When the Senate voted today to add 370 miles of fencing to the U.S./Mexico border, the presenter of the amendment, Senator Jeff Sessions, explained that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Apparently as clarification, he added, “Fences don’t make bad neighbors.”
The first part of Sessions’ statement is of course from Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the misinterpretation of which I’ve written about before. See, the narrator of that poem is quoting his next-door neighbor, who insists on rebuilding the mortarless stone wall between their properties each spring, when the thaw knocks rocks out of place. Why is the wall necessary? Why do fences make good neighbors, and what the hell does that even mean, the narrator wonders, adding:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
I question the effectiveness of extending physical barriers to crack down on illegal immigration. And although it’s clear what we want to wall out, perhaps we need to look more closely at what we may be walling in. At any rate, I’d like our elected officials to keep the argument Frost-free, unless they mean to suggest America is isolationist, driven by habit like an “old-stone savage” that “moves in darkness,” and not one to wonder why borders and boundaries were ever necessary to begin with.