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Under the Sun
Cynthia Oi
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Immigration comes up against a border wall
COMPROMISE is never easy, as the immigration legislation Congress is furiously fighting over clearly shows.
Conservatives bellow that granting legal status to an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants amounts to absolution for people who broke the law.
Liberals holler about a point system that would eventually rank family ties behind job skills and education for visas, undermining the very support group new arrivals rely on to succeed in unfamiliar locales.
A provision for temporary workers pits businesses against each other, some complaining that the three-cycle stints of two years here, one year away messes up employment stability, while others favor it because it would provide cheap laborers with no political muscle to demand good pay and benefits.
Amendments to the legislation are flying. One from Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy would fittingly restore weight to family ties in awarding visas. Others, like that of Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe to make English the official language of the United States, are ridiculously irrelevant.
Almost no one objects to the fence. If they do, they haven't raised their voices over the rest of the din. But the fence -- more correctly a wall -- along the Mexican border is the brawn of the bill.
Along with toughening border security, boosting the number of enforcement officers and penalties for hiring illegal immigrants, and improving technological surveillance gadgets, the wall is one of the triggers for everything else in the legislation. Nothing goes forward without them.
Part of the wall, which Congress approved last September, is up and operational, but the bill would require the double-layered, concrete barriers over 10 feet high and 150 feet wide across 370 miles of border land.
That's 370 miles -- long enough to wrap around the island of Oahu more than twice.
Already planned are 80 miles that would run through two national wildlife sanctuaries in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, lands most vulnerable because the federal government owns them, and another 90,000 acres along the river that have been acquired and preserved by conservation groups.
In attempting to curb human migration, the wall would stop migration of animals, some of them rare or endangered species, who know no borders, crossing map lines to find mates, shelter, food and water.
No environmental statements or reviews can stand in the way; the Homeland Security Department has waived federal laws that would have required them.
People might argue that homeland security, whatever it means, should trump environmental preservation, but why this great country cannot accommodate both I don't know.
I also don't know what other effects the wall will have.
Through our history, opportunity, education and a promise of a better life enticed people to America. People in Hawaii, most no more than three generations away from foreign-born ancestry, feel this keenly.
Besides being an ugly stain on the landscape and destroying habitats, the wall represents a contradiction of the words engraved on the pedestal of a luminous statue in a harbor thousands of miles east. It makes them lies.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976. She can be reached at
coi@starbulletin.com.