WHEN THE NEWSEUM REOPENS THIS fall in Washington, it will have on exhibit what may be the largest section of the infamous Berlin wall remaining anywhere and the East German guard tower that I used to pass crossing through the wall at Checkpoint Charlie. The Newseum is the Freedom Forum’s living tribute to the First Amendment freedoms of speech and press inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and engraved on the Newseum’s wall facing Pennsylvania Avenue here in this nation’s capital.
Our Media & Politics class put on hard hats for a look at the work under way. The Newseum sits midway on the avenue that links — or divides — the Capitol and the White House, a metaphor for the role of the press as the Fourth Estate in America’s artfully crafted, yet sometimes precarious balance of powers.
It’s been a warm, sunny week in Washington during which the division over funding the war in Iraq cooled-slightly. The simmering summer debate over changing the nation’s immigration laws, though, continues. It bubbled up in the recent Republican presidential debate in Columbia. There’s a wall between Senator John McCain — worker visas — and former Governor Mitt Romney — no amnesty. South Carolina’s senators — Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint — are similarly divided. The “A” word is causing much of the buzz, though the issue is too complex to be characterized by any single aspect.
There are real, virtual and rhetorical walls in this debate. Rep. Henry Brown told the students that past immigration reform has not worked, so the U.S. “has got to defend its borders first.” Rep. Jim Clyburn suggested that for every “15-foot fence” there is a “16-foot ladder.”
Last year’s Secure Fence Act calls for some 700 miles of fencing between the U.S. and Mexico. History suggests walls don’t always guarantee security. China’s Great Wall was, in effect, more a centuries-long jobs program and is now a tourist attraction.
The walls of Jericho came tumbling down, and Israel’s contemporary walls have not kept terrorism out.
The Berlin Wall was an onerous scab. East Germans risked and lost their lives trying to get over or under it. Korea’s DMZ has substantially held the North Korean nation captive. It’s the North Korean government that tunnels under the DMZ trying to subvert the South Korean republic.
As a nation that built its reputation on open doors and open arms, the United States is now engaged in debate as to how welcoming it wants to be. This is only partly a question of national and personal security. It’s also about economic security.
That’s a two-way street. Are immigrants — legal or illegal — taking jobs from Americans or doing jobs that would otherwise be hard to fill? Send back 12 million immigrants and see who shows up for work tomorrow morning. That goes well beyond the stereotypical notion that immigrants are all gardeners, dishwashers and hotel maids.
What the U.S. is wrestling with is hardly new or unique to our shores. When I lived in Yugoslavia decades ago, the street cleaners and garbage collectors were all ethnic Albanians. Serbs tended to look down on them. When I moved to Austria, the street cleaners and garbage collectors were more likely to be Yugoslavs. Austrians tended to look down on them. When I moved to Germany... you get the picture.
I took my teenage son to Ellis Island in New York recently. It was one of those Dad provides a field trip experiences to supplement son’s American history studies. The museum on Ellis Island documents the flow of Germans, Irish, Italians, Russians, Jews and others to the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Those populations, too, faced struggles of assimilation and discrimination. We’ve done this before and in numbers that probably seemed equally daunting. We did not, though, have to face immigration with the fears and insecurities of terrorism.
As the immigration debate continues there is much for our politicians and our society to think about. It’s not a time for building walls around our imagination and creativity.
CHARLES BIERBAUER is a former correspondent for CNN and ABC News. He is dean of the College of Mass Communications and Information Studies at the University of South Carolina.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 29, 2007. Read the original PDF.