Steel This Wall!

Texas troopers create “steel wall” of patrol vehicles in Del Rio as feds continue to repatriate Haitian asylum-seekers https://t.co/ahDQJA2QAZ

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) September 22, 2021

From the ground, this useless array of cars can seem impressive.

From the sky? Not so much. It’s a very long border; and these immigrants want to be detained, the better to make their asylum claims.

Perspective is all. Consider the pictures of those Border Patrol agents “whipping” immigrants from horseback. Forced perspective of the camera lens. It’s likely the man on the ground was not that close to the horse, and the rider was whipping the reins to drive the horse from side to side as quickly as possible. 

Still, the image of men in horseback facing men who aren’t is visceral. These car pictures are less shocking, though the purpose is the same, because no immigrants are in sight. So are the cars keeping the elephants away? Or are they doing nothing?

Abbott says the cars scared off the immigrants. The number of immigrants has declined, but that could be for a number of reasons, including a simple one: supply. Models predict Covid cases will fall through the winter and spring. That won’t be because Abbott sued schools in Texas over masks. Correlation doesn’t indicate causation.

Which response is more humane? Using horses to try to control movement? Using horsepower to move all those trucks in a useless row? Or keeping people under a bridge because of social disorder and government collapse in Haiti? I’m not even sure it’s humane to fly them back to Haiti. But is it humane to burden the people of Del Rio with the problems of Haiti? Is it humane to have the residents of Del Rio suffer the consequences of our moral decisions?

Are we really more humane, more moral, than the people we ask to control our borders? Were the men on horseback immoral? Or just unseemly in some pictures?

Pictures are seldom worth 1000 words; and they seldom tell the whole story, or even the true story.