Moat

by dday

This came out a few days ago, but I couldn’t let it slip by. Yuma, Arizona is looking back to the Middle Ages for a solution to their border issues.

City officials in Yuma, in south-western Arizona, have come up with a scheme to create a “security channel” along the nearby border by reviving a derelict two-mile stretch of the Colorado river.

“The moats that I’ve seen circled the castle and allowed you to protect yourself, and that’s kind of what we’re looking at here,” Yuma county sheriff Ralph Ogden told the Associated Press. The scheme would see engineers dig out a two-mile stretch of a 180-hectare (440-acre) wetland known as Hunters Hole.

Of course we have a model for how a moat like this would work, as the 1,254 miles of the Rio Grande River along the Texas-Mexico border has been virtually impenetrable.

This is at least more environmentally sensitive than the idea of building big fences that cut off wetlands and damage the ecology, but the imagery of a moat – a moat! – just stokes our irrational fear about immigrants, as if they’re some kind of marauders. They’re coming to take our health care and education dollars, to take our jobs, and to commit crimes, and we must put up a drawbridge. Except that’s all, you know, totally untrue. (read the link.)

I’m pretty convinced that this is a political loser for Republicans, but the fearmongering on immigration, prodded along mainly by elements of the media and a conventional wisdom that “reg’lar Murcans” all believe the same thing about these issues, creates reactionary solutions like this which really reflect badly on the country as a whole. Fortunately, most locals by the border are smarter than this.

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