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# Bolstering borders keeps enemy within
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/bolstering-borders-keeps-enemy-within/
- Published: 2006-04-13T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T23:53:18.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By NEWS ON THE EDGE BY RON SCOTT SMITH*

They’re reportedly this close to a done deal with the United States government to build a 40-foot-high wall around the entirety of the United States of America, from Yuma, Ariz., right across Katrina’s rubble that sits yet on the Gulf Coast, on up the Eastern seaboard through old-school Bush country, Kennebunkport, the whole shebang. It would traverse our northernmost boundaries, across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then on around the bend in Seattle to snake down along the Pacific coast, parallel to scenic Highway 1, right back to where all the trouble started in the first place, Tijuana and that damned leaky border, imaginary as it may be, that separates us from them.

You think the Chinese had this barrier-building thing down? Ha. This new “Great Wall of America” will make that tired old thing look like a white picket fence in front of a little pink house. You think the Barbarian hordes were menacing? The danger this nation faces from the great brown horde pouring in here, raping our fields, pillaging our kitchens, slashing our hedges at will —or at minimum wage — makes the Barbarians look like girlie-men.

Of course, as with most aspects of this whole twisted immigration row, the truth is that the folks the barrier would keep out are the very ones who would be needed to build it because that daunting task in a lot of hot sun is just another in the long list of jobs that, as President George W. Bush told us, “Americans will not do.” Does he make us sound like a bunch of spoiled brats or what? Won’t even mow our own lawns or scrub our own stovetops?

Maybe it has something to do with the unlivable $5.15 national minimum wage he condones for most of the hardest physical labor. What we lack in calloused hands we make up for in conniving brains, because nobody in their right American mind would work for $5.15, even if it is to build the magnificent barrier that would forever keep us safe at night and selfish in the morning. So the Republic Fence Company will have to visit the parking lots of Do-It Centers and Home Depots across the nation to hire their work force, one that finds even our paltry minimum wage better than what they could get back home.

And that beer-bellied band of border vigilantes, the Minutemen, will wink at each other and look the other way just long enough to let enough feared enemy in to build the Great Wall of America, then they will boot them out on their ass-end, never again allowed to set foot in the promised land, as their usefulness will have run out.

Why should America not be scared to death at the specter of great menacing hordes of the uninvited, unappreciative and differently-tinted, moving in from the outside and taking over? We have a great model to refer to — ourselves.

After all, the great white swarm that poured into this land centuries ago just looking for a decent empire, must have been seen as ruthless, unrelenting and terrifying to the ones already here. Boy, do Sitting Bull and Geronimo ever wish they would have had a Republic Fence Company of Chatsworth in their midst. Or a sign-maker to paint and hang the “No one with shirt, shoes, or pale-face will be served” warning somewhere up around Plymouth Rock. What a world of trouble they might have avoided.

Yes, we have taught ourselves a lesson, and we will not let that sort of thing happen again under any circumstance, ever.

Edgar Allan Poe must be doubling over in his grave. In his classic “Masque of the Red Death,” a wealthy prince seals himself and a thousand of his ilk inside a magnificent castle to keep them at safe distance from a deadly plague that ravages the countryside and the lesser-privileged outside the walls. All the chosen ones inside, however, are soon felled by an even more virulent strain that has made its way in, masquerading as one of their own. (Ron Scott Smith)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 13, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/041306.pdf?ref=smdp.com)