Tension at the Border

From the LA Times earlier this week:

More than 100 people pelted U.S. Border Patrol agents with rocks and bottles during a rowdy confrontation Sunday afternoon along the U.S.-Mexico border, federal authorities said.

Nobody was seriously injured and it’s not clear whether the crowd was trying to enter the U.S. illegally or hold a demonstration, but the sight of a large crowd surging beyond the border rattled nerves.

Agents said it harked to the days in the 1990s when migrants would run across the border en masse, in so-called banzai runs that would overwhelm agents. As the crowd on Sunday crossed the Tijuana River into California, more than one dozen agents responded to the border fence atop the levee and deployed pepper spray to hold them back, triggering the melee.

As many, many people have pointed out in recent years, there is a contradiction at the heart of globalization. Free-trade agreements, international banking agreements, communications technology, and the rest want to accelerate the movement of goods, services, money, and information across borders—everything, that is, except people.

Meanwhile in DC, immigration reform seems stalled and activists will spend Thanksgiving on their 16th day of hunger strike.