the U.S. economy, and make it easier for the Border Patrol to keep out the drug traffickers and the terrorists, and make it easier for the United States to efficiently process those desperate migrants from other countries seeking needed asylum.
To find fact, opinion and experience to bolster my argument, over several years I’ve visited and studied borders worldwide. I’ve traveled the serpentine U.S.-Mexican border, meeting with the victims and the perpetrators of U.S. government immigration policy. I’ve been contemplating alternatives to the status quo. I’m a journalist, so I’ve looked at the border wars through the prism of news and news reporting. Stories related here of my Mexican colleagues, journalists fighting bribery—a plague long institutionalized as a tool to manipulate Mexican journalism—offer glimpses into the rot in the Mexican economy, rot that emboldens frustrated workers to look to Gringolandia for a better life. I’ve wandered deep into Mexico to observe, experience and record the poverty and hopelessness that drive migrants to leave their homes and risk their lives on the long journey north. I’ve talked with undocumented immigrants living the American Dream and walked the beat with cops frustrated by unenforceable immigration laws. I’ve added to the mix stories from immigration lawyers and from those ultimately responsible for enticing Mexicans north: their employers in El Norte. On my journey, I’ve avoided the obvious border trip, that crooked line from San Diego and Tijuana east to Matamoros and Brownsville, the line that marks the artificial national frontier separating Mexico and the United States. Instead, I’ve traveled the extended border, crisscrossing our melded cultures from Niagara Falls to Chiapas, from Mexico City to Washington, DC, studying the borders that exist in our heads and hearts, searching for sane and humane solutions to the problems and conflicts plaguing our two countries.
Foreword by Former president of Mexico, Vicente Fox
When talk turns to borders and walls, I speak from experience. My grandfather left his native Ohio and crossed the border when he migrated into Mexico in 1895. He worked hard and eventually bought the hacienda that’s now home for my Fox Presidential Library. Around his land he built a wall because my grandfather wanted to protect his property from Pancho Villa and his revolutionaries. He needed a high wall for the job. And the wall worked.
That wall still protects our hacienda from unwanted intruders. But its role is completely different from walls that attempt to stop migration. I like to quote from Ezekiel and the biblical dismissal of such walls. “When anyone builds a wall,” Ezekiel teaches, “I will tear down the wall which you plastered over with whitewash and bring it down to the ground, so that its foundation is laid bare; and when it falls, you will be consumed in its midst. And you will know that I am the Lord.” And I appreciate the observations of the Dalai Lama who reminds us that nations belong to their citizens. Not to the leaders. Not to the presidents, not to the prime ministers.
As I write in my book, Let’s Move On: Beyond Fear & False Prophets, what good are walls around nations now when airplanes and drones can fly over them? People get very creative when faced with walls. Homemade bombs put holes in walls. Those seeking refuge or reunification with their families slip through the holes or tunnel under the walls or risk their lives on barbed wire to get over those walls.
When I was the president of Mexico we were working toward trying to abolish the concept of borders. What prevented us from doing it? Selfish nationalists who think that the rest of the world is no good. So they decide to build walls. Walls are for the fearful. You do not start building walls in the Land of the Free. The United States doesn’t keep its people behind concrete and barbed wire.
In Up Against the Wall, journalist Peter Laufer makes use of his longtime experiences studying borders and barriers to help us recognize the differences between personal walls such as those around my grandfather’s home and those like Donald Trump’s “impenetrable” wall along the Mexico-United States borderlands. Laufer reports on failed border walls turned into tourist attractions like the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall and the Berlin Wall. He shows readers new walls built on national borders since the Berlin Wall came down. He traces human migration as an unstoppable force when it’s driven by survival. And he documents stories of those who want to stay home and migrants who want to return to their friends and families and customs. Why should you trade enchiladas and tacos for hot dogs and hamburgers?
Up Against the Wall puts contemporary walls into historical context. It’s a guide for both policymakers and those thinking about migrating. And it’s a primary text for those who seek to understand the history, the philosophy and the psychology of borders and walls.
In one of my infamous videos posted on YouTube I showed a simple drawing to the camera and spoke directly to Trump. “It’s a ladder, Einstein,” I said about the picture. “You’re going to build a $25 billion wall that can be defeated by a twenty-five-dollar ladder?”1 In the following pages Peter Laufer climbs up a metaphorical ladder and looks out over our walls—the ones we may need, the nonsensical ones and the evil ones. We meet the characters who build them and those who break them down. Laufer doesn’t only present the problems, he offers creative solutions. And we come away from his book, I hope, with a better understanding of what the Dalai Lama and I talked about when we met: We eight billion people own this world. It doesn’t belong to one person or to nations, but to everybody.
Our family hacienda is now a boutique hotel; its profits help us fund the development work of Centro Fox—aiding those in need. The hotel is filled with reminders of our family’s and our nation’s past including a stark undated and uncaptioned black-and-white photograph taken on the hacienda grounds probably during the dark days of the Mexican revolution. Uniformed men with rifles are waiting for an order from their commanding officer to shoot, his sword raised high about to make the deadly signal. The guns are aimed at a man in civilian clothes, his hat doffed and held by his side, his eyes open and stolidly meeting the aim of his executioners.
The image is a sober reminder of what it means to be Up Against the Wall.
Guanajuato
2020
UP AGAINST THE WALL (EXPLETIVE)
The author and poet Jonah Raskin1 was mopping up his soup and salad dinner at the Casino bistro in Bodega—the Sonoma County village where scenes from Hitchcock’s “The Birds” were shot, a county once part of Mexico and these days filled with immigrants from Jalisco, immigrants documented and otherwise. We’ve been friends since he served as chair of the Communications Studies department at Sonoma State University—where I briefly taught.
We were talking about President Trump’s Mexico border wall, my study of walls worldwide and the research I was conducting into the origin of the phrase: Up against the wall.
“Did I tell you about the time,” Raskin queried me, “that I shouted, ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’ at a production of Joseph Heller’s play, ‘We Bombed in New Haven,’ and Heller added that line to the play and that it’s in the published text?” Raskin seemed pleased with his role as a literary footnote even though he added, “I didn’t get any credit.”
In fact, author Heller noted Raskin’s audience participation moment when the Columbia University student newspaper Spectator interviewed him in 1968 about his anti-war play. “As the actors came out for a curtain call,” the author of Catch 22 remembered, “a man stood up in the last row of the orchestra and yelled out, ‘Up
