutting surface clean that it may cut the more
freely.
53. Whetting Beveled Edge Tools.—The grindstone does not
sharpen tools; that is the work
of the oilstone. No tool, after it has been ground, is ready for use
until it has been whetted.
54. Oilstones.—Oilstones in common use are of two kinds; those
which are of very fine grained natural stone and
those which are manufactured by pressing a powdered, metal cutting
substance into rectangular forms. In selecting an oilstone it should
be remembered that the finer the grain, the keener the edge it will
produce but the longer time it takes to produce it.
Manufactured stones are frequently made “two in one,” that is,
coarse and medium or medium and fine are put together in such a
way that one side gives a rapid cutting and the other a slower but
smoother cutting surface. The advantage of such a stone is easily
understood.
Oil is used on stones to cleanse the pores of the stone of the little
particles of steel cut from the tool. Were it not for the oil’s mixing with
and removing these particles, the surface of the stone would soon
become smooth and friction so reduced that the cutting power would
be greatly interfered with.
While but a part of the stone need be used at one placing of the
tool, effort should be made to utilize as much of the surface as
possible that the surface may be kept level as long as possible.
Stones that have worn uneven may have their surfaces leveled by
rubbing them on a piece of sandpaper or emery paper placed on a
flat surface.
55. Sharpening the Chisel.—Hold the tool as shown in Fig. 103.
Suppose the grinding produced a
bevel of about twenty-five degrees, in whetting, effort should be
made to hold the blade so as to produce an angle slightly greater
than this. The amount shown in Fig. 107 a and b is exaggerated. The
aim at all times should be to keep this second angle as near like the
first as is possible and still get a straight bevel to the cutting edge.
 Fig. 103.

To get the tool into proper position, lay it flat on the stone with the
beveled edge resting in the oil which has previously been placed on
the stone. The oil should be drawn to the place where the whetting is
to be done, the back edge of the bevel being used to push and draw
it to place. Gradually raise the handle of the tool until the oil is
expelled from under the cutting edge; it is then in position. Use just
enough oil to keep the surface well moistened where the whetting is
being done.
Rub the chisel back and forth, keeping it at the same angle all the
time. A rocking motion and frequent change of angle will result in a
rounded end instead of a straight bevel. Some workmen prefer to
give the blade a circular instead of the forward and backward
movement.
To remove the feather or wire edge which frequently results from
over-whetting or from grinding, proceed as follows: Hold the tool with
the flat side down, just a little above the stone, with the handle just a
very little higher than the cutting edge. In one stroke push the cutting
edge forward and down on the stone, at the same time lowering the
rear end to a level with the cutting edge. The effect of this movement
is to turn the wire edge under and cut it off. If the first attempt does
not remove it, whet the bevel just enough to turn the edge back on
the flat side and try again. The presence of a feather edge is
detected by rubbing the fingers along the flat side over the cutting
edge. If a still keener edge is desired it may be obtained by the use
of a strop, a piece of leather fastened to a flat surface.

Fig. 104.

Hold the tool as shown in Fig. 104 and draw it toward you several
times. Then hold it with the flat side down and draw it back once or
twice.
The angles of the bevels of a gouge are similar to those of a
chisel. In sharpening, hold the tool at right angles to the edge of the
stone, instead of parallel as with the chisel. Move it lengthwise of the
stone, at the same time rotating the handle so as to give the blade a
circular motion as from A to B, Fig. 105.